How to use LinkedIn for business?

Today, it`s hard to imagine business without social media marketers always need to engage with clients, advertise their goods, sell products and make deals with other businesspersons. If 10 years ago people used to contact each other with phones and letters, today all you need to do is to send a private message to a current person.

LinkedIn is not standing on the first place as the most popular platform for businesspersons, but it keeps getting popularity – every day we can see new profiles appearing there. However, some marketers who have entered this social media for the first time don`t know how to use LinkedIn for business. With this problem, we decided to write an article and tell everyone how to achieve success in business with LinkedIn.

Engage your team

Whether you`re a marketer driving awareness for your brand or a recruiter searching for new leads, getting your team involved on LinkedIn is the way to success. It will give people an opportunity to become active workers of your company or organization and help you better prioritize your employee engagement initiatives.

You will be sharing company`s updates in its profile on LinkedIn and your employees will do the same on their pages. Just be sure that they are familiar with all LinkedIn`s features as well as your brand`s key messaging before setting them loose on the platform. It will be better to give them an easy way to share curated content with a tool designed for advocacy.

Follow publishing best practices

It`s normal for every social network to have it`s own advantages and disadvantages. If something works perfect on Instagram, it may not work at all on Facebook. For this reason, it`s important for you as for businessperson to familiarize yourself with LinkedIn`s publishing best practices.

For example, if you are going to build engagement, it will be better to follow 80/20 rule (LinkedIn algorithm): on four ads for the benefit of your followers you post one ad that promotes your company. Follow this practice, and you will reach balance with your content.

According to the statistics from LinkedIn, the best time for posting is:

• Weekdays during business hours
• Tuesdays, Thursdays and Wednesdays are more ideal than Mondays and Fridays

Also, there are some tips that should be followed while preparing your content strategy:

• Posts with link drive twice more engagement than posts without
• If you add image to your post, you will have a 98% higher comment rate
• Links to YouTube videos that play directly in LinkedIn feed typically result in a 75% higher share rate

Don`t forget about content marketing score 

Content marketing score – a resource that gives you insights into the impact of your paid and organic content on LinkedIn. With it, you know how well you`re engaging your audience over time, and with this information you are able to change your strategy to get a better result.

Your score is based on member engagement with your sponsored updates, company pages, LinkedIn groups, influencer posts and employee updates. You can filter it by choosing region, seniority, company size, job function and industry.

Showcase your pages

These are extensions of your company page and highlight specific components of your brand (brand, product or campaign). All LinkedIn users can follow the component they are mostly interested in. When they do this, you can create specific messaging around each showcase page for effective audience segmentation.

Try Sprout Social

If you didn`t hear about this publishing tool earlies, you should try it right now. It will make your posting process much easier, you will also have your own posting calendar that helps you to schedule all content. You van target your updates by company size, industry, function, seniority and geography to ensure that your messages will reach the most relevant audiences.