Some social media sites are better than others for garnering the traffic you want to attract. If your focus is on B2B, you’re likely to find that LinkedIn, the world’s biggest professional networking site will bring your website targeted traffic. With its 467 million users, LinkedIn drives more hits to corporate websites than any other social media platform.
Here are some tips to maximize LinkedIn’s potential:
Complete Your Profile
Your profile is a visual presentation of your business, so make sure it contains your company name and title. Add a professional headshot, so people know the face behind the name. To drive traffic to your site, include a link to it, along with links to individual blog posts. Like with all social media sites, relevant content is necessary to entice people to check out your site.
Know Your Target Audience
When you know exactly who your target audience is, you’ll know what groups they belong to, which content they read, when they’re most active, and how they communicate on LinkedIn. This will help you plan a LinkedIn strategy tailored just around them.
Share Relevant Content
Relevant content drives traffic. Create high-quality articles that your followers find appealing. Focus more on business-oriented articles, but don’t be afraid to create funny and light content as long as it still fits within LinkedIn’s professional environment.
Make and Join Groups
No member is an island on LinkedIn, not when you can join groups and take part in discussions. Use the search function to look for groups that fall within your industry. In case you don’t find one that fits your needs, go ahead and create it. It takes work to moderate a group, but at least you can tailor it to attract the kind of members you want. And when you’re the moderator people look up to you as an expert and are more likely to hire you.
Interact with Specific Individuals
You can post a link to an article on your newsfeed so that your whole network can see it, but people might miss it. To make sure you get the attention of your desired prospects, send a personalized message straight to their inbox. This move offers the additional benefit of making the recipient feel special for receiving a tailored text. It’s a good way to build strong relationships.
Utilize LinkedIn’s publishing platform
LinkedIn has its own publishing platform, which is similar to a typical blogging platform except that it has the SEO leverage of LinkedIn powering it. So aside from producing original content for your site and sharing it on LinkedIn, also create exclusive content for LinkedIn at least once a week. It’s an excellent opportunity for you to be noticed by top-level executives within your network.
Follow LinkedIn Influencers
LinkedIn influencers are people who have a wide following and readership on LinkedIn. They can be high-profile executives, prominent entrepreneurs, news media figures, etc. When you leave smart comments that initiate helpful discussions on the content of these influencers, you and your company will enjoy greater visibility in a wider network. This is because the content delivered by these influencers has a large audience.
Nurture Relationships
Like any other social network, connections on LinkedIn thrive on good relationships. This means you need to continuously engage with your target audience. One way to do that is by asking questions, sharing interesting articles, telling stories, and giving advice. Sounds like hard work, but it’s worth it in the end.
Beyond these sound ideas, you can also look at other LinkedIn Tools that offer special features that can help you. LinkedIn is a reliable tool for reaching potential customers who you can steer to your website for the ultimate goal – closing the deal.