LinkedIn has over 774 million users across the globe, which makes it one of the top social networks today.
Does your business take advantage of LinkedIn? It’s a powerful tool for building your brand, networking, and generating leads and conversions that can boost your bottom line.
This guide provides LinkedIn tips that you can use to improve brand awareness, share marketing content, and grow your business.
LinkedIn is clearly a powerful platform for promoting your business, and if you’re not already on it then you’re missing out. As of January 2022, LinkedIn is the world’s premier business network with 722 million users. 22% of all American adults use LinkedIn every single day, which demonstrates the power of the platform for promoting businesses. If you’re not already using LinkedIn, you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity.
The most common reason people use LinkedIn is to improve and grow their professional network. By staying in touch with old colleagues and making new connections, LinkedIn provides users with opportunities for business growth and new employment.
How can you market your business on LinkedIn in an effective way?
To help you market your company on LinkedIn, we have gathered all the necessary information and updates for 2022.
What Is LinkedIn Marketing?
The process of using LinkedIn to improve brand awareness, generate leads, create business relationships, share content, and drive traffic to a website is called LinkedIn marketing. Many marketing strategies today involve LinkedIn because it is such an effective way to expand professional networks.
When you use LinkedIn to market your business, you gain access to features that can help you with analytics, making connections, and building your brand.
Why Is Marketing on LinkedIn Important?
LinkedIn is often overlooked as a social media platform for marketing, but it is actually one of the most effective platforms. LinkedIn generates leads 227% more effectively than Facebook and Twitter.
If you aren’t familiar with LinkedIn, here is a brief explanation.
About LinkedIn
LinkedIn is focused on networking, building careers, and sharing ideas. It enables members to connect and share content with other professionals including colleagues, potential employers, business partners, competitors, new employees, and customers.
LinkedIn can be a powerful marketing tool for businesses.
For a quick guide on using LinkedIn for business and marketing, check out our video.
Now, let’s go over some of the ways you can use LinkedIn to promote and expand your business.
How to Use LinkedIn for Business
In order to access LinkedIn, you will need to create an individual account, which will also serve as the administrator for your company page. I recommend signing up with your work email address, but ultimately the decision is up to you.
Create a LinkedIn Company Page
After you have logged in, click on the Work icon at the top right of the browser. A menu will pop up and you should scroll to the bottom to pick “Create a Company Page.”
Choose the right type of Page from the four available options:
- Small business
- Medium to large business
- Showcase page
- Educational institution
All of the features on Facebook Pages are self-explanatory except for Showcase Pages. Showcase Pages are for companies that want to create separate pages for each division of their business while still linking all of the pages back to the main corporate Page.
If you have a Showcase Page, it will appear on the main Company Page under “Affiliated pages.” For example, Hootsuite has a COVID-19 Resources page listed there.
After you select a page type, add your logo and tagline. Your logo and tagline will be the first impression that LinkedIn users have of you, so it is important to make them good.
Hootsuite’s tagline is “The global leader in social media management.”
When you’re done, click Create page.
Optimize Your Page
You will need to optimize your new Page to get noticed and build your following.
First, click the blue Edit Page button at the bottom of the screen.
Make sure to fill out all the fields in the additional information area. This will help users understand what you do and also improve your LinkedIn SEO so you show up higher in search results. It’s worth the extra effort since companies with complete profiles get 30% more views.
Use Translations
If you want to serve a global audience, you can add translations of your company page here. You can have up to 20 languages on your company page, which includes the name, tagline, and description fields.
Add Keywords in Your Description
Your LinkedIn company description can be found by Google searches, so try to use keywords that sound natural. Keep the description to a maximum of three or four paragraphs, covering topics such as your company’s vision, values, products, and services.
Add Hashtags
You can only add up to three hashtags to follow on your Page copy.
To see all posts with relevant hashtags, go to your Page and click on Hashtags under the post editor. This makes it easy to comment, like, and share posts that are important to you.
Add a Branded Cover Image
This is the perfect space to promote your latest product launch or other big news. Keep it on-brand and simple. Hootsuite is featuring the new Social Trends 2022 report: a free mega-deep dive containing the secret sauce to outperform your competition this year (and next year, and the year after that…).
The dimensions for this space are currently 1128px x 191px.
And Finally: Add a Custom Button
This is the button located next to the Follow one that LinkedIn users will see on your Page. You can change it to any of these:
- Contact us
- Learn more
- Register
- Sign up
- Visit Website
“Visit website” is the default option.
You can change your button’s text to anything you want, so if you have a webinar or event running, you can change it to “Register” or “Sign up” to focus on that. Once the event is over, you can change it back to your website’s URL. You can also include a UTM so you can track where your leads are coming from.
Execute Your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
You have a LinkedIn marketing strategy, right?
The easy part of creating a Page is creating the page. The hard part is making sure the Page has content that your audience will want to see. You can make this process easier by creating a plan.
The LinkedIn part of your social media strategy should include answers to:
- What is the goal of your LinkedIn Page? (This may be different from your overall social media goals.)
- What will you use your Page for? Recruiting? Lead generation? Sharing the super nerdy industry stuff that doesn’t perform as well on Instagram or Facebook?
- Are you going to advertise? What is your LinkedIn ads budget?
- What are your competitors doing on LinkedIn, and how can you create better content?
Lastly, make a content plan:
- How often will you post?
- What topics will you cover?
- How can you repurpose existing content to use on LinkedIn?
- Are you going to curate content from others?
After you figure out what you want to post about, and how often you want to post, it becomes easy to stay consistent using Hootsuite’s planner tool.
The app allows you to see your content in either a weekly or monthly view and quickly add new content or rearrange upcoming posts as needed.
LinkedIn Marketing Best Practices
LinkedIn provides an opportunity to increase website traffic, identify good potential customers, share your professional knowledge via useful content, and expand your business connections. Additionally, LinkedIn can be utilized to post job openings and attract new employees. These are only some of the reasons LinkedIn is an excellent platform for any business to use for marketing purposes. There are a few more practical ways you can use LinkedIn as part of your social media content strategy.
Use Hashtags
Hashtags are a useful tool for adding emphasis to LinkedIn posts, but they can also be used to improve your marketing strategy. These short phrases, with a hashtag in front of them, can help you reach new audiences, industries, and areas of interest. However, using too many hashtags, or the wrong ones, can reduce the number of people who see your posts.
This means that you will want to find a balance between hashtags that are relevant to your work and those that are popular on LinkedIn. To do this, you can research hashtags on LinkedIn using the search bar. For example, if you work in growth marketing, you can start by searching for #growthmarketing to see how many people are following the hashtag and how often it is being used.
Reach the audiences you want to speak to with these hashtags. Don’t get too fixated on numbers, though- related but lesser known hashtags can help you connect with an engaged LinkedIn audience.
Know When to Use a LinkedIn Profile vs. A LinkedIn Page
A LinkedIn Page can be followed without having to send a connection request and wait for approval. That means that when a LinkedIn user shares your Page with their connections, those individuals will be able to follow your page and see your business’ content right away, which has the potential for high engagement. LinkedIn Pages and LinkedIn Profiles serve different purposes in LinkedIn marketing. Pages are public and used primarily by businesses, while Profiles are private and used by individuals. Each of them interacts with the LinkedIn algorithm in different ways, but you’ll have different tools that you can use to grow your audience.
LinkedIn Profiles can be followed, but they also have the unique ability to allow private one-on-one conversations with connections who request to join your network. If you are a consultant, work in direct sales, or prefer a more individualized approach to your business, you should have a LinkedIn Profile to take advantage of this feature.
You can improve your business’ LinkedIn marketing by listing your business’ LinkedIn Page as your employer on your Profile. This will allow visitors to your Profile to see your Page.
Create Posts of Varying Lengths
Quick and bold posts are effective on LinkedIn, while longer stories capture readers’ attention and lead to more time spent on the app. Both of these types of posts should be part of your LinkedIn content strategy.
You don’t want to come across as someone who only posts long, rambling monologues because people in your network won’t always have time to read them. Similarly, too many short posts can make you seem like you lack substance and authority as a thought leader.
You can keep your content fresh and relevant by varying the length of your posts and adding images and videos. You’ll have content that gets people excited to see what gems you drop next.
Share External Articles on the Platform
Unlike other platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn’s algorithm is designed to support external links to blogs and websites. So long as the content you post has value and is relevant to your audience, you should have success posting other people’s content on LinkedIn.
You don’t have to worry about formally crediting an author if you’re linking directly to their website, but it’s still a good idea to show them some credit by tagging them in your post or using their hashtag. Sometimes, they’ll share your post with their followers, or leave a comment under the post, which will help introduce your profile to their audience.