A few months ago, we were hosting one of our digital marketing workshops and decided it was time to up our LinkedIn game and see what was possible and how it would affect our B2B social media presence. But should you be doing the same? And if so, why?

Is LinkedIn Right for You and Your Business?

First of all, you should consider where your audience is. It’s easy to slip into the trap of thinking you should be on every single social network, but what’s the point if your audience doesn’t even have accounts on there. LinkedIn is where you should be if you are looking to reach out to business buyers and professionals in general. It’s the best for reaching out to individuals who may be interested in your offering and nurturing a relationship from there in order to generate leads. When it comes to our clients we focus on LinkedIn when their products or services are B2B, and content is created to suit this. If this sounds like your business, spend more time developing your LinkedIn presence rather than Facebook and Instagram which are much more focused on B2C and you’ll notice this in the content.

How to Use it Effectively

So you might have your personal profile all set up but for your business, it’s a good idea to create a company page. Every business should have a company page to not only post great, engaging and of course, targeted content, but to also give employees a page to link their profile too.

LinkedIn company pages are also a great place to advertise for current job openings at your firm - with so many skilled people using LinkedIn to find their next opportunity, it's the perfect place to recruit.

Anyone liking your company page will see your posts on their timeline. They can share, like and comment on those posts, which will also appear on your company's page itself.

Other users can also tag your company page into their own posts, meaning their followers could visit your page and even follow it, if they find it useful and relevant.

The Benefits of LinkedIn

Lead Generation

LinkedIn allows you to identify potential leads on a personal level, engaging them and turning them into customers. This is done by a thought-out combination of listening, analysing, participating, sharing, networking and responding. Overall, showing you are knowledgeable in your chosen field. Networking with potential clients and marketing to them indirectly through LinkedIn will increase the opportunity to make sales.

Brand Awareness and Credibility

Your company overview on LinkedIn is your space to share status updates and blog posts to help followers and visitors learn more about what you do and how well you do it. A company page also gives you the ability to interact with LinkedIn members in other areas of the site including groups and the answers section. In both groups and answers, you have the opportunity to demonstrate your company's expertise by participating in discussions related to your industry and answering questions from other LinkedIn members.

Social Listening

LinkedIn is perfect to listen, ask questions and gain insights. it allows you to gain a better view of prospective customers and other contacts. You could use your posts as conversation starters to gain an overall view on a topic which you plan to include within your marketing strategy in the future

Improving Your Organic Search Ranking

Google and other search engines rank LinkedIn company pages and posts highly in the search engine results pages, so adding updates to your company page and optimizing posts for SEO helps to improve your performance in the search results pages. As a result, your website may see an increase in visitor traffic, especially if links back to your company’s website are embedded in your posts.

There are lots more benefits we could go on to talk about but these are the ones we feel the most important not only for ourselves but our clients too. We’ve listed a few more in the infographic below and please get in touch if you would like a hand getting your company LinkedIn presence up to scratch!