LinkedIn and your business…0

You have no doubt come across the term ‘Social Media’ a lot in the past year or so. If you have not yet the plunge into Social Media, whether that be Twitter or Facebook, perhaps LinkedIn is the choice for you.

LinkedIn is a network of over 80million business professionals. It can be used for a variety of purposes such as:

A good LinkedIn strategy and well managed account can boost your company’s credibility and on-line visibility. This can lead to better website traffic, which in turn can lead to more business sales for you.

Profile

This section will include a brief description of yourself and your business. It is important to include a good quality photo of yourself. Having a bad photo or even worse, no photo at all will jeopardise the success of your LinkedIn profile. It is important to include information of your job title, your education and qualifications and what the main purpose of your job or service is. Remember this is what will be viewed by your prospective customers, so feel free to sell yourself a bit here.

Connections

Once you have your profile created you can begin to make connections. You can get LinkedIn to invite people from your existing mail contact list or you can invite people individually. Once you start building connections you can really begin to get the most out of LinkedIn.

Recommendations

LinkedIn is a network remember. There are chances that you will already know people on LinkedIn, some of who you will of worked with in the past. You can request for any of your connections to ‘recommend’ you. You need to pick people who can honestly vouch for the work you have done for them, such as colleagues or past clients. Having well written recommendations on your page will only improve your chances of success on LinkedIn.

Links

You can include up to 3 different website links on your member profile. Make sure you chose the right sort of links. Nobody wants to your Flickr page with all your holiday photos nor do they want to see your personal Facebook page. make sure you include your company;s website address first and foremost. Then include things like a Blog if you have one, but only if its business related.

A well written and  professional looking LinkedIn member profile is a great way to market your business, and the best part of all? It’s Free!!

Click the link here to get started on your own LinkedIn profile