Productive & Useful Methods To Use Linkedin, In Your Business

By Author: Joseph Augustine
Total Articles: 31
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Social networking sites continue to be widely spread & used worldwide today and more people are signing up every day. Facebook continues to be on top of the list while LinkedIn remains popular among business professionals.
LinkedIn is a relatively closed social network – closed in that you have to be somewhat active to get the most out of the network. While it is possible to see someone’s online resume without being logged in, LinkedIn is most useful when you see his or her connections and references.
LinkedIn in short is a network for business opportunities. On LinkedIn, people don’t chat about music or what they did at weekends, but instead people focus on opportunities and how the network can help you, to get them a winning formula. Here are few productive & useful methods to use LinkedIn, in your business:
Advertise for free on LinkedIn:
Anybody can advertise on LinkedIn, but it there is cost price for it. But there are few ways to do it for free.
*One way of doing it for free is of course your status update,
*Another way is to post it into your groups,
*Also by becoming ...
... member in more new groups, you can add your posts.
These work good only in the theory method, but the trouble is that most people see those updates as adverts and tend to ignore them.
So, one of the creative way is to use a SlideShare or Google presentation where you can put your presentation on,& then integrate this on your LinkedIn profile and share it with your network. This will actually get clicks and if it’s done well it could go viral.
Categorize Connections to send Group Emails:
Another much underutilized feature of LinkedIn is the ability to tag people. That means you can categorize your connections according to company, position, location, where you met or whatever you choose.
Then during some sales calls, you can tag everyone you speak to. Then when your next sales session comes up you’ll have an instant shortlist and you are able to send a group email to everyone in that category to get it out quickly.
Connect with People in Groups:
Another aspect in LinkedIn is a worst kept secret on LinkedIn is that Groups normally allow you contact and connect with anyone direct on LinkedIn. Sometimes you can find a perfect prospect but you have no way of contacting them, in such case, what you can do is see what groups they are a member of and join those. From there you can either invite the person to your network direct or you can look them up in the group and send a message.
Note: The users can able to turn this off, it’s enabled by default but if someone gets spammed they are likely to opt out of these contact settings.
Integrate Twitter and LinkedIn:
If you want to integrate Twitter and LinkedIn, with your tweets, or with your company tweets, you might get this is done through an application called Tweets. It’s fairly straightforward to install but the important thing here are the settings.
You could have seen users with more than ten updates on LinkedIn per day, these updates typically come from Twitter and probably do more harm to your brand than anything else.
So the setting you want to use is to only share tweets on LinkedIn when you use the hash tag (#) inside Twitter. This will allows you to selectively share on LinkedIn as opposed to blanket bombing your network with conversational updates.
Be Creditability:
Increase your credit. When you’re trying to market yourself as an expert, or develop credibility in your field, it looks good for your product to have a strong presence in a network such as LinkedIn, with lots of connections. Also if you answer questions with the knowledge of an expert in the answers section, it could even better.
Aim:
Whatever your aim in business, be it as a freelancer, as a potential employee, as a writer, as a business man it’s only smart to develop your own personal brand. Think, what do people think of when they hear your name?
A strong presence on LinkedIn only reinforces the branding you’re doing elsewhere. And while you’re at it, be sure to link to your website from your profile.