Is every brand using LinkedIn to its maximum potential?

Authored by Sulagna Pal, Senior Account Executive, Adfactors PR.

LinkedIn has recently established itself to be the largest professional network in the world. It is one of the most important social networks to reach out to for talent acquisition, business buyers and a major platform for B2B (business to business) social media. Establishing thought leadership, building and strengthening relationships, generating leads, gaining insights, doing market research, improving reputation, and creating online communities are all possible with the network.

Here are 6 solid reasons stating the importance of LinkedIn and how it can help your business grow and ways it can boost reach and engage your target audience.

Create Awareness and Heighten Reputation – LinkedIn is a great place to begin with, if you want to amplify your online profile. Businesses can network with an expanding number of intriguing contacts. Employees and the people who represent an organisation or a brand, they may all boost their exposure and trustworthiness, both as individuals and as a brand, by using LinkedIn’s various personal and group capabilities. Don’t forget to use the status update option, which is an underutilised tool, despite the fact that the changes are now more prominently accessible on the homepage with the new design.

Establishing robust thought leadership and influencer marketing – LinkedIn allows you to build your personal profile which potentially becomes influential based on impact it creates. Various LinkedIn features like creator mode, newsletter (which is a part of the creator mode), video, analytics summary, articles, etc., allow you to establish yourself as a thought leader in your area of expertise. The network provides fertile ground for thought and practice leaders wanting to become trusted advisers, from creating high-quality material, developing personal profile, and participating in LinkedIn forums to answering queries. Leadership and their reputation play a huge role when it comes to influencing. As LinkedIn’s core goal continues to be networking, it also allows you to find and engage with other influencers, which further enhances the growth of the community.

Lead Generation – LinkedIn is one of the most effective networks for generating leads. It offers very personal means of discovering new leads, engaging with them, and converting them into customers or buyers. Evaluating, participating, listening, sharing, networking and responding are all effective ways to accomplish this. Making sales or achieving targets will be easier if you network with potential clients and market to them indirectly through LinkedIn. Consumers often submit their queries and wants, while 18%-20% of postings are focused on groups and communities, which helps B2B marketers to discover new leads. Another 20% are involved in content sharing, reposting, and reacting which gives an insight into what they find interesting. Potential leads or customers tend to directly contact the person who responds to their queries.

Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – In a social CRM setting, LinkedIn is a perfect tool which helps us to get a better perspective and insights of potential customers. This can be accomplished with Social CRM programmes as well as ‘connectors’, such as those for Outlook. Even though, most Social CRM solutions integrate with LinkedIn, you may also use Google Contacts to set up a rudimentary integration of your contacts. One of the advantages of using a social CRM application is that you can see what your contacts are doing on LinkedIn in real time basis, giving you important insight into their behaviour and preferences. When you are targeting a contact on LinkedIn, you can witness this data and information in its own environment.

Building Traffic – Primarily, LinkedIn drives traffic to B2B blogs and sites. Optimising the personal profile, back linking, link building, republishing content are some of the core strengths of Linkedin as platform, which most people are unaware of. LinkedIn’s social sharing button ‘share often’ enables to share content in your status update visible on homepage and in groups or communities which you are a part of. This particularly works in favour of business related content or information, which also leads to viral effects and eventually becomes a part of ‘trending’. Hence, it is important for organisations and brand custodians to plan a traffic generation strategy to leverage benefits.

Social Listening and Insights – How is social listening relevant to LinkedIn? On this platform you can monitor views, metrics, connections, engagement etc. For example, you post content regularly or frequently. Social Listening and the page analytics will give you a full picture of which posts are doing great and are most preferred by your audience, with this insight you are able to ideate on your next pieces of content. Monitoring and investigating the interests of your audience can give you crucial inputs for future marketing and influencer marketing campaigns or communications strategy. When you know who your audience is and what exactly their preferences are, you can create more relatable content and get more followers, while increasing your brand’s visibility.