Linkedin is a great tool for companies to network, share new products or news and attract potential clients. Especially if you’re business is focuses on B2B, LinkedIn is a great resource to generate leads but are you using your company’s profile to its full potential?
Prospective clients often use LinkedIn to conduct their own background check on your business and employees, so you want to treat your LinkedIn account as a landing page and streamline it to effectively attract prospective clients and nurture leads.
In this Ricemedia blog, we look at applying keywords, content marketing and looking at user experience strategies to your business’ LinkedIn account.
Keywords
Some people might think it’s silly to think about keywords for your LinkedIn profile but I will say this, nearly anything with a search engine, you can apply keywords to your advantage and LinkedIn is no different. When building and updating your account page, apply some of your keyword research to the content.
This makes using industry terminology, jargon and slang is very important. This needs to be taken with a pinch of salt though. It is good to include industry terms in your LinkedIn content as it will increase searchability but focusing too niche of keywords will turn against you.
Here’s an example.
What annoys me is when people put out job ads for roles such as Social Media Guru or SEO Ninja, I mean who searches for that? Could you imagine a recruitment agency trying to fill in a vacancy for Digital Overlord, whatever that entails, and expect many applicants? The only reason people see those sort of job roles is because they include keywords that people actually search for, actual job titles and duties. That is the power of keywords in a recruitment situation and it works on LinkedIn.
One last piece of advice on keywords, if you’re unsure if this phrase or term is useful for you, test it. Type it into the search and see what comes up. It is the easiest way to test a keyword.
User Experience
This might not be a website but you need to think of the experience any visitors to your account page. By user experience, you need to look at how they would use and interact with the page.
Straightaway, there are the simple things such as having a clear graphic of your company logo and keeping all the information up to date. If you moved your business premises or changed your company’s services, you would inform your customers, why would you leave that out on your LinkedIn?
Then you look at the content and conduct an audit over your content. To do this, you need to ask yourself, does this give my audience value? When you start asking this, you start asking more important questions and you start streamlining your LinkedIn page.
Also, please remember to include links to pages on your website. I should not have to tell you this, it’s not really advice but common sense. Yet businesses still don’t do this. I’m not just talking about the homepage but target certain pages for certain subjects.
For an example, if you’re writing about your certifications as a electrical engineer, link to the page or part of the website which demonstrates these certifications. Straightaway, just one click and they have evidence of your skills and abilities.
Integrate with your Blog and Social Media
You’ll find a lot of company profiles dormant, like a ghost town in a western, just completely dead. This shouldn’t be when your company’s putting out great content for the company blog or engaging constantly on the business’ social media.
Integrate your social media with your LinkedIn through management software like Buffer or Hootsuite, so when you tweet or announce any news, your Linkedin doesn’t miss out.
Also when you publish new articles and content for your blog, post it and share it or run your blog off your company’s LinkedIn account. The ability to blog or post off of LinkedIn is an interesting feature and you should not ignore this.
Again, link back to your website. If you’re publishing a piece about rogue traders in your industry, let’s use security consultants as an example, link to the page to your services as a security consultants. Driving traffic to your LinkedIn profile is important but to be closing those deals and making those conversions, you’d want to be driving them to your website. LinkedIn, at the end of the day, is just a social media site and you’d want to drive that traffic to your site.
Reviews
The last film you watched, why did you watch it? What made you choose that restaurant? That app you downloaded, why? Odds are, it was because of reviews. Reviews play a large part of making a sale. So why don’t you integrate it to your LinkedIn profile?
This is fairly simple enough, approaching good loyal clients for a brief review of your products and services, and will certainly pay off. Especially if you’ve worked for large clients and their name carries a bit of weight. Also, these days it’s so easy to open a LinkedIn profile and write what you want, reviews demonstrate your experience and abilities. LinkedIn recommendation system is really good for this and can make or break a sale when a client is looking for references to your abilities and experience.
Engage
One thing I find that company’s see their LinkedIn profile as almost like a listing in a directory, they just set up an account and leave it. They forget LinkedIn is social community, you need to interact and engage. A useful tactic is to join groups in your field, especially groups for people who are starting out, and engage with people, answer questions and give advice.
As example, your business is a travel agent specialising in backpacking package holidays and you join a group for other businesses. Someone in the group brings up a problem, let say they’re struggling to sell packages for trips in Chiang Rai in north Thailand. Well, you’ve just wrote a good blog article about a wonderful local market that can’t be missed, why don’t you share it with them?
It is through interacting like this, you start building strong links between other professionals, building your brand as a strong authority, which other companies turn to for advice and inspiration. It is through simple acts of kindness, you build this reputation and brand.
That was how we’d recommend you optimise and improve your company’s LinkedIn profile. If you’re interested in how else Ricemedia can raise your business’ profile, whether it’s through social media or digital PR, get in touch today.
