Along with Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn is an excellent social media tool. LinkedIn is specifically designed for professional networking and can be used to promote and market your business in powerful and unique ways! Setting up a LinkedIn company page is easy and you can choose to market your business in both active and passive ways.
LinkedIn Users Mean Business
LinkedIn is a unique social media network in that it is specifically designed and marketed as a network and service for businesses. Other social media services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ encourage their users to engage in all types of networking that fall within the bounds of their Terms of Service, including personal, casual, and professional networking. While being a universal service works well for these companies, LinkedIn has taken a different approach – it encourages its users to specifically focus on business and professional networking.
Networking and Recruitment
While some users may utilize LinkedIn for other purposes, the vast majority participate for business-oriented purposes only, including professional networking, job hunting, and recruitment. This focus provides LinkedIn distinct advantages over other social media networks and should provide sufficient reasons for small businesses and organizations to join the service and set up their own company pages.
On LinkedIn, It’s Okay To Be Passive
On Facebook and Twitter, it is important to stay actively engaged. LinkedIn is different in that setting up a company page has advantages even if you choose not to post updates or otherwise be actively engaged. This is due to how LinkedIn users interact with LinkedIn company pages, specifically for companies and organizations they work for or have worked for in the past. When users set up their individual profiles, they are encouraged to list the companies they work for and have worked for in the past.
Dynamic Resumes
When a business has setup a LinkedIn company page, users can automatically link these company pages to their employment profiles, creating a dynamic resume in their user profile that showcases your business! Obviously, it is crucial that you control your own company page and keep your business and contact information both accurate and relevant. In addition to these user profile links, your company page will appear in search results on the service. Even if you choose to not do anything else with LinkedIn, setting up your company page can provide an excellent way to promote your business or organization.
Actively Promoting Participation
Although not being active on LinkedIn after you create your company page is acceptable, there are very distinct advantages to being active! When your business is an active participant on LinkedIn, you can promote your business through regular status updates, participate in group discussions, create events and invite users, and encourage all of your employees to participate as well by creating their own individual LinkedIn profiles and networking all of them together! Some of these activities won’t require a lot of additional time and resources – for instance, you can easily reuse a lot of the same copy you prepared for your other social media About page for preparing your LinkedIn company page. Actively engaging on LinkedIn can provide valuable content for your blog and social media updates as well – LinkedIn discussion groups can be an excellent source of industry news, insights and challenges which can inspire your own blog posts and social media discussions.
In our next blog post we discuss the advantages of using two of the more image-based social media services, Instagram and Pinterest.