LinkedIn is usually considered to be professional, as opposed to Facebook which is more social. It is more business biased, yet should be treated as a social networking site. The method of acquiring contacts (rather than friends) is strictly controlled, with a connective reason needing to be confirmed before a prospective is approached.

Promote yourself, not your business

As it is a networking site, it shouldn’t be used to publicise your business. The profile is in your name, so ideally it is you and your expertise which should be promoted. Therefore your profile page needs to be fully completed, with a good photo, a quick summary underneath it, links to you website and blogs so inquirers can find out more about you, and a CV biography showing your past employment and educational history.

If you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours

People buy from people, so create a good impression by growing your contact list, and by giving and receiving recommendations or testimonials. It’s worth communicating with the people you have collated, rather than just acquiring them as trophies, and swapping over information for each other can further your social networking prowess.

Spread your knowledge around

Expand your expertise by regularly visiting the Questions and Answers section on LinkedIn and contributing to the activity. You can feed these questions to your Google Reader page to keep tabs on new entries and to quickly get your response in. If you are fortunate to be chosen as the best answer, this is promoted on your profile. And ask a question for marketing research purposes, as this is an excellent tool to gather necessary and valuable information.

Join in with the activities

Join groups on LinkedIn and participate in them regularly. You will get email reminders on new material in each group, but it is worth going in to see if new comments have recently been added, or whether anybody has responded to your previous contribution; create a vibrant discussion on a particular point. Also spread your expertise by feeding your blog posts or any other relevant resource into the News section. You could even set up your own group and grow a following who are interested in contributing to your cause or discussing your area of business.

It won’t happen immediately

As networking is a long-term activity, don’t expect results overnight. Remember to update your status box regularly and feed it to Twitter, set up a feed from your blog into your profile so visitors can read your latest posts, watch your contacts’ activities, be interested and generally participate. The dividends will be worth it – but over time.

Related posts:

1. How to use marketing within LinkedIn
2. Do your customers use the same social media?
3. How to do marketing for free
4. How can social media work for you?
5. Learn how to link in to LinkedIn

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 10:30 am and is filed under Businesses, online marketing, visibility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.