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How to put your business on LinkedIn

Posted on 19 Mar 2009 at 17:49

LinkedIn is one of the more mature social networks, both in terms of how long it's been with us and the type of audience it attracts.

In terms of usage, you'll find it almost entirely populated by professional people. In fact, for many years, LinkedIn wasn't much more than a glorified CV repository, where each user uploaded details of the various jobs they'd done over the year.

As a social network, there's also a "connection" element, allowing users to create links to their business contacts - sometimes even getting a bit competitive about the numbers involved.

The strange thing is that although LinkedIn is the most business-like of the three networks we're looking at here, it's probably the most difficult to exploit from a purely marketing point of view. It has changed over recent months, becoming more like Facebook with groups and status updates, but it's not really the kind of place people would go to check out their favourite real ale or chocolate biscuit. It's really about business to business communication, rather than business to customer.

LINKEDIN TIPS FOR BUSINESSES

Make a pitch

As a business marketing tool, LinkedIn is probably most suited to the SME community and if used well can be a good source of new business.

The first opportunity is actually making the connection itself. Typically you'll upload your email contacts list and LinkedIn will identify the people it knows and send them invitations to connect to you.

At that point you have a chance to override the default "Since you are a person I trust, I wanted to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn" message. If you add a note relevant to the contact, reminding them of the type of work you do and some recent success stories, you might pick up new business there and then.

Ask the right questions

Another great way to win business is through LinkedIn Answers, a facility which allows you to ask questions of your extended network of contacts.

The key here is to ask a question which invites contact from interested parties, something such as "We're developing a web-based landlord and tenant communication and management system. Can anyone think of any features we might have missed?"

With a question like that, many of the people answering are likely to be potential sales targets, so at one stroke you've identified a sales prospect, put your new product on their radar, and opened a communications channel. Not bad for a 22 word message.

Keep your customers close

You can use LinkedIn to keep an eye on your customers, and whether they are cosying up to new suppliers.

We know of an online agency that noticed its contacts at a key client were suddenly adding connections within other web companies. This rang alarm bells as it looked as though the client might be investigating alternative suppliers.

In response the agency raised its game, offering a new highly-competitive, fixed-price deal, and managed to keep the client without the risks of a re-pitch.

Cheap market research

LinkedIn is also useful for competitor or market research, either by using the Answers facility, or within groups. You can even use the new status message facility. If you want to find the key players in mobile security you might set your status to "Researching mobile security solutions. Anyone got any good contacts?" This should open the door to some useful experts and providers.

Research job applicants

But let's not forget LinkedIn's heritage - user profiles still look very much like CVs. This makes the network very useful within the job marketplace, both for those seekers and hirers.