How Do I Use LinkedIn to Promote My Business? 

Here’s the good news: Everyone is online these days. You can share your content with just about everyone if you want. But here’s the bad news: Everyone is online these days. How do you stand out amongst the crowded newsfeed? One question you might be asking is “How do I use LinkedIn to promote my business?”

To create an effective LinkedIn business page, your company needs to offer ample opportunities for prospective customers to learn more about your brand and those who work there, allowing them to engage with relevant content. Give your page a personality, be personable and stick to it. Be helpful. Be creative. Be interesting. Responding to comments and other user tags, when appropriate, serves as a positive way to interact with other users.

Be Discoverable

Your page deserves to be found easily. Optimizing your content for search engines is the best way to get new and returning customers to your LinkedIn page and your website.

• Insert SEO keywords. Incorporate keywords and phrases that potential customers might use to search for your product or service in your posts. This will help with SEO in the app. Include these keywords in the About tab overview, clearly representing who you are and what you do.
• Link to your page. Links are essential for boosting your search ranking. An easy win here is to link to your LinkedIn page from your website. Also, make sure the LinkedIn profiles of employees are up to date.
• Share relevant content. Don’t post it sporadically or randomly. Instead, have a plan. At BigOrange, we follow monthly social media calendars, which help us plan when a social asset will be published. The more frequently you share content your followers engage with, the higher your page will appear in search results. 
• Be inclusive. Use pronouns such as “we” and “our” when talking about a company. This will lead your audience to view your company as a whole, not an individual.
• Be clear. Talk about yourself using personal pronouns such as  “I” or “my” when personally sharing content from your company’s Linkedin page.

Grow a Following

Speaking of growing your followers, share your LinkedIn page everywhere you are able. Email signatures and website footers are good places to include them.

Your updates appear directly in a follower’s LinkedIn feed.  A strong following will give you a relevant audience with every update. There are a few key things you can do quickly to start growing your following.

• Use a LinkedIn “follow” button on your site or blog. 
• Invite your profile connections to follow your company’s LinkedIn page. 
• Let your employees know about the relevant page posts to the company’s LinkedIn page so they can engage and boost the posts’ organic reach.
• Promote your company’s LinkedIn page through emails, newsletters and blog posts.

Get in the Flow 

A river has multiple branches or feeder rivers that carry water from various locations. A LinkedIn page and the CEO and other higher-ups of a company should use this idea to spread content. You should be sharing the strongest content with your personal connections on social media. Your followers care about you and will be interested in your words. They may not follow your company’s page but could still be interested in what you share because of a personal connection. 

Likewise, encourage members of your board, content creators and employees to share content from your company’s LinkedIn page that they think their following could find useful.

And, when you have a post you are really proud of, consider boosting it to your audience’s feed, using sponsored content. 

Here are a few more tips to answer the question, “How do I use LinkedIn to promote my business?” 

• Attract followers by getting your updates in front of more people.
• Use LinkedIn’s comprehensive targeting to reach the right audience.
• Use Direct Sponsored Content to test variations of your messaging.
• Track the number of leads you are getting from your ads with conversion tracking. 

Stop the Scroll

Of course, you want your company’s LinkedIn posts to stand out. Visuals bring people in. Use photos, videos, gifs or any other media to draw your audience’s attention. Remember, a post with a lot of text and a photo is much more inviting than a post with just a lot of text.

• Use images that don’t look like stock images. Find images of people with enough room to put text on the image without covering the focal points. 
• Be creative with your posts. Use current events, trending topics and emotions with your posts. Your fans will be interested in seeing what your company is up to.

Create, Create, Create!

With LinkedIn’s publishing platform, the most recently published content will be at the top of your profile, allowing businesses and potentially interested clients to view the content.

According to reports, “LinkedIn is responsible for 64 percent of all visits from social media channels to corporate websites.” The obvious algorithm takeaway is this: Create interesting content, share it regularly on LinkedIn, gain a following and drive visitors to your website with a call to action.

UserGrowth adds,“The LinkedIn audience has been proven to be highly engaged with content: six out of 10 users actively look for industry insights.”

Try using LinkedIn as a tool to build your thought leadership. LinkedIn Articles (like the one on HubSpot below) and Newsletters are a solid option for creating regular content.​ Weekly or monthly newsletters allow your fans, or followers, to keep up with your content. They can expect a newsletter on Thursday mornings or whenever you choose to publish them. 

Articles written in LinkedIn allow users to open up the written piece within the app. Articles allow for videos, images and other rich media content, so be sure to use good, quality visuals to draw your audience in.

Don’t Just Lurk 

LinkedIn is the place to surround yourself and your company with like-minded people and to network.

Commenting on other users’ posts with your company account works in a few ways. It works as a way to connect with other users, it allows other users to see that you exist and it allows people to see a link to your page, which boosts brand awareness. When engaging on the platform, remember that comments should be aimed at creating a conversation rather than just commenting to take up space. A comment that attracts attention can be seen by more users. Comments that don’t garner attention tend to get buried by more popular comments.

Liking a post acts similarly, but on a smaller scale. Directly target a user by liking their posts and hopefully attracting their attention. A company should not count on growing an audience by only liking posts.

When to Post to Promote Your Business on LinkedIn?

According to HubSpot, the best times to post are between noon and 3 p.m., 3 to 6 p.m., or 6 to 9 p.m. on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. It’s good advice to follow, but you may find your results are different. You could experiment to see when your content gets the most engagement. 

LinkedIn is a rapidly growing marketplace of ideas, and it’s waiting for you to join in. Don’t be too precious when it comes to content. Have faith in your ideas and let them into the world.

And if you are still asking, “How do I use LinkedIn to promote my business?” or are looking for someone to take creating social media content off your plate, we can help. Book a meeting to start growing your business and get noticed.