10 LinkedIn Best Practices To Grow Your Business In 2019
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With an estimated 2.77 billion users worldwide, there’s no secret that social media has incredible power nowadays. Everyone heard about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat. All of them help you to connect with friends, colleagues, customers and peers. But when it comes to LinkedIn, we are talking about a distinct case. It’s the secret weapon that can push your B2B social media strategy and by following simple LinkedIn best practices you can accelerate your business growth.
What started as a simple networking and job search tool, turned into much more. Now we use LinkedIn for research, cultivate the audience, build communities and push the content that correlates to our followers.
Why use LinkedIn for your business
With more than 590 million users, from whom many are business owners and other professionals, LinkedIn is a powerhouse of opportunity for accomplishing your business goals. Integrating LinkedIn into your social media strategy and sharing content here puts your brand on their radar.
It worth mentioning that 61 million LinkedIn users are senior-level influencers, while 40 million are in decision-making positions.
Researches reveal that:
80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn vs. 13% on Twitter & 7% on Facebook
59% of marketers active in B2B confirm that LinkedIn is a leading pipeline for their business
38% of marketers active in B2B sustain LinkedIn generates revenue for the business they market.
Moreover, LinkedIn is appreciated as a high-quality source of content. 1% of users post content weekly, though 91% of executive use LinkedIn as a content source. This makes users become very engaged when using it and count on it in their business decisions. And because of the business-centric atmosphere that defines this social network, around 92% of B2B businesses market themselves here.
Even though it is a valuable resource for any type of business, this doesn’t mean success is guaranteed.
Before developing and implementing any LinkedIn marketing strategy, here is a short list of LinkedIn tips that you can implement today:
Develop SMART goals. Just like in any marketing strategy, your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based.
Reach the right audience. LinkedIn offers you various demographic data that can help you develop specific target segmentation. Therefore, it will become extremely easy for you to personalize your messages and grow your audience.
Create the right content. It should give answers to your clients’ questions and provide solutions to their problems.
How do you get the full advantage of this network? Let’s look into some LinkedIn best practices for business that will fuel your progress and help you accomplish your marketing goals.
Strengthen your LinkedIn Profile
Your LinkedIn profile is the welcome mat for your LinkedIn account. It is your business card, and it should put you in the spotlight. That’s why you need to pay close attention to the way you present your business, your brand story, your products or services.
A few useful LinkedIn profile tips include:
Take the time to write a summary that engages your audience. People like reading about others, and they also feel right away if you are telling the truth or write some nice words. So, be real and share your own story and experience..
Your company page should be always up-to-date.
Add a customized background photo and your profile picture. The LinkedIn best practices for personal profile encourage you to use a recent photo and not exaggerate with bold and vivid colors.
Include your brand logo so the people know they are in the right place.
Use relevant keywords for your business, that will make your page easy to find.
List your most important products and services
Ask your clients and partners to write reviews and testimonials and share their experience using your products or services. In this way, show your prospective customers that you are trustworthy and third-party reviews can encourage more interaction.
If you are freelancer or solopreneur, add a ProFinder Badge. The badge will link to your ProFinder profile, so people can view your skills, expertise and much more.
Once you’ve set up your company profile, you can focus on creating content and engaging with your audience.
Focus on Education
Another remarkable LinkedIn characteristic is the ease with which its users can publish articles. But if you think you can write and publish promotional content that will sell your products or services immediately, you are completely wrong. The LinkedIn users are uninterested in some other salesy content that encourages them to spend money. They are rather looking for content that helps them find effective solutions to their problems.
Therefore, educational content is most successful on LinkedIn.
So, one of the LinkedIn best practices is to focus on answering common questions related to your industry. Address needs and concerns your audience faces on a regular basis and give them practical solutions to their issues.
In this way, educational content works for building your brand’s credibility. As your articles witness your industry expertise and helpfulness, your audience will be more willing to work with your brand in the future.
Include visuals
It has been proven many times that humans are visual creatures. In fact, the studies show we process visuals 60.000 times faster than text. If we also consider that content with images receives 150% more retweets than tweets without and 65% people are visual learners, then the importance of visuals in brand communication becomes crystal clear.
LinkedIn best practices - visuals
And LinkedIn is no exception.
One of the LinkedIn best practices in 2018 that will also continue to grow this year consists in including visuals in your posts. They make your content more reader-friendly, more digestible and easier to remember. So, use as many visuals as you can, and this includes images, infographics, charts, slideshares, video and more.
Use Videos to tell your story
Video is no longer just for Facebook or YouTube! In fact, video gained so much popularity, that 85% of businesses intended to create more video content in 2018.
There are many ways to use videos on LinkedIn for engaging your audience. For instance, you could consider using videos to:
Tell your brand story – give your brand a voice and an image that humanize it
Create a demo about using your products or services
Answer to some of your frequently asked questions
Interview a top influencer in your industry or niche who is open to share his/her opinion related to some pain points of your audience or related to your products/services
Interview your customers and publish their video testimonials about how your brand helped them
Enhance your profile with videos showing real-life examples of your expertise.
Video creation is not a tough task anymore, so virtually anyone with a smartphone can make one in a matter of seconds. You can choose from many video creation and editing tools. Some of them are: Vimeo, Magisto or ClipChamp Create.
Post consistently
If you think that LinkedIn will bring you incredible results overnight, you are completely wrong. Like any other marketing effort, it takes a lot of consistency and hard work to show your customers you run a reliable business and put them on top of your priority list. Therefore, keeping your content fresh is not just one of the LinkedIn best practices, but also a way to draw attention to your brand and get more followers.
To keep your audience engaged, aim to publish new content at least one time per week. Otherwise, they could look for content elsewhere, and for sure some of them will never come back. In addition, always try to be one step before your competition and be the first who offers a perspective on the newest developments in your industry. It seems to be a lot of work (and indeed, it is), but you’ll see that audience will start to come back to you for fresh insights and advice.
Create your own group
Having your own LinkedIn group can be a smart decision that will help you bring your prospects exactly where you want them: into your target audience.
But creating LinkedIn groups is not for everyone. Before creating your own group, make sure you meet the following conditions:
You have a strong group of followers, as they form a solid foundation. People love social proof. So, having connections who can convince new followers to join the group is extremely important.
You create a special topic. There are many groups on LinkedIn striving to attract people’s attention. This means you have high competition and you need to come up with new topics and ideas if you want to succeed.
If you decide to set up a new group, here are some LinkedIn best practices to follow:
Create a catchy name. There are over 2 million groups on LinkedIn and sometimes they can be redundant. Just check the groups under the name “marketing” and you’ll understand what I mean. That’s why you need to come up with a different and engaging name that target a specific audience.
Keep the group up-to-date and create topics that will benefit your audience. Be the first who share the latest information and industry news with your viewers. But these don’t have to be the only content you post here. Bring up on the table anything that can help your followers and create discussions that encourage people to share their ideas and opinions.
Starting with August 2018, LinkedIn released a new version of LinkedIn Groups, integrated into the main site and app. It comes with new features, aiming to make Groups more user-friendly and attractive while reintegrating them into the prime LinkedIn experience.
Nurture your connections and tag strategically
The power of social networks consists in building communities and encouraging people to connect to each other. So, when you get feedback to one of your posts or someone says something positive about your business or brand, always leave a comment.
If the person is in your connection lists, this is a way of showing your appreciation. If not, this is a fantastic opportunity to connect with him/her.
On the other hand, when you want to draw more attention to your posts, you may tag strategically. What does it mean? When you share an article of an influencer or quote him/her in your posts, you just can add “@” in front of their names. This will place your content in their news feed, notifying them about your post.
The influencer might repost your content, and this is a win-win situation: you get more exposure for your business or brand, while he or she reinforces the reputation.
Involve your employees and encourage them to share brand content
Even if you run a small business, posting on LinkedIn shouldn’t be a one-person job. Instead of taking care alone about your business account, you should also stimulate other members of your team to create and post.
This for several good reasons:
Your team can come up with more fresh ideas, giving you more content to share
LinkedIn best practices embolden entrepreneurs to listen to their colleagues’ ideas and publish them. This approach humanizes your business page, showing the faces beyond the brand.
It’s also a great idea to have your team members contributing with their opinions and experiences to the content pool. Involving them in this process shows that you care about what they think, and you want to make them part of your business, gaining also their loyalty.
Use LinkedIn ads and sponsored updates
When you have a particularly high-quality piece of content and you want to get faster in front of your audiences’ eyes, you might consider investing some money in ads and sponsored updates.
LinkedIn offers you some targeting tools that help you optimize the performance of your ads. For instance, you can target specific industries, people with specific skills or years of experience, or can combine two LinkedIn targeting criteria. Thus, your messages reach exactly the persons you need to increase your ROI and develop your business.
Find out in the video below more details why LinkedIn is such a powerful channel for lead generation and B2B advertising:
Create LinkedIn Showcase Pages to target a specific audience
If you want to spotlight your brand or business, one of the LinkedIn best practices is to create niche pages related to your main Company Page via LinkedIn Showcase Pages.
This helps you to share unique content with a specific target for creating personalized and memorable user experiences. As the users have the possibility to follow just the topics they are interested in, and not the main company page, showcase pages help you create relationships that matter with LinkedIn members.
Use LinkedIn Analytics to measure your results
Even if you think you are doing things right, this doesn’t mean you are successful all the time. You need clear data to see how your content is doing and where you can improve. LinkedIn Analytics is a powerful tool that provides you the data for analyzing your marketing efforts.
Here are a few important metrics to consider when you want to maximize the LinkedIn marketing strategy:
Engagement - find out how much your audiences engage with your content, from clicks to likes and shares. When you see which topics or types of content your audiences engage with, you can create more of it.
Follower demographics - analyze the data to determine who you’re reaching and to help you focus your content to appeal to a certain demographic.
Competitor comparison - See how your metrics compare with those of your competitors and decide what you should improve or make different.
Final words
There is no doubt that LinkedIn is a powerful tool you can use to boost your business and brand. Implementing a LinkedIn strategy is not as difficult as it might seem at a first glance.
I hope these LinkedIn best practices in 2019 will help you to use it to its fullest potential and reach more customers than ever before.
