Tips for B2B Companies to Make the Most of LinkedIn

81% of business decision makers use LinkedIn on a regular basis. Whether you are looking to build a strong profile or you wish to hire new team members, today LinkedIn has become the social network of choice for the business community. LinkedIn offers several ways to build your professional network, brands and business reputation throughout your network as well as gain valuable traffic back to your website.

1. Creating brand awareness – With more than 2.6 million company pages on LinkedIn including all Fortune 500 companies, LinkedIn has an ever expanding global presence. By creating a company page on LinkedIn, marketers can easily showcase their products and services; highlight their team expertise, share customer feedback, recommendations and more. With LinkedIn, marketers are improving the visibility and credibility, both as an individual and as a brand.
   IBM, best known for its cutting edge technology, makes good use of LinkedIn to drive brand awareness and engagement. With more than 1.8 million interactions, IBM achieved business success by sharing engaging content and promoting their product and services.

2. Sharing Leadership Values – Being a Thought leader provides companies a strong competitive edge and LinkedIn is one of the most fertile platforms for sharing Thought Leadership. CEOs, CMOs, CIOs, CTOs and top executives find it easy to position themselves as leaders in a particular domain with LinkedIn. By positioning yourself and hence your company as a Thought Leader, you deliver messages which are better regarded and more engaging.
   With GE’s Eco imagination campaign to position itself as a “green” company on LinkedIn and all across the web, it has not only become the thought leader for go green solutions for companies, but also is the biggest service provider in the wind power industry across the globe.

3. Generating Leads – As per Hubspot, lead generation at LinkedIn is 277% more successful than Facebook and Twitter with the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74%. LinkedIn is a treasure trove of B2B content that can be used to support your organization’s lead generation and qualification activities. By answering questions or responding to threads, direct contributions to your company blog and website posts all increase site traffic and consequently conversions.
   HubSpot has been quite successful in generating a consistent flow of leads for their products through their LinkedIn company page. They have highlighted marketing offers for a free demo of their products and some free eBooks related to utilizing the software or products, featuring this kind of valuable information worked best for them for generating business leads.

1. Highlight Recommendations – More than 45% new B2B users on your website come from a LinkedIn Company page. Having third party recommendations go a long way in attracting new business prospects and they are great in making an impression even before they reach your website. When you add your products and services to your company profile page, you give a chance to your customers and partners to give you a recommendation. Testimonials from happy customers act as a confidence booster for your company’s brand and reinforce quality of your products or services.
   With 821 recommendations across 10 products, Salesforce, a global cloud computing company has a very compelling LinkedIn Page, enabling them achieve consistent growth in inbound traffic and inquiries.

2. Recruit Talent – In 2013, 93% of recruiters use LinkedIn for recruitment, up from 78% in 2011. Today, LinkedIn has become a living database for most recruiters. Recruiters are relying heavily on LinkedIn for professional relevance and effectiveness. LinkedIn provides great options to seek talent with ability to build connections, join relevant and focused groups and utilize the Job Posting function. Unlike other recruiting sites, LinkedIn allows you to connect with those who aren’t actively looking for a new opportunity, but would consider a move for the right position.
   Accenture, a global management consulting company plans to hire 40% of 50,000 new staff through LinkedIn. With LinkedIn’s free Talent Pipeline, Accenture has been able to attract employees from different regions and multiple domains.

Here’s how you can leverage LinkedIn as a Business-building tool:

• Status updates: With an aim of providing one update per day that contains compelling or noteworthy information about your company or industry ensures that you stay active and your targets audiences achieves value from information shared.
• Blog Posts: LinkedIn allows you to easily syndicate your blog posts to your profile. As you post blog on your website, your LinkedIn profile automatically gets updated with your post’s title and link to the full post on your website.
• Groups: To get LinkedIn group’s mindshare, you can join few groups and then start your own conversations as well as participate in those discussions started by others. Sharing third-party content in relevant groups helps you build trustworthy relationships with group members.
• Polls: Using polls is the easiest and one of the most enjoyable ways to engage your target LinkedIn professionals. Asking a question relevant to your industry using a poll always sparks engagement from LinkedIn users who might not be active in groups.
• Answers: By constantly participating on the answer boards and responding to any or all questions that pertains to your area of expertise leads to engagement.
• Presentations: LinkedIn allows you to share power point presentations. If you have a SlideShare account, you can easily share your presentations on your LinkedIn profile as well.

Grazitti^™ Social Media Marketing Services:

From creating social media presence, recruiting members, managing engagement to full-scale execution, Grazitti Interactive^™ is ahead of the curve in social media marketing. Our service includes:

• Reputation management
• Product and brand promotion
• Sales nurturing and Lead generation
• Customer support
• Research and product innovation
• Partner & reseller program

Start a conversation today.