3 Reasons Your Business Needs a LinkedIn Presence Right Now

LinkedIn combines the professionalism of a business website with the interaction of a social media profile. Today, more than 3 million businesses use company pages to access a global network of over 200 million users. If you’re not using LinkedIn for business, you’re missing out on ways to boost your company’s reach — and bottom line. Here's why LinkedIn should be a part of your business's social media marketing mix. 

Three ways to use LinkedIn for your business:

1. Networking Tool

LinkedIn is an amazing networking tool. To take full advantage of LinkedIn’s networking capabilities, you need to do three things:

• Build an all-star profile

You should invest time in building your personal profile and/or business page. Start by writing a concise introduction that will make your business stand out, add a professional headshot for your personal profile - including a business logo, fill out all the applicable fields and lastly attach media such as blog posts, images, videos and infographics. Building a robust profile will give readers a clear understanding of who your business is, complete with contact information and next steps (CTA’s).

• Connect with people

Connect with colleagues and friends you know, and with other people you don’t know as well. There’s no limit to who you should connect with. Follow someone’s blog? Connect with them on LinkedIn. Have a dream company you want to work for? Start connecting (and interacting) with people from that company. Looking for new job opportunities or want to generate leads? Accept any and all new connect requests. Keep your profile set to public, and always be open to connecting.

• Interact with others

It’s not enough to use LinkedIn as a publishing platform alone – it’s essential to interact with others and build meaningful connections if you want to take full advantage of LinkedIn’s networking potential. Ask questions and spark discussions, give recommendations, ask for recommendations, participate in LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your business. 

2. Generate Leads, Drive Conversions

Whether your business is B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to customer), you can generate leads and drive conversions through LinkedIn. Consider the following:

• You can form strategic partnerships through LinkedIn. It has over 61 million users that are considered senior-level influencers.
• LinkedIn users have buying power. 44% of LinkedIn users earn more than $75,000 (NZD)  in a year. If you have a product to sell, you’ll find people who can buy on LinkedIn. 
• You can find new clients via LinkedIn. With over 40 million LinkedIn users that are in decision-making positions, therefore they have the authority to hire your agency, license your software or make a company-wide order of your product or service.
• If you upgrade to the Sales Navigator plan, you also get: Insights into your current leads (including company growth, job changes and more). Advanced search functionality that lets you analyse users during their decision making process. And will automatically recommend leads for your business.

3. Use LinkedIn to find the best people in their area of expertise that your business needs

LinkedIn offers a premium subscriptions that your business can use to make it easy to find talent. With a Recruiter Lite plan, you can:

• Post job openings.
• Send 30 direct LinkedIn messages to people you are interested in.
• Use advanced search options to find exactly what your business is looking for.
• Sort and manage your candidate pool.
• Easily track candidates and open roles.

Recruiter Lite can be a great solution if you’re just starting to scale your business and don’t have a hiring manager or HR department yet. Even if you do have a hiring manager, Recruiter Lite can be a useful tool to help them vet candidates. It can also save thousands of dollars if you currently use an employment agency to help with your hiring needs.

How to Optimise Your Business’ LinkedIn Profile

Can customers find your business on LinkedIn? Here’s how to optimise your LinkedIn business profile for maximum visibility.

• Make sure your profile is complete - This includes logo, image and about sections
• Customise a URL
• Start publishing content - this needs to be done regularly - at least once a day
• Start building connections and your followers 
• Engage with content that others are sharing and join the conversation 
• Be patient and gain trust.

Whether your business is looking to grow it’s network, manage the online reputation, scale your business, drive valuable social traffic to your site, or find and nurture leads, LinkedIn is an extremely useful tool for your business. Even if you invest more time in other social networks, you should create a LinkedIn page for your business and start exploring these opportunities. At Firefly we offer many different digital marketing solutions and we would love to help you skyrocket your business into the future. Get in touch with us today to find out what we can do for you and your business.