LinkedIn – A Gateway to Sales

LinkedIn is the professional person’s Facebook, introducing new business connections, efficiently displaying profiles and acting as a forum for recommendations, recruitment and liaisons. Essentially a social media tool, LinkedIn isn’t only useful on an individual scale. Offering company profiles and related groups, it can form part of an integrated social media campaign that supports your sales process and customer service, resulting in improved customer retention and sales.

Tips to using LinkedIn for your business’s success

You don’t need to be a computer whizz to complete your LinkedIn profile and ensure that your URL reflects your company’s name. These are simple, search-engine friendly steps that basically act as an online CV, and help to connect your name with relevant keywords online. But you can take this a few steps further:

Be active with your profile: Make connections with current and former colleagues, clients and friends, and make useful industry contacts. While doing so, ensure that your profile is publicly available, and that your internal links can be indexed. Don’t hand out trade secrets, but leverage the dynamic content that social media naturally creates. Once you’ve established connections, request and make recommendations, and remember at all times to maintain your professionalism.
Register your company’s profile: Create your company’s listing and add applications updating news, events, polls and blogs. Encourage your employees to create individual profiles and ensure that their entries are up-to-date.
Become an alpha user: Join and create LinkedIn groups where similar industry professionals gather online. Add value to your profile and to your contacts through bookmarks, reading lists and slideshares. Use LinkedIn Answers, which is a forum for professionals to post questions and answers, and build up your reputation in your industry. In this way, you can also gather internal links pointing to your profile within LinkedIn.
Write efficient content: Your profile tags and descriptions allow for optimisation (within reason), and LinkedIn users search for keywords within profiles. Use descriptions, adjectives and professional language – avoiding jargon – to enliven your profile. Always review for grammar and punctuation errors, or better yet, ask a trusted friend to check it for you.
What are the benefits of using LinkedIn for business?
Because LinkedIn has high-quality content that often updates more quickly than websites do, its pages appear in ranking results for popular keywords. This is one of the reasons that there are 52 000 product managers on LinkedIn working every day to push their products to the top of search engine results pages. Through LinkedIn, you can also perform reference checks on individuals and companies on a financial or personal level. LinkedIn also offers hopeful interviewees preparation for interviews, and recruiters can evaluate references. Investors can track the growth of start-ups and establish a company’s financial health by reading the rate of turnover and whether key people are leaving the company.

LinkedIn connections mean business

In today’s pressurized economy, social media networks such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are additional channels through which businesses reach out to people. But good business is also about leveraging opportunities. According to blogger Guy Kawasaki, people with more than 20 connections on LinkedIn are 34 times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than five. How many connections do you have?

Caitlin is an SEO Copywriter for Purple Cow Communications, a leading digital marketing agency based in Cape Town, South Africa.

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