Almost while you were sleeping, LinkedIn has quietly become one of the top tools for promoting your B2B services and engaging with potential clients and employees. With new features and better interactive tools, here’s how to use LinkedIn for business in 2020 (and beyond!).
LinkedIn is built for businesses, large and small
Many people think of LinkedIn just as a place to post a resumé, list a few schools, and maybe connect with people they already know. Even before the newest features were added, though, LinkedIn for small business features were so much more than that.
With over 700 million users across the globe, LinkedIn is tailor-made for businesses both large and small by:
- Connecting you with potential leads
- Helping you stay up on trends in industry groups
- Increasing engagement opportunities for your company as a whole and employees as representatives of your brand
- Getting support, recommendations, and endorsements from trusted colleagues
- Streamlining networking and introductions for remote companies
Some of these features were always a part of LinkedIn, but other recent changes have increased the potential for growth. In 2020, these include:
- LinkedIn Live: Connect and receive 24 times the leads with live broadcasts from your page
- LinkedIn Elevate: Empower employees to share content to your page to boost your page’s impact
- Analytics: Get a better look at which posts attract the most attention – and which content needs help
- Invite to Follow: Invite current connections (and new potential leads) to your page
- New ways to post: Post as a business or as an individual to the business page, even from your iOS or Android phone
Add these new features to LinkedIn standbys like blogging capability and easy messaging and you can learn how to use LinkedIn for business to develop positive relationships and steady growth.
How to create a LinkedIn business page
Creating a LinkedIn business page only takes five simple steps.
- From your personal page, click the “Work” icon at the top right, and then click “Create Company Page”
- Select your company type
- Add some basic details about your company (you can optimize later)
- Click “Create page”
- Click “Start building your page”
How to use LinkedIn for business: Our tips
Following LinkedIn’s best practices for creating a page will help you to set your page up for success, right from the start.
Now that you have your page up and running, what should you do? Here are our tips on how to use LinkedIn for business.
1. Optimize your page
Start with basic information, and then make sure to come back and build in more detail as soon as possible. If your business is international, make sure to add your tagline and description in the over 20 available languages. Also consider:
- Adding a custom button to encourage action in visitors to your page
- Use hashtags in your profile (up to three) that best suit your industry
- Post a great, eye-catching photo
2. Share your page and invite connections
Share your page across all social networks and specifically invite your personal connections to view it. Encourage employees to share, too.
Don’t forget to add LinkedIn buttons to other social networks and your website, too.
3. Set some goals to tailor your strategy
Who visits your page and what are you trying to accomplish?
These are two key questions to ask as you begin to develop a strategy for your LinkedIn business page. Are you looking to primarily recruit new employees, make connections through social media marketing, or develop deeper relationships with customers? All three?
4. Add some videos
Videos get attention. In March of 2020, people on LinkedIn viewed over four million hours of video content on LinkedIn. Adding videos has visual impact and can position you as an expert in your industry.
To begin (and if money’s tight), keep videos brief and as high-quality as you can.
5. Go live
LinkedIn’s live features can punch up engagement in a big way. Schedule a regular live event on your page and invite everyone who follows you to attend.
Again, these events need not be long or detailed to start. Maybe focus on a quick Q&A session or address any questions that are coming in on other media channels.
6. Don’t forget the pictures
Posts with pictures and other customized images tend to have more engagement than posts without. Encourage employees to share photos to the page, too.
7. Optimize your content
LinkedIn has some good suggestions for optimizing business page posts for best results. These include many of what we talk about above, but also the following tips:
- Keep writing clear, simple, and brief (or use bullets)
- Use quotes and statistics to make a point
- Identify your audience in the post
- Use tags for any individuals or businesses you mention
- Focus on writing strong headlines
- Utilize no more than three relevant hashtags
- Ask a question to engage people
- Add a simple call-to-action
- Answer any comments or questions you receive
Make it better by figuring out when your potential employees or customers are most active. Dive into analytics to get the most out of your posts.
8. Pay attention to analytics
Speaking of, you are spending time on this page, so it makes sense to pay careful attention to what’s working.
Use LinkedIn’s analytics to see who is visiting your page, when, and how they are interacting. Find the types of posts that work best and which ones aren’t serving your business.
9. Target your audience
When you create ads, page administrators have the option of directly targeting a specific audience based on factors like size of the business, location, industry, and job.
10. Utilize LinkedIn’s messaging features
LinkedIn’s InMail feature lets you directly message someone with whom your page is not yet connected. InMail sees a response rate that is 300% higher than regular email – and doesn’t require you to collect email addresses.
Sponsored InMail is also one type of LinkedIn ad used by over 65% of B2B companies to increase connections and generate leads.
11. Be consistent
Use a social media scheduler to create and schedule LinkedIn posts and company updates about events, new releases, and any changes you know are on the way. These scheduled posts can also announce upcoming live broadcasts.
This is not to be confused with another LinkedIn feature. LinkedIn’s built-in scheduler is great for automatically connecting with potential employees and syncs to your personal calendar for reference.
Learn more
LinkedIn’s new features combined with their classic standbys, make starting a business page a smart move in terms of your overall digital marketing strategy.
Don’t have time to learn how to use LinkedIn for business? Get in touch with Boost. We can do full-scale setup and ongoing monthly management so you can focus on your business.