Social Media for Entrepreneurs Workout 5: Lunging into LinkedIn

Posted on 22. Mar, 2010 by Natalie in Entrepreneurs, Highlights, Marketing & Sales, Social Media

LinkedIn is the perfect tool to meet like-minded business people and cultivate relationships.

It’s also an amazing way to gain an international audience for your business. With over 50 million users and growing rapidly, LinkedIn is a valuable social network where you can create and manage your professional identities online and reach an educated, wealthy and uber networked bunch of people.

Depending on your business this is an audience that could be very lucrative to you both in terms of connections and potential sales.

I have to admit to have only recently discovering the incredible value of LinkedIn. It’s allowed me to connect with a variety of business professionals and investors in a way that is collaborative and professional as opposed to intrusive.

It’s also allowed me to build a network of trusted and engaged individuals. Every day professionals use LinkedIn to define themselves —and their businesses — to the world. You should be too, especially as LinkedIn has some of the most entrepreneurial people in the world.

Tryout these top exercises to get your business in LinkedIn Shape

Exercise 1: Increase your visibility.

Once you’ve set up your profile, added your career history and core skills and written a compelling bio, then you want to add connections. The more you have the more you increase the likelihood that people will see your profile first when they’re searching for someone to hire or do business with. In addition to appearing at the top of search results, people would much rather work with people who their friends know and trust.

Exercise 2: Improve your connectability.

What I like about LinkedIn is your ability to create an excellent profile that defines who you are as a brand and your skills and experience. You should fill out your profile like it’s an executive bio, so include past companies, education, affiliations, and activities so that people have more to search on.

As with your other social networks you should include a link to your profile as part of an email signature. The added benefit is that the link enables people to see all your credentials

Exercise 3: Improve your Influence.

LinkedIn allows you to make your profile information available for search engines to index and this is a good way to influence what people see when they search for you and improve your Google PageRank.

To do this, create a public profile and select “Full View.” Also, instead of using the default URL, customize your public profile’s URL to be your actual name. To strengthen the visibility of this page in search engines, use this link when you comment in a blog.

Exercise 4: Enhance your Assets.

In addition to your name, your LinkedIn profile lets you promote your blog, website and twitter account to search engines like Google. You can choose the existing categories like My Company.

However if you’re smart you’ll select “Other” to modify the name of the link, i.e. if you’re linking to your personal blog, include your name or descriptive terms in the link and you’ve achieved instant search-engine optimization for your site. To make this work, be sure your public profile setting is set to “Full View.”

Exercise 5: Get a regular health check up.

If you’re about to do business with a client, hire an employee or do a background check to see if an investor is legit, then LinkedIn has a ton of data to search on. It’s also an excellent way to see who’s linked to the person you want to connect with and ask them for an introduction – this is where 6 degrees of separation really comes into play. There’s nothing better than getting your foot in the door thanks to a personal introduction.
Exercise 6: Ask for advice.

LinkedIn Answers allows you to broadcast your business-related questions to both your network and the greater LinkedIn network. The quality of high-value responses is impressive because it’s coming from people in your network rather than open forums.

Exercise 7: Become an authority

I love being able to help people by answering their questions. Turns out I should have been doing more of this on LinkedIn. Hundreds of people have success for their personal brand and business by proving their values as `Experts’ on LinkedIn.

How? By answering several questions on a daily basis on their area of expertise. This gives them more visibility, credibility and naturally more customers and clients who turn to them as someone they trust who provides value on a regular basis.

Exercise 8: Content is king

LinkedIn allows you to submit articles with useful information to your groups and connections. It’s a valuable activity to conduct each week especially if you pick your audience right. I’ve been regularly posting my latest blog articles to the key entrepreneurial groups I’m a member of.

Example of a discussion I started

Simply go to Submit Article and enter your URL link and it will pre-populate it with an intro paragraph that you can customize to your intended audience.

Not only has it driven traffic back to WomanzWorld.com but it’s also created a vibrant community of comments. It’s taken a while to get this engagement and I love it.

I do see many articles every day that have no discussion activity attributed to them, but this doesn’t mean they’re not being read or appreciated. You’ll notice the difference when people start connecting with you based on an article of yours they read or a discussion thread you started.

• The Entrepreneurs Social Media Workout 1: Back to Basics
• Social Media for Entrepreneurs Workout 2: Get Facebook Fit
• Social Media for Entrepreneurs Workout 3: Toning up with Twitter
• Social Media Entrepreneurs Workout 4: Exercise Control Of Email
• Five steps to taking your networking online (and into the social media age)

Tags: Entrepreneurs Groups on LinkedIn, LinkedIn for Small businesses, Using LinkedIn to Gain clients