7 Ways You Can Use LinkedIn To Blow Up Your Brand

Julie Guest

Over the last three years, LinkedIn's active user base grew by a staggering 48 percent, from 500 million in 2018 to 740 million in 2021. Business owners and entrepreneurs can leverage the platform to grow their brand, generate new leads, establish partnerships and make connections.

The following seven ways can help you utilize LinkedIn to grow your brand and gain a competitive edge over your competition.

1. Optimize your company profile and connect with people

If you haven't worked on your LinkedIn profile, please take some time and perfect it. Make sure it provides all the essential details about your company's products and services. Put more emphasis on the headline and summary to ensure that it's compelling, engaging, interesting and professional. Furthermore, optimize it for more B2B and B2C lead generation.

Within no time, you will start seeing the "Someone has viewed your profile" notification. Don't just view their profile back. Instead, track the individuals who viewed your business's profile. If they are an ideal prospect, invite them to connect. An individual who views your company profile is most likely finding out more about your brand. There could be a chance they are also interested in your products or services.

2. Post valuable content on LinkedIn publisher

You can use LinkedIn Publisher to publish blog posts that users can engage with and share. With more shares of your blogs, the higher the impact it has on growing your brand. The post can also get prospects interested in your products, triggering an open door for more partnerships.

Make it a habit to publish content on LinkedIn consistently — but remember quality is key. It can build a community of loyal followers who admire your brand. Through them, you have ambassadors who can create a good reputation out there about your business. When users see the value and insights in your content, it gives them the conviction to check out more about your company. It's one of the most straightforward and subtle ways of promoting your brand on LinkedIn without being pushy.

5. Utilize plugins

LinkedIn can be an even more powerful lead generation tool by itself when you utilize the complementary add-ons. Tap into the following plugins:

• LinkedIn Connection Revealer: The LinkedIn Connection Revealer shows you the following that your connections have. By pinpointing the users who travel in big circles, you can engage with them to leverage their platform and promote your brand.
• LinMailPro: It's a Chrome extension that gives you the capability to automatically find and invite individuals who have recently viewed your profile. You can also send personalized messages to them about your brand or deliver marketing messages.
• Headlinr: You may have sponsored a great story, uploaded ads or put up posts, but without a great headline, your potential targets might not click on them. When you use Headlinr, a chrome paid plugin, it automatically generates multiple headline combinations with the keyword you specify depending on your industry. You will get compelling titles that lure users into clicking through your ads and stories.
• Rapportive: If you are a Gmail user browsing in Chrome or Firefox, Rapportive can be a handy tool in getting more leads. It enables you to get LinkedIn profiles that have email addresses in your contacts. You can then send them personalized invites to their inbox to help you grow your network.  

See all 7 ways and the complete Entrepreneur article

 

 

 

The Biggest Error Thousands Of Professionals Make On LinkedIn Each Day

 Kathy Caprino

As most professionals know, LinkedIn has become a massively powerful professional tool—for connecting with colleagues and mentors, building personal brands, sharing company’s stories, eliciting interest from potential customers, clients, recruiters and hiring managers, sharing thought leadership and more. And LinkedIn is growing. Some recent statistics from BusinessofApps.com reveal that LinkedIn generated $8 billion revenue in 2020, an increase of 19% year-on-year and:

• LinkedIn has 756 million members
• The U.S. has the most LinkedIn members, followed by India and China
• According to LinkedIn, over 100 million job applications are sent each month
• Over 57 million businesses and 120,000 schools have LinkedIn accounts

According to Hootsuite, LinkedIn is the most trusted social network in the U.S. And Microsoft has reported that LinkedIn topped $3 billion in ad revenue in the last year, surpassing Snap and Pinterest.

Clearly, LinkedIn’s impact is growing and for many professionals and businesses, it’s vitally important to get it right in terms of how they’re engaging with others there. A burned bridge on LinkedIn is often one that can’t be rebuilt. You have one chance to make a powerful and positive first impression, so it’s important to succeed at it. 

From my perspective as one who is very active on LinkedIn and hears from hundreds of individuals each year who are making some sort of a request or pitch, I can say that the single biggest error I see professionals make on the platform is the manner in which they are reaching out to a complete stranger.  

So often, they’re taking the wrong approach that ends up being off-putting and opportunity-crushing. For instance, people commonly now use LinkedIn as a avenue for the “cold-calling” approach, reaching out with a cold sales pitch or offer, without knowing anything relevant about the individual they’re pitching to or ascertaining in advance if what they’re selling would be of the slightest interest or value. And worse, they don’t expend any energy making their pitches engaging or helpful. The reality is that the majority of people on LinkedIn absolutely hate being pitched to, and are viewing the platform as a professional social network, not a place to be hawked and sold to. Whenever I’ve posted a comment or message on LinkedIn about this problem of being cold-pitched continually, I’ve received hundreds of comments and messages from members sharing their extreme frustration about this.

In my Forbes.com interview several years ago with Judy Robinett–startup funding expert, bestselling author and a super connector at the highest level—on her book How To Be a Power Connector: The 5+50+100 Rule for Turning Your Business Networking Into Profits. she shared what she viewed were the top 5 blunders networkers of all kinds make, and they are:

1. They network in the wrong places for what they need
2. They network at the wrong level for their goals
3. They have no way to assess the relative value of the connections they make
4. They have no system for optimizing their networking efforts
5. They fail to network in the best way to create high-value, long-term connections

These 5 networking blunders sum up very well how these cold pitches and blind outreaches to strangers on LinkedIn (or to other LinkedIn members whom they barely know) are missing the mark, and also slamming doors that could have been very instrumental if they’d been opened creatively, wisely and respectfully in the first place.

Here’s what to avoid, when reaching out to a stranger on LinkedIn: ... read what to avoid and the complete Forbes article