Are You Missing Out on LinkedIn?

The networking social site LinkedIn is pretty well-known today for its ability to help people in business connect with one another—in fact, you probably have a profile on this social networking site. What you may not know is that LinkedIn can also offer a tremendous opportunity for companies to connect with potential customers—especially if your company is focused on business-to-business (B2B) sales. If you have never considered the power of this social network as part of your digital marketing strategy, keep reading to find out how it could help you.

What LinkedIn Is

LinkedIn is considered a professional social network, and today it has over 135 million profiles for business people in a myriad of industries. Most people think of LinkedIn as a place to post their online resume, but in recent years the platform has created plenty of opportunities for businesses to use it as a connection tool as well.

What LinkedIn Is Not

While it can be a powerful social networking tool for companies in the B2B sphere, it’s important for companies to note that it’s not the same as other social networks—the audience on LinkedIn is different from that on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. As such, you need a specific strategy for LinkedIn to have success using this platform in your SEO strategy.

Ideas for Using LinkedIn as an SEO Tool

If you are a company interested in making more B2B connections, here are some of the ways you can use LinkedIn for search engine optimization:

• Post Status Updates: Use the profiles of key C-suite leaders to post frequent status updates relevant to your industry. Think of these like Facebook posts or Twitter updates, but for the professional community on LinkedIn.
• Post Links: You can also use status updates to link to content around the web that your audience might find useful.
• Syndicate Your Blog: Your SEO company in Utah has hopefully already created a blog on your website and may be helping you with content (or perhaps you’re writing it yourself). Use LinkedIn to share these blogs and post them; the platform makes it easy to syndicate your blog to your profile, complete with the post title, an abstract, and a link to the full blog post, all of which are great for boosting your SEO.
• Post Presentations: Use programs like SlideShare or Google Docs to create presentations that showcase your products or offer useful advice to your potential customers.
• Integrate Your Twitter Feed: If you have an active Twitter account, integrate it with your LinkedIn profile to get even more SEO mileage out of your tweets.
• Promote Events: When you’re speaking at an event or conducting a training session, post a link on your profile to help boost attendance.
• Request Recommendations: Your audience might be using LinkedIn to evaluate whether you can provide the products or services they want, so be sure to request recommendations from your network. These are sort of like Google reviews for your LI profile.
• Conduct Market Research: Use polling features to find out what your customers are thinking and implement it in your strategy moving forward.
• Become an Expert: Use features like LinkedIn Answers, and engage with others in industry groups to establish your company and your key leaders as experts in your field.

If you’re not using LinkedIn as a social media platform and you’re in the B2B industry, now is the time to start. Call an SEO agency in Utah to find out how it could help you overall digital marketing strategy and learn what you need to do to begin.