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Are you interested in the latest tips and tools?
LinkedIn is one of the most effective platforms for expanding your reach and improving your business results. We asked social media experts for their hottest LinkedIn tips.
Here’s what they had to say.
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#1: Learn Valuable Info From LinkedIn Publisher Stats
The new LinkedIn Publisher stats offer amazing insight into not only how many people are viewing each post, but the length of life of each post, reader demographics and the people who engage with your posts.
To see your stats, go to the Who’s Viewed Your Posts tab, which is located under Profile in the main navigation under Who’s Viewed Your Profile.
Click on any post to see a graph that shows the number of views by the last 7 days, 15 days, 30 days, 6 months or 1 year.
This gives you incredible perspective to see the shelf life of each post. Review these numbers, as well as the elements of the posts themselves, to see patterns that will tell you what topics, format and length your readers are most interested in.
LinkedIn also provides you with the demographics of the readers for each post. View the top four industries, job titles, locations and traffic sources that showed interest in your posts.
Based on this information, you can see if your content is reaching your intended audience. You can also determine if there is a need for your products or services with a niche market you had not previously considered.
Finally, see who engaged with your posts by liking or commenting on them. Since this includes people you are not directly connected to, it makes it an excellent opportunity to find potential prospects or partners.
This only scratches the surface of what you can learn and how you can use LinkedIn’s new invaluable feature Who’s Viewed Your Posts.
Melonie Dodaro is author of The LinkedIn Code and founder of Top Dog Social Media.
#2: Invest in LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn is steadily restricting functionality from the free version that business owners and sales and marketing leaders need, which includes a limited view of prospects inside targeted companies. It’s time to consider investing in Sales Navigator. (This is something I didn’t advise in the past.)
Sales Navigator assists with buyer identification and prospect research. Plus, it helps you engage with decision-makers more effectively, as it provides real insights into what your prospects care about. This is important because reach without engagement means nothing.
You even get news about the company, so you can create messaging around trigger events. For example, for one of our clients, we took advantage of a major airliner’s IT outage. We engaged in sales conversation with tech leaders who wanted to learn about a new approach and a rising technology that would keep it from happening again.
Even though LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great platform that’s worth the investment, it’s still just one piece of the puzzle. All the lead suggestions and insights won’t help if you don’t have the right messages, content and approach to enable sales using LinkedIn. You also need a strategy your tools can support.
Kristina Jaramillo is founder of GetLinkedInHelp.com.
#3: Network On The Go
Instead of surfing Facebook during downtime between appointments, increase brand exposure by using LinkedIn on your mobile device. Use LinkedIn itself or companion apps.
If you only spend 10 minutes per day sharing great content with your connections on LinkedIn, it will keep your brand on their radar. Plus, it’s simple to do on the go. Be strategic about connecting with new folks or start conversations with recent contacts.
When making a connection request, always personalize your message by clicking Customize Invite. A generic message is bad connecting etiquette. Plus, it’s not something you would ever do in person. So stand out and do it right.
Also, download LinkedIn Connected, which allows you to easily keep in contact with people you already know. Click on the grey head and shoulders image on the top right of that person’s update, you can “star” them. This will ensure LinkedIn keeps you informed with what’s going on in their world.
LinkedIn Connected is a great tool for dropping someone a congratulatory line on a new role or to say happy birthday. You can even add an emoji if you wish.
Nurture new relationships with prospects in a very low-key way. Just a few minutes per day of networking on LinkedIn can provide great results.
Linda Coles is a speaker and author of Marketing with Social Media: 10 Easy Steps to Success for Business.
#4: Optimize LinkedIn For SEO
LinkedIn now sports 364,000,000+ members and this rapidly growing social media platform consistently ranks highest for its B2B lead generation value, finding new talent or landing a new job. Yet, many companies are still not aware of the search engine optimization value LinkedIn offers.
Treat and optimize your LinkedIn company page for SEO just as you would any page on your website. Just follow these four easy steps:
1. Add your 3-4 most important target SEO keywords right at the top of the LinkedIn company page description. Separate keywords by a special character such as a * and try to keep it to 90-100 characters.
2. Add a double space and use 150-160 characters to write a compelling and engaging sentence about your company that also includes your 2-4 most important target SEO keywords.
3. Now, add a double space again and provide an extended version of information about your company. I recommend you use about 5-7 variations of your primary target SEO keywords.
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4.Google seems to pay quite a bit of attention to the Specialties section of your LinkedIn company page. You have 256 characters and multiple fields available to add your primary and additional SEO target keywords.
Add your SEO keywords to the Specialties section of your LinkedIn company page.
Optimize your LinkedIn page for SEO. You’ll see it really works!
Chris Raulf is the founder and digital marketing expert at Boulder SEO Marketing.
#5: Market Smart
Before posting anything on social media, you need to ask yourself: “Why am I doing this _______ (insert creative asset here), who benefits and what would I like them to do next?”
When posting on LinkedIn (for example, for purposes of B2B lead generation), research and engage with new users and groups before reaching out with appropriate content.
Here’s what I recommend:
1. Research, find, join and connect with related groups within your niche.
2. Join the conversation. Like posts and comment with useful insights. Plus, note what’s trending/popular and write it down.
3. Reach out directly. Connect with new people via profile email or InMail. Then, share related, helpful articles and insights, keeping in mind the questions above. Create content that you can place on your blog, video channel, podcast or in a LinkedIn post. Drive your visitor back to your preferred online asset. Also, use remarketing/retargeting where you can continue to build your audience. Advanced users, send your special “Dream Client List” a follow-up hello-style letter in the mail too.
Do this for at least 30 days and watch your quality leads go up while you build authority and trust!
Jon Rognerud is the founder and chief cartographer at Chaosmap.
#6: Develop Authority With LinkedIn’s Publishing Platform
The best marketing opportunity on LinkedIn right now is the publishing platform, where you can publish long-form content to share with your network and beyond. I’ve often said that you don’t have to be officially crowned as a LinkedIn influencer to become one. With this publishing platform, there is a tremendous opportunity to build momentum and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry or niche.
Keep in mind, content themes associated with business and career tend to work best on LinkedIn’s publishing platform. Write articles about your own business and industry expertise or career experiences to differentiate yourself and stand out. Share your unique perspective and insights. The frequency of your posts will also make a difference in growing your visibility, reach and engagement. Don’t expect to see meaningful results unless you make a commitment to publishing content consistently on LinkedIn’s platform.
Here are three reasons to jump on the LinkedIn publishing platform:
1. Position yourself as an industry expert. A big reason clients and customers do business with you is because of your unique perspective. Sharing how you think and providing insights and guidance through your LinkedIn posts can position you as the go-to expert in your industry.
2. Increase your reach. As you publish more posts on LinkedIn, you will earn more followers (which are different from connections). Your followers can see your published posts and share with their respective networks. Your LinkedIn posts will also be indexed by Google search and can be discovered across the social web outside of LinkedIn as well.
3. Generate new leads. In every LinkedIn post you publish, include a simple call to action either within the post or at the end in your bio section. For example, I offer a free guide in the bio section of my LinkedIn posts that links to a landing page on my website.
These are only a few of the benefits to publishing your thought leadership content to LinkedIn. If you haven’t started already, develop your LinkedIn publishing plan and write about the most frequently asked questions in your industry or market. Jump on this opportunity now while it’s still in the early stages.
Stephanie Sammons is the founder and CEO of Wired Advisor.
#7: Track the LinkedIn Profiles You Visit
One of the challenges you can run into with LinkedIn is keeping track of all of the profiles you visit during a given day or week. Install the Google Chrome Internet browser add-on called Dux-Soup, and you have a great way to automate the process.
Dux-Soup lets you export a .CSV file of every LinkedIn profile you’ve visited in any given time frame. This .CSV file lets you see the name of the person whose profile you visited, his or her LinkedIn ID, job title, company name, location, email, phone number and more.
The reason I love Dux-Soup is that after I spend an hour visiting the profiles of people in a target audience and sending them messages or invites to connect, I can now remember and track all the activity with one simple export.
Dux-Soup will save you hours of manual data entry when it comes to tracking all of the people you come across and interact with on LinkedIn. The premium version costs $15.00 per month, and comes with additional features, including the ability to automatically visit profiles of LinkedIn users based on Google or LinkedIn searches you make.
Note: I don’t recommend auto-visiting or mass-visiting LinkedIn profiles of people you don’t know just for the sake of trying to gain visibility, which is the purpose of that feature with Dux-Soup and similar browser add-ons like Autopilot for LinkedIn. Some consider auto-visiting profiles a violation of LinkedIn’s Terms of Service, and/or a “black hat”–type approach to networking on LinkedIn.
With all that said, I’ve found Dux-Soup to be invaluable when it comes to tracking and organizing the profiles of people I’ve visited on LinkedIn.
John Nemo is the author of LinkedIn Riches: How to Leverage the World’s Largest Professional Network to Enhance Your Brand, Generate Leads and Increase Revenue.
#8: Manage Your Company Page Like a Boss
The new LinkedIn Company Page Notification Center streamlines how you manage your company page, while allowing you to better understand which updates and content are performing the best. Now all of your company page activity can be viewed in one place in a single view.
Open the new Company Page Notification Center dashboard, and you:
- Get an aggregated overview of how many likes, comments and shares you’ve received on the updates on your company page and also see how often your company has been mentioned by LinkedIn members on the platform
- View every publicly shared mention of your company on LinkedIn
- See all of the most recent likes, comments and shares your company has received in a single view
- Comment and like as a company representative in response to mentions about your company
In addition, company page notifications are now displayed as multiple interactions aggregated into a single notification for admins. This makes it easier to manage a company’s LinkedIn presence, while also keeping track of personal notifications from their network.
With greater insights into how the content and messaging on your LinkedIn company page is performing, you can make better decisions around which types of content to post to better engage with your target audience.
Jason Miller is the senior content marketing manager at LinkedIn and leads content and social strategy for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions.
Conclusion
There’s no better way to step up your business game than to be active on LinkedIn. The platform is constantly making improvements, so individuals and businesses can get more out of it. Plus, there are tactics, aside from LinkedIn itself, to increase organization, engagement and visibility. Explore these tools and tips, and see which ones work best for you and your business.
What do you think? Do you use any of these LinkedIn marketing tips and tools? What has been your experience? What other little-known LinkedIn tips to you have to share? Please leave your comments and questions below.
