If your business isn’t already utilising LinkedIn, it should be

With around 500 million users, LinkedIn allows users and companies to connect with potential customers and business partners, recruit and look for jobs, as well as post relevant content. LinkedIn can be very useful for a company and here are 4 ways that yours can be utilising it.

1. Publish valuable content

LinkedIn content has a higher-ranking potential (Google, Bing, etc.), meaning that more often than not when someone searches your company your LinkedIn content will appear high in the search results. You can become an author overnight by writing and sharing articles on your LinkedIn profile. It’s a simple and straight forward form of marketing, to post relevant information your readers can enjoy and/or learn from, placing you as an industry thought leader. As well as sharing your own content, it is also a good idea to share other’s; show your company to be engaged with the community and get you recognised amongst potential customers.
Top tip: 24hours+ after posting an article, check the number of clicks, shares and comments you received as these are good indicators of whether people are finding your content interesting. If your content isn’t getting much attention, try posting different things, experiment with it, and utilise the stats to figure out what will.

2. Connect with people to work with or customers

LinkedIn offers a great way to find potential clients and business partners, as it offers more information about the professional or individual you would like to contact. LinkedIn has an advanced search feature, which allows you to search by various different sectors including industry, keywords and area, letting you easily find potential customers (and even competitors!). Once you’ve found the person you want LinkedIn allows you to either connect with or contact this individual through their messaging feature, so not knowing their email is no longer a problem. As well as making it easier to contact people, LinkedIn messaging leads to a higher response rate, compared with emailing, where often your email goes to junk or goes unnoticed.

3. Competitor research

LinkedIn is a great way to find who your competitors are and look into more detail about them. By doing an advanced search you can find businesses that are similar to yours and found out information such as employee count, a description of what they do and the type of content they post, all revealing a lot about the business itself. Watching the employee number can show when a company may be doing a hiring or firing spree, which can give an indication on how the business is doing and perhaps if they are hiring more people they could be expanding or vice versa downsizing – a good time to push to take over them and grow your business.
This type of competitor research can also aid your future business aims and goals. By looking at the new people your competitors are hiring’s, skill set and job title, for example can tell you if they are potentially going into a new business genre or taking on a new service. If this is the case it might be a good idea for you to consider doing this or something similar to stay competitive with them.
Another way businesses can do research into their industry is by connecting with similar companies that are in different countries or areas and aren’t actually considered competitors. Make the most of these random and new connections by sharing advice and intelligence of the industry swap ideas and work together to help improve both of your companies.

4. Recruitment

LinkedIn is also a great way to recruit new employees, by posting your new job vacancies and making it easy for people to apply, by allowing them to upload their CVs to their profiles. This helps cut out any middlemen and the additional costs that come with using a recruitment company or website. It allows you to easily see someone’s CV and job history, as well as any references, skills and endorsements that have been posted on there by previous employers or colleagues, to help you make an informed decision on who to give the job role to.

Here at boxChilli we offer effective Social Media Marketing Solutions, which include LinkedIn expertise. We can offer advice on how to utilise LinkedIn to improve the success of your company and create new business leads. If you’re thinking about utilising LinkedIn for your company, get in touch today and utilise our knowledge.

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