Thoughts on leveraging LinkedIn as a marketing tool

Where earlier posts in this series  (here and here) used Forrester’s POST methodology to give some brief thoughts on leveraging various social media technologies as marketing media, I’m going to break with this shortlived tradition whilst addressing the marketing potential of LinkedIn. There are 2 reasons for this:

1. LinkedIn is just a social network: the medium, social networking, is a wider issue that i’m not going to get embroiled in here
2. Unlike my last two ‘leveraging’ posts i’m not focussing this posts on brands, but rather on individuals and how they can use LinkedIn for themself or on behalf of their company

Enough justification, lets get to it!

Increasing your visibility and connectability:

• You should fill out your profile like it’s an executive bio, so include past companies, education, affiliations, and activities. The easier you are to find the more connections you can make and the more chance you have of finding that key contact
• Include a link to your profile as part of an email signature; the benefit is that the link enables people to see all your credentials
• LinkedIn allows you to make your profile information available for search engines to index. To do this, create a public profile and select “Full View”. Also, instead of using the default URL, customize your public profile’s URL to be your actual name

Update your profile:

• Updating your profile is a good way to promote a message that you want your contacts to see. By updating various sections of your profile (namely the ‘Summary’ section) all your connections will see that you’ve updated your profile in the weekly, automated email updates LinkedIn users get, telling them what their contacts have been up to. This way, people can see what changes you’ve made to your profile be it a new initiative you’re a part of, a new area of expertise or specialism you’ve moved in to or even a product or service you want to promote (be careful with this one).

Recommending services:

• Ensure you give and get recommendations: by having a broad range of endorsements attesting to your professional expertise, you show others that you can be trusted. This means you have more credibility when engaging people you don’t know
• Recommendations both endorse you as a person and your company – win win!

Interacting with the community:

• LinkedIn ‘Answers’ is a great way to engage the sorts of people you want to begin a dialogue with. First of all search for questions pertaining to your area of expertise and then answer the question asked (but only if you have a genuine insight – don’t say something for something’s sake!). With this method you can both demonstrate your, and by extension your company’s, expertise but most importantly it provides you an opportunity to engage the question asker (someone clearly interested in the area you’ve just demonstrated your knowledge in) AND any and all people who read the question and your subsequent answer.

Promotion via messaging:

• Promotions have to go to filtered lists (e.g. a ‘Group’ or a selection of your relevant contacts) – to people who know and trust you and won’t take offence; and to more casual contacts who would clearly benefit from what you’re pushing – anything sent that is in any way promotional should add value for the recipient in terms of giving them information that they might reasonably find useful. There are a number of forms promotion might take including: giveaways, beta site invitations, one’s own services etc.

There you have it, a few thoughts on how to use LinkedIn to market ones self or ones company. Hopefully its given you a some thoughts about how you could optimize your use of LinkedIn. Its a great tool and a little good practice and hygiene goes a long way!