Photo by Kevin Dooley CC BY2.0
Now that you’ve built your profile and company page on LinkedIn, you’re ready to start using LinkedIn for business. Unlike social networks like Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn is a social platform built specifically for business, so it’s ideal for networking and building business connections.
1. Develop Your Network
To start building your network, import your contacts from your email account. LinkedIn allows you to important contacts from Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail and other email clients.
Since you want to encourage connections, we recommend having your email address clearly visible on your profile under your contact information. You can simply state your email address or you can make it more personal by providing details on the types of projects or opportunities you wish to be contacted about.
While on Facebook people tend connect only with people they know, LinkedIn is about building your professional network, so we recommend accepting everyone as a contact. You never know who’ll be a valuable business connection.
Show that you’re active on LinkedIn by updating your status. Make sure that your status is professional by posting about business news, industry events and helpful business advice.
Start chatting. The key to building your network is to talk to your connections. Did someone you haven’t talked to in years accept your request? Send them a message asking what they’ve been up to career-wise and update them on what you’re working on. Offer to give recommendations to people you like who you’ve done work with in the past.
2. Position Yourself As a Leader
LinkedIn is a place to show off your expertise and demonstrate how you can help others.
Using the Answers feature to ask and answer questions is a great way to bring your name around to people outside of your circle and thus gives you more opportunities to find people to connect with. Answering questions is also a way to demonstration your expertise and increases the likelihood that someone will recognize your authority and contact you for something further.
Another networking tool to get your name and profile out to people is LinkedIn’s Groups. Joining groups gives you the opportunity to network, participate in discussions and receive business advice. An added bonus of joining groups is that—while a basic LinkedIn account normally only allows you to send messages to connections—you can send messages to group members.
(Find more information on LinkedIn’s subscription plans here.)
If you want to show further leadership by starting your own group, read our tips for managing LinkedIn groups.
3. Promote Your Business With LinkedIn’s Tools
Here are a few tools that will help promote your business:
LinkedIn Events. Adding your events to LinkedIn’s Events section helps to promote your events. You can share the events you create with your connections as well as your second and third degree contacts. Events are also searchable on LinkedIn by keyword and location, which gives your events greater reach.
LinkedIn’s Slideshare app. If you are a speaker and use Slideshare to upload your slides, the Slideshare app is a great way to show off your presentations and expertise on your LinkedIn profile.
LinkedIn Ads. Although we don’t have experience using LinkedIn Ads, they could be a useful tool for reaching a B2B audience. This is a helpful article that explores whether you should advertise on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
Connect to Monique Trottier on LinkedIn
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/moniquetrottier
Connect to Crissy Campbell on LinkedIn
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/crissycampbell
