LinkedIn: A Valuable Marketing Tool?

LinkedIn is arguably the most business-friendly and thoroughly professional of all the major social media sites. Remember that LinkedIn boasts of more than 135 million business professionals across the world.Thus, LinkedIn should be deemed as a valuable marketing tool and it should play a big part of your social media marketing strategy.

Your first task is to create an impactful LinkedIn profile. Consider your LinkedIn profile as an interactive resume and develop it accordingly.

Apart from details about your education and work experience, you can enhance your profile with the Web 2.0 capabilities – Status Updates, Blog Posts, Presentations, Events, Tweets, Recommendations, Reading lists, Polls, Huddle Workspaces etc.

• The ideal way to keep your connections informed about yourself is by posting ‘status updates. This will also keep you active in LinkedIn.
• LinkedIn permits you to syndicate your Blog posts to your profile Take advantage of this fabulous facility.
• If you happen to post PowerPoint presentations to SlideShare/ Google Docs, you might as well display them in your LinkedIn profile.
• If you are involved in an event or hosting a training session, you can post a LinkedIn Event.
• If you participate in Twitter, you can integrate your LinkedIn Status Updates with your Twitter Tweets.
• Remember LinkedIn makes it easy for you to request recommendations from your connections. Build a collection of recommendations.
• You can share your reading interests with your LinkedIn connections by linking you profile with Reading Lists by Amazon.
• LinkedIn Polls can be a tremendous market research tool. It will enable you to collect actionable data from your connections.
• Huddle offers you secure online workspace packed with sharing tools for dealing with your LinkedIn connections.

Take advantage of LinkedIn community features. LinkedIn offers a number of community features that let you to communicate /collaborate with other LinkedIn members.

Create LinkedIn Groups to help you stay in touch with people that share similar interests.  LinkedIn Answers is an excellent way to share business knowledge and stay connected with colleagues.

Company Pages are an extraordinary market research tool that will enable you to find prospective companies to do business with. Further, you can create a Page for your own company to showcase your experience and expertise.