As a small business owner, it is very important to take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way. LinkedIn is one such marketing opportunity. Best of all it’s free! It can expose your business to millions of LinkedIn members. It’s also brilliant way to attract top talent to your small business. LinkedIn also has a reputation for being a professional social search engine so small businesses should start focussing on LinkedIn as a social media and networking tool.
So, how can you use LinkedIn to grow your small business? Here are just a few easy ways to get your business booming.
1. Get employees on board
Encourage your employees to follow your company on their personal account. They will automatically appear as employees on your business profile. Whether you’re the only employee or have a few employees, you have to connect your profile to your company’s profile.
With a small business, this is a crucial step. For example, your customers might want to see your employees. Perhaps, they might want to see how qualified your employees are or get an idea of what your employees look like. With small businesses, personal connections are important. When you add yourself and your employees to your company profile, you make personal connections easily.
2. Interact with groups
Your small business won’t necessarily have the marketing budget of its larger competitors. What you do have is knowledge and an ability to personally interact with people. LinkedIn Groups feature can help. Search for groups that are talking about your brand and/or industry. Take part in groups that are active and start conversations.
Interacting with such groups will not only build expertise in your field but also attract customers to your business. Your marketing expertise will come in handy. If you provide helpful and thoughtful responses to members of groups, then people will feel interested in what your small business has to offer. Since LinkedIn is a professional platform, it’s acceptable to approach strangers who are business, as opposed to Facebook which is more personal.
3. Build up followers
Reach out to your friends, family and business connections and ask them to follow your LinkedIn profile page. For instance, if your small business targets local customers, then you will want to aim for a local following in your target cities.
Your objective here is to get your business rolling before you start to target your specific demographic. Convert customers into followers by adding a LinkedIn link at the bottom of every email you send out, for example.
4. Generate targeted content
Often small businesses cannot afford to spend too much time and money on content generation, and probably cannot post frequently. In that case, it is very important to make every single post count.
This can be achieved by researching and providing what your demographic needs. Actively participating in groups will enable to further understand what your target market wants. Keep an eye out for problems and challenges they are facing and directly address these problems; try offering your advice and solutions to them.
There are more than one million post publishers on LinkedIn, and to differentiate yourself, you have to make quality and targeted content.
5. Tag connections in content
Tagging connections in your articles and posts ensures that they are notified of the post and will receive an email letting them know of the same. All you need to do is type ‘@’ and the name of your connection.
However, this technique should be used sparingly. Only notify your connection of something that is incredibly relevant. You don’t want to unnecessarily tag them on everything that you post on LinkedIn.
Advantage: when you tag on of your connections, the rest of your connections will see it in their news feed section. This gives your small business even more exposure.
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