07 Mar How Well Do You Know LinkedIn?
LinkedIn has been proven more effective at generating leads than Facebook or Twitter, especially for B2B companies. It boasts over 100 million users and affords brands and individuals the opportunity to build valuable industry connections that can lead to new business, co-marketing and affiliate agreements. You can even find your next new hire.
There may be some hidden LinkedIn gems that you’re overlooking when navigating your social message. Some examples are:
LinkedIn Answers
LinkedIn Answers is a forum for people to ask and answer questions about virtually any topic. By answering questions in your industry, you build credibility and show your expertise and value. But that’s not all – it’s also a great opportunity to identify industry influencers with whom to network. In fact you can even search through experts in the Top Experts section.
If you’re looking for guest writers for your Blog, the top experts on LinkedIn Answers are the people to reach out to. Ask them to take some of the most common questions they answer, and write a post for your blog on that topic. Then whenever the question comes up again, they can refer people to the blog post they wrote for you on the subject. They get to build their reputation, and you get the SEO benefits.
Subgroups
You may belong to several LinkedIn groups, but did you know there were also subgroups of those groups? Click ‘More’ on the tab of your LinkedIn group, and you’ll find them.
Subgroups help maintain relevancy; as groups grow there are naturally some topics, industries, or side projects that develop that don’t pertain to everyone. Subgroups offer a chance to filter out any content that isn’t relevant for the entire group and keep your members engaged.
LinkedIn Apps
Enhance your profile and better collaborate with your network with the many available apps, like SlideShare Presentations, WordPress and Company Buzz.
News Module
Everyone with a LinkedIn Company Page should be using this feature. The News Module feeds mentions of your business to your LinkedIn company page, and also shows news to those who have your name listed in their profile. This helps your information be seen in multiple places. Go to your page’s ‘Overview’ tab while in edit mode, and check ‘Share news about my company’ to enable it.
LinkedIn Polls
Within your group you can now offer polls. Polling not only lets you perform your own market research and collect interesting data for content creation, but doing it on LinkedIn also means it can be extremely targeted based on group demographics.
Export Contacts
You can export all your LinkedIn connections to a .CSV or .VCF file. You even have the ability to filter out certain people — like friends and family — that aren’t relevant to your business. The only rule of thumb here is to make sure you do NOT include them in your email campaign list – being a LinkedIn connection is not synonymous with opting in to receive emails from you.
Are you using these to your advantage? What works better for your business? What tools did we leave out?
