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How to Market on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has always been the industry standard when it comes to marketing yourself professionally, but over the last few years, the importance of the social network aspect has increased dramatically. TechCrunch reports LinkedIn has roughly 187 million unique visitors per month and growing.  LinkedIn has ramped up its efforts to become a content platform. In the past three years LinkedIn has acquired Slideshare, Pulse, and Newsle; all of which hint at a continuing push towards content distribution.

 

Instead of just maintaining your profile and company page and being active in LinkedIn groups, LinkedIn is now encouraging brands and individuals to create content, share, and engage.  These are all signs that LinkedIn is finding ways to leverage its new robust publishing capabilities. It is clear that LinkedIn sees itself as a vital part of the future of content marketing.
Viveka von Rosen (LinkedIn expert and author of the book LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day) notes that “LinkedIn is about building relationships, and one of the best ways of building relationships is to show your top prospects that you were listening to them.” With this in mind, she points out that LinkedIn actually provides users with a fairly robust CRM tool.

She recommends leveraging these tools:

1. Research your prospect or client (or better yet, have a conversation with them – maybe at a conference or trade show?)

2. Make your notes about the person on their LinkedIn profile. (Click on the star icon to “unfold” LinkedIn’s CRM feature.)

3. Set a reminder to follow up with your prospect.

4. Find an article, or even better, create your content that you think they might be interested in and send it.

5. You can also tag your prospects, segmenting your network in a way that makes sense to you, and that will allow you to follow up with them in a smaller group.