7 Basic tips you need to know about LinkedIn – Part one of series

Business Tools / Social media /

June 2016

Most Business owners I speak to are more confident using Facebook to promote their business than LinkedIn. Here’s the thing, I don’t really like the acronym B2B or the suggestion that some of us only do business with businesses, let’s face it – we all do business with ‘people’! But for those business people whose target market are business people who hang out on LinkedIn this can (for some) be an untapped market.

Once you have completed your profile and put in as much detail as possible, the question is ‘How should we use LinkedIn and use it WELL?’ Here I will provide you with some basic tips to get you started and not so scared of giving it a go on LinkedIn. These are based on the questions I am most asked at the LinkedIn workshops I conduct.

Via the home tab you will see:

 

 

Share an update, upload Photo, Publish Post. So while ‘Upload a photo’ is fairly self-explanatory, my workshop attendees often ask me what is the difference between ‘Share and update’ and ‘Publish a post’.

  1. Updates: using ‘Share an update’
    An ‘update’ is basically a status update. You should use this option to share, updates about your business. You should ‘Share an update’ with links back to any blog posts (or LinkedIn posts) you write. Using ‘Share an update’ you can also share quotes and posts by others and links to any video (hosted on YouTube or other locations). The key here is to remember LinkedIn isn’t Facebook, no one cares about your lunch, bad day, kids funny quote of the day or your cat. Keep it professional and relevant.

 

  1. What is a ‘Post’ used for?
    A ‘post’ is an article. If you have a blog you may wish to re-purpose content and post it on LinkedIn under the ‘Posts’ section. You will always post under your personal page (via the home menu tab. On your company page, you would then post an update with link to the post you made on your personal LinkedIn. To do this effectively make sure that you read under the heading ‘Duplicate content’ below.

 

  1. Create a company page:
    From the top menu, go to Interests > Companies > then press Create Company on the left hand side via the yellow button. This is great for those who have staff members who can all be linked to your company page. You can also post updates on your company page, more about that below…

  1. How your Personal Profile works
    The share an update, publish post, upload photo updates do NOT appear on your personal profile page – Unlike Facebook, where you have a ‘timeline’ with all your updates, on LinkedIn, your Personal Profile status updates can only be seen by connections when they check their news stream or by visiting your profile and clicking on the ‘recent activity’ link. See Part two of this series for more information

 

  1. How to use your Company page
    Note that when you ‘Share an update’ to your COMPANY PAGE, it DOES stay visible on the company page, as that page IS set up like a timeline.Also worth noting is that unlike Facebook you will not contact people, message people or post articles as the company name. All of these activities will be conducted as you, under your name. The key with LinkedIn is that you are your brand. Employees should also ensure they know their employers policy on social media activity, especially if you are linked to the company page.

 

  1. The news feed on LinkedIn is VERY different to Facebook.
    If you ‘Share an update’ or ‘Like’ something, ‘comment’ on something, receive comments these fill the LinkedIn news feed.When people check their LinkedIn news stream, unlike Facebook, every post DOES get pushed to your connections. So it is possible to scroll and scroll and scroll to the last post you saw when you were last logged into LinkedIn to ensure you don’t miss anything of value. However it is important to note that depending on the quantity of connections those you really want to see your post have if you post on Wednesdays, and someone you are linked to only checks their news stream on Mondays, by the time they check again on the Monday after you posted, the content may be so far down that even when they scroll, they don’t see it.

 

  1. Make sure you are easy to find.
    Don’t make it hard, your phone number, email address, website and physical address if you have one should all be visible within the first few lines. Don’t make people dig to find your information, we are used to getting what we want in seconds these days so if you aren’t easy to find, they will move on to one of your competitors that are.

 

If you’re keen to learn more you may like to organize a one-on-one training session or attend a workshop with us, contact us we would be happy to help guide you.

Thanks-for Reading-Lisa

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