When you look for tools to create awareness for your business sometimes it is the free ones that often get overlooked. The following tips will help you create a better presence on Linkedin.
Company Profile
When creating a company profile give a specific rundown of your offerings, purpose and company mission statement.
Create Your Own Group
LinkedIn Groups Are Virtual Trade Show Breakout Rooms
The power of LinkedIn Groups cannot be underestimated. Since every profession and discipline is represented at the virtual trade show that is LinkedIn, there is a need to have breakout rooms or separate sessions so that those with similar interests can come together for discussions and to share news on the topics that mutually interest them. At the time I wrote this, there were more than 730,000 groups on LinkedIn, with the most popular one having more than 320,000 members.
Functionality provided by LinkedIn Groups includes a discussions board, where it is possible to post a link to a web article of interest or simply engage in conversation. Through Groups, you can also do a member search and directly send a message to someone, provided they are using the default setting LinkedIn provides. In other words, by attracting your target demographic to your group, you can now directly engage with them regardless of your connectivity status.
How to Create an Effective LinkedIn Group
Before you think about creating a LinkedIn Group, you first need to create a mission statement that states who you’d like to attract and what your group will offer them.
Creating a LinkedIn Group is surprisingly simple, as is indicated by the sheer number of groups that exist. That being said, there is one very important thing to consider that will make or break your group: its name.
As a social networking site, no LinkedIn user wants to be sold to. Therefore, in the spirit of inbound marketing, the name of your group should NOT be your company name. On
Facebook or Twitter, it is wise to have a page or username that represents your company. On LinkedIn, however, you want to win the mindshare of your target audience and attract them to become members of your group. You can only do so by naming your group appropriately.
Once the name of your group is chosen, it is important to brand it in a way that will be attractive to the target audience, while maintaining consistency with your established look and feel.
How Promote Your LinkedIn Group to Earn Membership
Once you start a LinkedIn Group, what do you do next? It’s all about promotion, and that starts with introducing your community to relevant professionals in your own LinkedIn network. This is where you are already at an advantage if many of your employees are already established users with LinkedIn connections. Of course, your employees should only be introducing your group to those that are in your target demographic and would feel it is a valuable resource; otherwise, your innocent introduction of your group could be perceived as spam.
Using Your Other Social Media Assets to Promote Your LinkedIn Group
Promotion doesn’t and shouldn’t stop with just LinkedIn members: Once you begin to strategically engage in social media, you need to optimize your own website for social media. For the LinkedIn Group, it can be as simple as posting a logo and a link to your group in a prominent area of your website. In this way, your website visitors not only find out about your community, but they can also easily join it. If you have an email newsletter, don’t forget to feature your group’s logo there as well. An occasional tweet or Facebook post introducing your LinkedIn Group is another way to efficiently utilize social media to “advertise” your LinkedIn Group.
Jason Baudendistel is an Amazon #1 Bestselling Author, serial entrepreneur,Life coach,success coach, business coach, Linkedin consultant, and Internet marketing consultant.
