What Is LinkedIn? Its a specialty social networking site with a strong focus on business and professional networking. LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with 225+ million members in 200+ countries. The formal nature of LinkedIn is its biggest strength compared to Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, and make this site ideal for business development, recruiting, and referrals.
This networking site offers professionals a number of benefits and features. LinkedIn is more specialized than the other social media sites due to the audience it attracts, because it is used by professionals across industries. Therefore, this site is a must-use for job search. However, business owners looking to attract prospects and connect with industry professionals can also utilize LinkedIn in a productive and prosperous way.
Features and Benefits of LinkedIn
(a) Company Pages: The first element of LinkedIn is that it allows business owners to create Company Pages. Unlike profile pages on other social networking sites, Company Pages comes with analytics as well as an ability to share meaningful content and promote your business.
(b) LinkedIn groups: This feature may be one of the most beneficial because it allows you to join groups that are specific to your audience and your industry. Within a group you can connect with other professionals and prospects to build an audience. Groups support conversations, article posting, polling, and display group icons on your Company Page to further enhance your connections.
(c) Advertising: Like many social networking sites, LinkedIn offers advertising options for members. The taregting can be very precise, inlcuding location, industry, role/seniority, university/education background, etc because people tend to fill a lot of detail in their LinkedIn profiles. Therefore, you can reach a targeted audience with ads that you can test and track for best results.
(d) Marketing solutions: LinkedIn offers a professional membership that goes above and beyond the standard membership. You can then utilize features like their Marketing Solutions program that also lets you create specific messages for your audience through targeted content marketing.
(e) Integration: Finally, LinkedIn is a site that understands you want to make the most of your social networking efforts. You can integrate many social media sites with your LinkedIn page. Integration saves time and maximizes your results.
Creating Content for LinkedIn: Its important to remember that while you can integrate your social marketing efforts, LinkedIn has a unique audience. It often makes sense to create unique content for LinkedIn followers, becasue they tend to be professionals and their needs may be different than your general audience.
People tend to trust the information they find on LinkedIn more than other sites. This simple fact can help you build tremendous authority and credibility in your niche. Pdfs and powerpoints can be shared effectively via LinkedIn. If you’re not using LinkedIn to grow your business or you’ve let your profile lag, consider giving this top rated social media site the attention it deserves.