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On today's episode of Business Rockstar Podcast:
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The Uses Of Linkedin
Here are some reasons why people may use LinkedIn. - To stay in touch with friends and colleagues. - To reconnect with old friends and colleagues that you may have not been able to find or be found by otherwise when emails and phone numbers are changed. - To get introduced to new interesting friends and business connections. - To promote your products and services, find or be found by new customers. - To find or be found by new vendors, suppliers or service providers. - To find a job through your network and to make it easy for employers and recruiters to find you. - To find someone to fill a vacancy that you may have. - To find experts and get advice. - To share your experience, help others and give advices. - To stay updated with the latest news especially about your network and what’s new. - To join groups and start or join in interesting discussions. - To build and strengthen your personal branding and online presence for you or your company (improving the chances of being found on Google). - To find new opportunities for business, partners or investors - To consolidate in one place trusted (to some degree) recommendations that you can get from your colleagues, friends and business contacts. - To use who you know in common to ask for reference about someone or a company before working or doing business with them. - To look up anyone that you need to meet or speak to and find out what you can about them to understand them better and to make a good impression. - To be able to post questions and get different answers - To be able to create or participate in polls (surveys) and find out the results. - To be able to post and share announcements, updates, news, cool things. - To be recognized as a subject matter expert in your area of expertise. As you can see the possibilities and power of this network are endless. This Week I have something a bit new for my readers. These are two videos on Linkedin Marketing Strategy from the vault. When Defining yoursocial media marketing strategy it is important to have a gameplan.
If you haven’t yet integrated LinkedIn marketing into your overall marketing strategy, here are a few facts that might get you interested: -LinkedIn membership exceeds 400 million professionals. -About one member joins LinkedIn at each passing second -The Executives of all the Fortune 500 corporations are members of LinkedIn While most social networks e.g. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, were founded on the premise of entertainment, LinkedIn targeted the professionals from the very point of its inception. Here are a few tips for effective LinkedIn marketing. 1. Build a Targeted Network First, and Then Start a Business Group - Your LinkedIn marketing strategy should focus on two important steps as follows: i.Build a network of prospects and customers. You should also consider inviting your employees to connect with your company on LinkedIn. ii.Next, create a LinkedIn Group for your company or brand. This open up a lot more opportunities to market your company and extend your reach beyond that initial network. For instance, a group will make it possible to start discussion threads and share important company announcements as well as news with your contacts. You can even use your group to announce job opening in your company. 2. Use Your LinkedIn Profile Effectively - Your LinkedIn profile is your most important marketing feature. It is what your potential connections will first see before making the decision to interact with you. So, what makes for a good LinkedIn profile? I.To start with, use your company website links in the profile and use relevant keywords in the anchor text. For instance, instead of “visit our blog here”, you should consider using something like “pet training blog”. II.You should as well use relevant keywords in all profile descriptions and anywhere else possible e.g. in the experiences section. III.Lastly, you should also add your company logo or any other relevant image in your profile. This gives your profile a personal touch and separates you from the crowd. 3. Update Your LinkedIn Profile Regularly - Part of LinkedIn marketing is to engage your prospects and customers and the best way to do that is to continuously update your profile. Various online applications and tools e.g. Blog Link allows you to connect your company blog with your LinkedIn profile.You can also manually update your profile while logged in to LinkedIn. 4. Get the Word Out About Your LinkedIn Profile - The last but most important LinkedIn marketing step is to get your potential contacts know about your LinkedIn profile. To do that, you should take advantage of every marketing medium available to your company to reach out to potential contacts e.g. email signatures, newsletters, your blog, and business cards as well as any other materials sent out to your prospects and customers. And if you do a good job on optimizing your profile with relevant keywords, you might as well get some referrals from the search engines like Google. Need more help? Feel free to contact me today.! Do you have a social media strategy? Share your thoughts below. The
folks at LinkedIn have been rolling out a tremendous amount of updates recently. These range from revamped profile pages, updated LinkedIn Company pages, the ability to follow thought leaders, endorsements and much more. They’re doing something right because Now LinkedIn has over 359 million members. If you haven’t joined LinkedIn yet, I hope the following facts convince you to get started. This is some really cool stuff. Please feel free to add your own facts and comments in the comment section below. has over 359 Million Members To put this in perspective, LinkedIn had 32 million members in January of 2009 Users are joining LinkedIn at 2 members per second added 50 million members last year alone. It took them 6 years to add their first 50 million users! The United Kingdom and Brazil are tied for third place as the largest countries on LinkedIn. Brazil just hit 10 members. India is second place while the United States is number one is expecting to reach 5 billion professional searches this year There are over 1 million groups on LinkedIn. These groups contain between 2 and 250,000 members The mobile version of LinkedIn is it’s fastest growing service The LinkedIn mobile app had 12 options in 2011 and approximately 1 million users. In 2012, LinkedIn cut the number of options down to 4 and they saw an increase in the number of users from 10% to 23% There are over 28 people searched on the mobile app per second Over 75,000 developers are using LinkedIn’s API’s in their own products and services LinkedIn gets over 2 billion network updates viewed weekly There are over 175 thousand new LinkedIn profiles created every day. There was 3 billion searches on LinkedIn Over 25 million LinkedIn profiles are viewed every day There are over 2 million LinkedIn Company Pages on LinkedIn Over 1 million publishers have implemented the LinkedIn share button on their sites Recently, 150 thought leaders were requested to create articles for LinkedIn on various topics. These individuals consisted of 1 Nobel Prize Winner, members with over 2 million followers, 1 McArthur Genius, 29 New York Times best seller book authors, all from 11 countries There are over 10 million endorsements provided on LinkedIn everyday There has been over 200% more social interactions since the LinkedIn homepage was redesigned If I were forced to choose between using only one social networking site for my business, from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social networking sites, I would choose LinkedIn, hands down. I still love these other social networking sites, but LinkedIn is by far the most powerful for your business and career. Why LinkedIn Is #1 With the average household income per user hitting $109,000, which is much higher than Twitter, Facebook, and the other social networking power houses, you know you are dealing with people who mean business. Being that it is the largest business networking site in the world, there is a mindset shift when users log on to LinkedIn compared to logging on their cousin sites, Twitter or Facebook. The mood changes, the messages are more professional. Conversations are geared toward partnerships and transactions, as opposed to how funny you looked in your birthday pictures, and everything is centered around advancing careers or building businesses. LinkedIn Means Business Everyone talks about the power of Facebook ads but the LinkedIn ad platform is even more powerful considering the demographic is made up of decision makers. My point being, if you aren’t using this powerful site to market your business yet, then it’s time to start taking it more seriously and step your game up. There are a number of ways to market yourself and your business online, but here are 14 LinkedIn tips that will drastically increase your marketing potential: 1. Complete Your Profile Your profile is the heart and soul of your online business brand. It usually ranks in the top 5 of Google search results for “Your First and Last Name”. When others do a search for your name to learn about your product, service, company, or previous work experience, then you’d better have a rock solid profile or that first impression could drastically tarnish your value. Make sure you fill out your profile 100% for starters, then go on from there to make it sexier. 2. Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Profile. Just like your website, if you want your LinkedIn to capture search traffic you have to make it SEO-friendly. Describe your company in clear language consistent with descriptions on your website and social media accounts. Optimize for the same keywords as your website, but feel free to be more technical or industry-oriented, advises Marketing Land’s Jim Yu. Post shareable, quality content, videos, and linked calls-to-action to improve user experience and search engine rank. 3. Leverage LinkedIn News Feed. A challenge for many content marketers is simply getting eyeballs on your content. LinkedIn news feed provides direct distribution channel for your content marketing, explains ClickZ's Roger Katz. Content posted on your company page will be delivered daily to your followers’ pages. They won’t even have to search for your content. By streamlining content distribution and facilitating content sharing, LinkedIn truly proves its value as content marketing tool. 4. Build Followers. LinkedIn news feed is only as good as the people who follow you. Your followers are the ones who will regularly receive your content and you want to make sure they are your top content marketing targets. Aim to develop a following comprised of businesses who are potential qualified leads. Begin to build this community by including calls-to-action to follow your company page in all your content. Embed LinkedIn follow buttons on your website. Promote your LinkedIn on your other social networks. Slowly but surely you will build a quality following that will enable you to leverage LinkedIn to its fullest potential. 5. Join LinkedIn Groups. This is a simple way to engage your desired audience. Because LinkedIn groups represent a specific segment of the professional community, joining them gives you direct access to a target population. Use this forum to build relationships, communicate relevant, useful information, and position yourself as a likable expert. 6. Start conversations. Posting informative content isn’t the only way to engage an audience and build your brand. Ask questions, answer questions, participate in group discussions, suggests Social Media Today. If you contribute often and provide valuable advice, you will eventually be identified as an industry thought leader. 7. Follow a Company. This LinkedIn feature offers numerous benefits to content marketers. To begin, it is the first step to building relationships with prospects. Comment and share their content to plant the seeds. Maybe reach out to them for an expert opinion quote or guest post on your site. Second, it is a great way to learn about your target audience and identify their needs, goals, and culture. This will equip you to create relevant, quality content which delivers legitimate value and effectively engages businesses. 8. Tap Into Your Own Employee Network. Don’t stop at sharing content on your own company page. Encourage employees to share company blog posts, articles, or other content pieces on their own LinkedIn, advises Jim Dougherty of Vocus. This widens the scope of your content audience, hopefully increasing brand awareness, social connections, website traffic, and ultimately conversion. 9. Add Your Company Profile LinkedIn is constantly enhancing its platform and one of the things that has been lagging, until recently, was the company page section. Now, it allows you to add a video, share more information about your products and services, and give more insights about your company and the people working there. 10. Connect With Twitter I sometimes find that I get more comments and interaction on LinkedIn from the same update I published on Twitter. The updates (even when synced from Twitter) seem to “stay on top” longer than they would in your Twitter stream. The more interaction you get, the more others see it as well (it’s similar to Facebook in this regard). Make sure to connect your Twitter account to LinkedIn. Others talk about why this is bad because a lot of your messaging won’t be targeted for your LinkedIn audience (especially when you use “@” symbols and hashtags), but for the most part, my message is staying at the top of mind for my connections on LinkedIn and for me that’s a powerful thing. 11. Add Advanced Applications I love the fact that LinkedIn has rolled out a number of applications to help you promote your business or your personal work better. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, there is an application for everyone that can help you get your message across better, and improve the overall experience of your LinkedIn profile. Go to the applications section on your profile to see which ones you could start using today, and make the most out of the new ones that come out in the future. 12. Connect With Everyone A number of LinkedIn newbies or purists will say, “You should only connect with those you already know and trust, so you can make recommendations to others when they want an introduction.” Believe me, I understand where these users are coming from, but how do you expect to expand your opportunities and options when you shut off communication to the rest of the 85 million plus members on LinkedIn? Think about it, you already know all of the opportunities that your closest connections can share since you talk to them more frequently. It’s time to use LinkedIn like a live networking event and introduce yourself to others, make new friends, and start helping more people connect. Also, start accepting invitations to others who add you, as the more connections you have, the larger your expanded network grows which helps create more opportunities in the long run. 13. Customize Your Websites This is a basic thing that everyone should do. It’s simple. Creating a call to action attracts more attention then having a generic link that says “My website”. Make it look and sound sexier so when people come to your profile they feel inspired to click on your links and go back to your website. 14. Be Compelling Work on making yourself stand out to keep people from falling asleep when looking at your LinkedIn profile. An extremely boring profile that showcases zero personality or compelling attributes is a sure way to a leads shortage. Add an interesting story in your summary, have a video recommendation pop up in the first few seconds, or at the least tell people who you are, who you help, and how you help them so there is some direction for people when they land on your profile. LinkedIn is an excellent platform for sharing content, but do you have a platform on which to publish? The key is to find the right one research it and leverage it. Use these tips to get started building something powerful with your Linkedin Marketing strategy today. |
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