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10 tips to use LinkedIn for business

27 February 2013

Are you using LinkedIn for business opportunities? With millions of members, LinkedIn provides a lot of opportunities. Sadly a LinkedIn profile is commonly viewed as an online resume or digital business card. Using it for that is a good start, but you can take it much further! We give you 10 tips to get the most out of LinkedIn for business opportunities.

The basics of LinkedIn for business
The real value of LinkedIn for business is to connect one-to-one with other professionals. Connections can introduce you to business influencers and partners. But they can also refer your company to new customers. It is more important to be well connected, than to have a lot of connections.

10 tips to use LinkedIn for business
To help you in using LinkedIn for business, we took a closer look at LinkedIn features and best practices. We turned this into 10 tips to use LinkedIn for business. We divided the tips into 3 categories.

Optimize profile for search discovery and ranking:
1. Use appropriate keyword phrases in your heading and title. Your title makes you findable for a LinkedIn search. Your heading is an opportunity for showing who you are.
2. Import all your business contacts into LinkedIn, also the offline ones. This makes your network complete and you maximize the aggregate value of your LinkedIn network.
3. Tag your skills and expertise. It’s not really important for LinkedIn search now. After this feature moves out of beta, it may well become so.
4. You can include links to up to three websites or pages. If you do this properly, you can attach the links to your keyword phrases. This improves your SEO within LinkedIn and on the open web. The secret is using the “other” category to enable this option

Personalize for engagement and action
Maximizing your results from LinkedIn for business starts with having a profile that encourages others to engage with you . Present yourself as interesting and approachable. Using conversational language and having an engaging profile picture helps in this. The next tips will lead to more new opportunities:

5. Personally welcome and acknowledge your new connections. It takes little time and makes you stand out from the crowd, since most people don’t.
6. Add video to your profile to make it come to life. There are two applications for this: the Google Presentations app and the Slide Share app.
7. If you scroll down any profile you will find a field for inserting notes. This can prove very helpful for personalizing your follow-up communications.

Organize for business intelligence and networking
If you refresh your personal profile on an on-going basis, while also keeping all of your contacts current, you will get more out of LinkedIn than the average user. These final tips will help you realize the full capabilities of LinkedIn , now and especially as new features are added.
8. By tagging and filtering your connections as you add them, you create a framework. This allows for filtering them in ways that are advantageous to you.
9. Study the interrelationships of your contacts. It can help to minimize risks to know to whom competitors are connected. It can also help you to find better LinkedIn groups.
10. Take advantage of the fact that most of your LinkedIn connections are keeping their contact information current. Periodically import that data into your CRM.

LinkedIn is a network designed for professionals. In this the individual is the centre of the system. This is why taking steps maximize your personal profile is the surest strategy for making the most of LinkedIn for business. Take advantage of these 10 tips and maximize your own LinkedIn profile!

 


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