HOW TO: LinkedIN Your Brand

Brands and organizations can connect to 120m+ professionals around the world (latest stats from LinkedIN). As of April 2011, LinkedIn counts more than 11 million recent college graduates around the world as members. As of January 2011, LinkedIn counts executives from all 2010 Fortune 500 companies as members; its hiring solutions were used by 73 of the Fortune 100 companies as of March 22, 2011. There are currently more than 2 million companies having LinkedIn Company Pages. LinkedIn represents a valuable demographic for marketers with an affluent & influential membership. Thousands of developers are using LinkedIn APIs to create innovative tools and services for professionals.

According to statistics by Online MBA, 68% of LinkedIn users are 35 or older, 74% have a college degree or better and 39% make more than $100,000 a year. Although LinkedIn may not have the buzz of Facebook or Twitter right now, it has an enviable demographic base as you may see. LinkedIN is also now a highly profitable, fast-growing and expanding into new lines of business like news aggregation and congratulations to LinkedIN as it prepares to go public this year!

LinkedIN is now being used in so many perspectives – such as Business development, marketing, and sales; career management, personal branding, and resumes; job search, recruiting top talent, growing your network, keep in touch, organizing and extending groups, borrowing expertise of others, and increasingly for industry purposes where even journalists for example are benefiting on this platform.

Steps To LinkedIN Your Brand
So let us just give you on how critical this tool is, and how it should be used – and also why increasingly advertising on this platform is highly targeted, customized and professionally innovative.

 1.   Get your brand into LinkedIN - A company profile in LinkedIN helps you separate your individual account by creating a page that includes information and other details about what your brand and organization does, how much of expertise and skills you have, and how interested parties can get in touch with you.

2.   Remember this one – Don’t brag about it too much! You need to understand that LinkedIN is a soft strategic tool, not something you can bombard and expect overnight. Get your customers to write as many positive reviews of your brand or organization on your company profile as possible – this increases your credibility.

3.   Invite those you know – Once you are there, do not invite those whom you do not know at all – don’t be blindfolded as your brand or organization could get into a heap of trouble here. So make sure you know your invitees – O’Malley, for example, once invited 3,000 people, only to find that several of them were individuals with the same name as contacts he knew. He’s never done that again. So this is a very good lesson to learn from.

4.   Use polls and answer questions – Hand pick the best of the best in your list which is the company’s audience and colleagues with LinkedIn Polls which lets you to create polls and distribute to everyone or to people who want to hear them! The best part here is that you can view and analyze real-time results as to what people are saying.

Remember if your brand or organization is in LinkedIN, it’s vital to share your business knowledge and expertise, and help others find solutions to their problems by answering questions posed in LinkedIn Answers – stop being so selfish or fallen to a glory of greed that you know everything and nothing matters. This can be a great way to make an “expert” name for your business.

5.   Participate with groups – Get into being a member of interested and like-minded groups on LinkedIn as you fulfill that membership by participating in discussions. By taking part in group discussions, you can attract a lot of positive attention. But what happens here is that you tend to join too many groups which really is not a good idea – so the solution is that to focus on two or three that are most likely to provide access to potential customers or partners.

 6.   Ask for recommendations – Ask for recommendations from your customers, partners, colleagues, or even your employees! Have a practice of regularly asking clients to provide testimonials. These reviews are listed under your company information on your profile – this is a very credible method to practice which will drive in word of mouth and confidence.

 7.   Try targeted advertising - Consider starting off a targeted advertising campaign of your brand or organization’s offerings with LinkedIn DirectAds. You can target your ads based on geography, job function and seniority, industry and company size, and gender and age – it’s highly targeted!

From advertising in your own company page, having it on the custom groups to attract more leads through to having different types of innovative display ads and sponsoring answers, polls, events, partner messages, white paper distribution and so on – it’s a whole lot of things to tell here – so get yourself into LinkedIN Advertising and do your search!

8.   Job posting – If you are thinking of hiring top talent – an employee, freelancer, part time worker, or even an intern, LinkedIn in an excellent way to spread the word about the position you need to fill and your business in the process – Sri Lankan individuals are on LinkedIN – Brands and organizations should really try to shift from those independent job sites in Sri Lanka to using customized job postings in LinkedIN which bring real results!

9.   Track, monitor and buzz up – It’s increasingly critical now to track and monitor your brand or organization online. Same goes for LinkedIN – Use the LinkedIn app, Company Buzz, to track what’s being said about your brand or organization on LinkedIn. Having this information also gives you a way to measure the impact of your brand on these social networking sites.

Our Final Say on LinkedIN

LinkedIN as stated is a powerful tool that needs to be utilized in the proper manner, not promotional bombards! Do your searches on the web, browse through those successful case studies in the LinkedIN site, review what others say about it, and learn about it through the vastly available articles and guidelines! You don’t need a class or a heavy consultancy for this.