When it comes to building your presence online there are plenty of reasons why you should create a profile for your business on LinkedIn.
First of all, LinkedIn is a business-focused social networking site. The majority of its members are online entrepreneurs, business owners, marketers, and other business-oriented individuals. This fact alone makes the social site a necessity for your own business. If you’re not building a presence on it, then you’re missing out on a lot of business opportunities.
Whether you are promoting a new product or service, looking to hire new employees, or simply marketing your business as a whole, LinkedIn provides you with a plethora of tools and resources that you may use to help you accomplish all these things.
Creating a LinkedIn profile for your business is an effective business strategy. Here are a few tips on how you should go about it:
1. Setting up a business profile on LinkedIn is free so there are no related costs that you have to be worried about. Just log in to the site using your personal account, find the “Companies” menu and just follow the instructions from thereon. LinkedIn’s wizard will guide you throughout the whole process.
2. Make sure that you complete all the necessary information in the registration process. Don’t leave any space blank. If you have a logo for your business, then add it. Don’t forget to place the location of your business as well. This is especially important if your business is a brick and mortar one. Including your business location is critical if your online presence is for marketing purposes only. You have to let people know where they can find your physical store if they are interested in doing business with you.
3. Take time to write a brief but very informative description of your business. See to it that the description includes information about your business offerings, whether these are products or services or both. Most people don’t have the time to read through long texts so make the description as brief and as straight to the point as possible.
4. Place your business under the correct category. LinkedIn members will be using the site’s search functions to look for businesses on the site. If you placed your business in the wrong category or industry, your targeted customers or partners won’t be able to find your business profile.
5. If you have a business or company blog, get the feed of the blog and include it on your business LinkedIn profile. Anyone who follows your profile will be updated on the latest posts on your blog. If you don’t have a business blog, now is the time to start one. Putting the feed on your LinkedIn profile will keep the page fresh and entice other LinkedIn members to keep visiting your business profile.
6. LinkedIn will pull all the other accounts, feeds, and links on the site related to your business profile and connect them all together. These include your job listings, current employees, and even former employees. With that said, it’s crucial that you monitor these things to make sure that everything that is being connected to your profile are legit, and accurate.
When it comes to setting up a LinkedIn profile for your business keep these simple tips in mind and you will have a winning profile in no time!
Over the next few days I’ll post more articles on the topic of using LinkedIn for your business, so make sure to bookmark this site. In the next article we will be talking about making connections via LinkedIn’s groups and events features.
