By: Michael Sim
LinkedIn Overview
1) What is LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a social networking site focused on building connections among professionals. LinkedIn provides you with the opportunity to connect with colleagues, meet new people, identify recommended services and create new contacts from within your network.
There are currently more than 60 million professionals worldwide using LinkedIn, including all Fortune 500 companies. By creating a network built entirely of industry professionals, business owners, and entrepreneurs, LinkedIn creates a unique opportunity for users to engage and connect with people that they may not normally have had the chance to reach. This allows for deeper market penetration, an increase in brand visibility, and the residual effect of generating new leads and sales.
2) How do I use LinkedIn?
Unlike Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn is targeted towards reaching specific people. It is not a suitable environment for bulk or large-scale marketing efforts. If reaching or connecting with vast numbers of people are the foundations on which you determine success, Facebook and Twitter might be a better option. If making targeted connections and building strong relationships with professionals determine your success, LinkedIn can be a very powerful tool.
3) LinkedIn Benefits
• Build connections by utilizing the contacts of your friends as a means to create an introduction or opportunity for interaction.
• Identify the members of a company or organization that you “need to know” in order to make the contacts necessary to get in touch with the right people.
• Increase the visibility and awareness of your company and brand.
• Increase website traffic and improve search engine optimization.
• Establish yourself and your company as a source of credible information and expertise.
• Generate new leads and sales from within your network of professionals.
4) Risks
There are a few risks that most companies face when using LinkedIn that should be taken into consideration prior to implementation, including:
1) Security
Companies that employ a large number of people that have LinkedIn accounts may be revealing a good amount of private information about the company. This includes specific positions for employment, specific levels of education and experience, previous employers, and so on. While this fact remains true for most social networks, this issue should be approached and discussed internally before moving forward.
2) Recruiting
Job recruiters and head-hunters tend to rely on social networks to identify and target potential talent. Putting your company or personal profile in the public eye opens you to the potential of facing this situation. While recruiting takes place offline as well, identifying and understanding the risk for potential conflict will better prepare you to deal with this situation if it occurs.
3) Negative Representation
It is important to understand that the activity you perform within LinkedIn directly represents your personal, professional, and business reputation. Any public material that you post and share with users over LinkedIn (also with most social networks) is recorded for an indefinite amount of time (usually until it is manually has removed or deleted). This means that at any time, a potential or existing client, lead, or employee have access to a great deal of sensitive information about you and your company. If any of those individuals were to view your company’s archives and find an argument with a previous employee, negative replies to client feedback, or anything else that falls short of exemplary professional behavior, it could have a significant negative effect on your personal and professional reputation. Ultimately, this can damage both your reputation and ability to do business by preventing you from growing your network. The type of content and material that you share with your network can affect the impression of your company in the eyes of your viewers. If the content that you post is done in poor taste, irrelevant, or out of character in regards to the image you or your company represents, it can confuse, offend, and turn away potential business.
5) Import Contacts
LinkedIn allows users the ability to send invitations to connect by importing contacts from major email service providers (such as Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL). By entering in your email login details, LinkedIn automatically generates a list from the email addresses that it imports. You can then hand-select which members you wish to invite to connect, but often times it is much easier to simply select-all and click “invite”. Importing contacts is one of the most successful strategies for building a network from your personal email contact list. LinkedIn also automatically identifies which of your email contacts are currently LinkedIn members, providing an added level of convenience for inviting new connections.
URL: https://linkedin.com/secure/importAndInvite
6) LinkedIn Groups
The concept behind LinkedIn Groups is fairly simple. Joining a group basically creates a connection out of each group member. Members of the group can create new discussions, post news articles, post jobs, join subgroups, and view updates from other members within the group. LinkedIn Groups are very similar in marketing value to Twitter’s list feature. Groups and lists alike contain members of a focused interest group who are all able to interact and view the updates of other group members. Taking advantage of the marketing value presented by LinkedIn Groups requires a two-stage approach.
1) Join Relevant Groups
Joining relevant groups will help you create exposure for your brand among like-minded users. It is acceptable to join groups that are both directly related and complimentary to your company’s products or services. Joining a group that is considered a conflict of interest may not seem like a viable technique to attract new members to add to your network. However, it does increase the size of your network, creating new opportunities to connect with other users. There is a limit to the amount of groups you can join at one time, so choose wisely.
URL: http://linkedin.com/groupsDirectory
2) Create a Group for your company
Creating a group for your company will help generate a following behind your brand. Similar to how you were instructed to join relevant groups, so to will others join yours based on relevancy to their interests. It is also important to include a logo or design when creating a new group. Users tend to either join or avoid specific groups based on their professional appeal.
URL: http:// linkedin.com/createGroup?displayCreate
7) Search Engine Visibility
1) The “No-Follow” Tag
Many forums and social directories use a term known as the “no-follow tag”, which prevents posters from receiving back-links to their site when they posts links in updates or forum messages. LinkedIn does not use the “no-follow” tag, which means it is a source of a back-link for your website and company information. Essentially, the more content that you put into your LinkedIn profile, the more keyword relevancy and back-links you will be creating for your company. This improves search engine visibility and rankings, and will likewise drive more traffic to your website.
2) Back-Links
One way for a company to look at the back-linking and content relevancy scenario is to consider the amount of employees they have actively using LinkedIn. If they have 50-100 employees, and each listed the company in one of the three link areas available on a profile, there will be 50-100 back-links created for the website. This is a very big deal in terms of search engine visibility and will have a significant effect on your relevant keyword rankings.
3) Enable Profile Links
In order to make links visible to search engines from within LinkedIn, you must add the “show website” feature to all profiles that will display the company link. This can be done from within each account by viewing the “Edit My Public Profile” page and making sure both “Full-View” and “Websites” are selected. This makes the website link and anything else that is posted in this area public.
4) Questions & Answers
Answers pages are indexed by search engines, giving you additional back-link potential if you choose to use it. Each answer page allows you to add up to 3 links for reference purposes. The more questions you answer, the more relevant content search engines have the ability to index.
8) Your Profile
The profile area is a significant asset for your brand. It is important to make profile information not only informative, but optimized in order to appeal to search engines and profile viewers.
1) Profile Picture
One of the most significant ways to turn away viewers is the lack of a professional profile image. Social networking is based on a virtual relationship that you build with members of a community. If you’re profile has no image, or an image that doesn’t reflect your goals with social network marketing, the chances of building a successful connection are greatly diminished.
2) Personalized URL
When creating multiple profiles across different social networks, it is important to have a username or a personalized URL that is consistent and memorable. For example: www.facebook.com/chicagodesign. Your username can your company name, describe your profession, and help localize your presence by including a city or state name.
3) Relevant Keywords
Search engines such as Google are heavily based on reading and indexing relevant content from the web. Keyword strategy plays a significant role in taking full advantage of the fact that search engines actively index content across most social networks. The most successful way to do this is to use a combination of location, description, brand name, or other information consistent with the way people search for content relevant to your product or service. For example, a real estate agent in Chicago might post “Chicago homeowners, find a realtor in your area today (insert hyperlink here).” It is also important to consider keyword strategy when posting URLs on websites that allow link-tagging or anchor text. Keywords are also important to consider when creating descriptions for images and other materials.
4) Privacy
If you’re using a social network to promote yourself or your company, privacy is much less of an issue that it might be others. In fact, certain privacy restrictions found in sites like LinkedIn and Facebook limit the ability for search engines to index specific content, reducing the keyword relevancy and search engine rankings for your material.
5) Back-Links
Include links to your social profiles within other online pages, social profiles, and email signature. This creates multiple streams of traffic, increasing the potential for your marketing efforts to drive traffic to your website. Back-links are also part of the algorithm that search engines use to determine value in the content that it indexes. If a search engine finds 30 links spread across a variety of websites, each pointing to a single website, the value of that website becomes 30 times higher than a website with back-links. In terms of business, this will eventually result in a higher listing than your competition (given that they have a lower back-link count and less relevant keyword data).
6) Update & Engage Frequently
Most social networking websites offer their members the ability to post a status update. Actively updating your social profiles demonstrates that you are a human user, which creates a much higher potential for you to engage with that person in business matters. When social profiles become inactive for long periods of time, people forget that you exist and the connection that was once made with them becomes lost. While many of the strategies listed in this document mention automation, it is important to remember to be “human” about your approach as often as possible.
7) Promote your profile
In order to obtain maximum visibility with LinkedIn, or any other social network is to actively promote your respective profiles across all networks. Include links to your profiles on your website, blog, individual blog posts and social updates, email signatures, and on business cards.
No comments:
Post a Comment