Most social media platforms focus on the consumer and improving communication. If your business focuses more on a B2B approach the social media options are limited. For these types of businesses LinkedIn is THE best platform to raise your profile, drive new business, new clients and increase revenue. It is the fastest growing network with over 3 million businesses having a LinkedIn Company Page and 279 million members worldwide.
So how can you utilise LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a professional platform for social media, created specifically to benefit business. LinkedIn enables you to connect with your target market in a “business environment”. The more connections you build up the more likely you will be to win business. However you can only connect with second level and groups connections. People will be more likely to connect with you if you send a friendly message and ask them a question about their business. Make sure you connect as a friend or group connection when searching for potential customers as LinkedIn may think you’re spamming. You can also search for potential customers in groups. Once you have joined you should regularly try to engage in discussions to make people aware of you and your business. LinkedIn is all about building relationships, so the more you engage with your target market through LinkedIn; the more likely they are to do business with you. Just remember, you can mention things about your business but you don’t want to sound like you are selling to someone. LinkedIn allows you to search for potential customers in many different ways by using the advanced search. This allows you to search for people by job title, company, school, and name and by location. So if you wanted to do business with a specific company you can use advanced search to try to connect. You can also reduce the number of search results by selecting the type of industry, company size, seniority level and connection level. Make sure you post regular updates that are relevant to your business. This is so that you get seen in the newsfeed and your potential customers are reminded of who you are and why they should do business with you. You should also regularly comment on the updates shown in your news feed to engage with people that may want to do business with you. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
If you want to optimise the use of Linkedin, contact us to discuss what you want to achieve and how we can best support you. Call us now on 01245 791969 or email us at [email protected]
