What Do You Want from LinkedIn?

Why should a person use LinkedIn? It’s a common question. Many people hear about popular websites and tools and think they need to start using them immediately. However, they dive in without understanding the real reasons for leveraging these tools. A social networking site like LinkedIn can open doors, but those doors can vary from one person to another. In short, there are a lot of people using LinkedIn for a lot of different reasons. You can’t simply copy what everyone else is doing and expect to be successful. First, you need to understand who is using LinkedIn and the opportunities LinkedIn can create.

LinkedIn is a social networking site targeted to professionals who live and work around the world in diverse industries and in many types of professions. Networking to build your business, brand, and career via LinkedIn works similarly to in-person networking, but you can do it from the comfort of your own home or office at any time of the day or night and for free. You can get started right now. Simply create a free LinkedIn profile that explains who you are and what you do, then reach out and connect with other users, and start joining conversations. Naturally, there is more to LinkedIn than a static profile, and that’s where the power of LinkedIn, for marketing your business and yourself, is found.

Who Is Using LinkedIn?

Since LinkedIn debuted in 2003, its membership has grown toa over 120 million people, and just under half of those users are in the United States. The rest are located in over 200 countries and territories around the world. Just over half of LinkedIn users are male and most users fall into the 25–34 or 35–54 year-old age range. Users work in a wide variety of industries with diverse job functions. Furthermore, it has been reported that every Fortune 500 company has an executive on LinkedIn.

INSIDER SECRET

Facebook might be the most popular social networking tool, but in surveys, marketers have repeatedly stated that LinkedIn drives higher marketing return on investment (ROI) results than Facebook. The reason is simple: LinkedIn has far less clutter than Facebook and is far more focused in its member goals. The people who spend time on LinkedIn are there for professional, business purposes. They’re not interested in playing games. They have specific goals to learn and grow their businesses or careers. When you connect with people on LinkedIn, you’re instantly connecting with an audience that has identified themselves as belonging to a target market of business and career-related professionals. This book teaches you how to use those connections—and your access to that audience—in order to build your own business or personal brand.

LinkedIn Opportunities

LinkedIn enables people to publish content and interact with one another. Your participation can be private or public, and gives you the opportunity to develop your business or personal brand. That means you can use LinkedIn to grow your company or your career. This book will teach you how to use the varied features offered in LinkedIn to jumpstart new opportunities. For example, following are just 20 ways that people use LinkedIn:

• Build relationships with influential people in their industries

• Develop relationships with target customers

• Establish their expertise in a specific subject matter or industry

• Provide valuable and meaningful content and conversations that lead to word-of-mouth marketing

• Acquire new customers

• Gather testimonials and recommendations

• Provide and get answers to questions

• Interact with like-minded people

• Obtain referrals

• Research customers and competitors

• Find vendors and business partners

• Raise funding or donations

• Promote events, new products, and more

• Identify mentors

• Find a new job

• Research a company for potential employment

• Search for new employees

• Acquire incoming links to websites for better search engine rankings

• Offer different ways for people to engage with you and experience your brand in the ways they prefer

• Get on the radar screens of potential clients

The most important thing to understand when it comes to using LinkedIn as a tool to build a business, brand, or career is that LinkedIn is most powerful as an indirect marketing tool. That means your LinkedIn activities should not read like an advertisement. LinkedIn should be used as a tool within your overall social media and content-marketing strategy. It is an amazing tool for building long-term, sustainable, and organic business or personal brand growth. However, that growth is dependent on your ability to publish useful content and conversations that help your target audience of existing and prospective customers or employers.

DEFINITION

To use LinkedIn effectively, you need to understand what a brand is. In simplest terms, your brand is your promise to your audience and can refer to a business brand or your personal brand. Whether your LinkedIn goal is to boost sales for your company or land your next job, you need to establish your brand promise through your LinkedIn profile, Company Page, content, and activities.

LinkedIn allows you to raise awareness and recognition of your brand (throughout the remainder of this book, brand will refer to both business and personal brand). Through your content and conversations on LinkedIn, your connections will develop expectations for you, your brand, and your content. When you continually meet or exceed those expectations again and again through your LinkedIn activities, people will begin to feel secure with your brand. When they feel secure about a brand, they’re more likely to try it, talk about it, and become loyal to it.

In other words, your LinkedIn activities can help you build a band of brand advocates who will not only try your products or services but also share your content, talk about your brand to their own audiences, and even protect your brand from naysayers. Brands that consumers become emotionally involved in and loyal to are referred to as relationship brands, and they are the most powerful brands in the world. LinkedIn helps you build those relationships that can transcend micro- and macroenvironmental changes and stand the test of time.

Think of LinkedIn as a long-term strategic tool for building your brand, but you can supplement that long-term strategy with short-term tactics as discussed throughout this book. The worst thing you can do is create an incomplete LinkedIn profile and never return to it again. For LinkedIn to work as a marketing tool to help you build your brand, you need to commit to it for the long haul. Consider the three steps of brand building listed below as you begin your efforts with LinkedIn.

• Consistency: All content and communications must consistently represent your brand promise and meet audience expectations for the brand. Otherwise, your audience will become confused and turn away from the brand in search of one that does meet their expectations for it.

• Persistence: Brands aren’t built overnight. You must be vigilant and continually create content and communications that keep your brand in the audience’s mind.

• Restraint: Don’t be tempted to expand your brand into new ventures that don’t consistently match the brand promise and might confuse consumers and do more harm than good.

As you develop your presence on LinkedIn and use the various tools and features available to help you connect with people, keep those three steps of brand building in mind. If an activity doesn’t support your brand promise, then it might be better to skip it entirely. Consistency, persistence, and restraint are keys to your long-term business and personal branding success.