A Guide to LinkedIn Influence Marketing

Charlie Luck has taken the time to write a guest post specifically for our site. With three decades in sales and experiential marketing that led to his passion for digital marketing, he currently focuses on display and Instagram marketing. Charlie is constantly in search of the next ad or video idea that could go viral and the psychology behind it. Today, he shares his thoughts on LinkedIn marketing.

LinkedIn is a fantastic way to digitize your resume and make yourself available to recruiters. But, as worthwhile as those are, they don’t even touch on the nearly limitless capacities of this professionally oriented social media platform. LinkedIn currently has over 350 million users from more than 200 countries around the world, and 40% of those users report that they check in at least once per day. Nowhere else can you get such global reach so easily. Also, most B2B marketers concur that LinkedIn is an effective social media platform for generating leads and delivering content. Whether you are seeking to strengthen your personal brand or generate B2B buzz for a startup (or even an established company), LinkedIn is the place where you can network with a targeted and highly desirable demographic that may not be active on other social media channels.

Even LinkedIn’s free accounts offer access to basic analytics such as who has viewed your profile, the demographics of your viewers, and how you rank among your connections. Company profiles can view even deeper analytics which can lead to more lead generation possibilities. LinkedIn is designed to build business relationships, and they want you to know who’s interested in you. Premium accounts with premium features are available for a price, and they may be very worthwhile to power users or those who are ready to invest in some heavy networking. Paid advertising and sponsored spots are another way to reach even more of your targeted audience.

However, while the paid features do provide a considerable return on investment, there is plenty that you can do with your basic account and some better-than-basic branding efforts. LinkedIn offers some sophisticated content generation and delivery systems that you can use to maximize your influence. The blog publishing platform is intuitive to use and produces attractive, nicely formatted posts that you can use to reach out to current and potential contacts. If your posts are selected by LinkedIn’s personalized Pulse feature, there is an excellent chance that it will be widely shared and commented on, and it will reach a broad audience including thought leaders to whom you would not ordinarily have personal access. SlideShare is integrated directly into LinkedIn, which makes it incredibly easy to share presentations, infographics, videos, and other documents.

As mentioned earlier, LinkedIn follower potential goes up to 350 million users – and users on LinkedIn are far more likely to read your profile closely than users on other social media platforms. You also have much more space on LinkedIn than you do on other platforms, so take advantage of that and create a profile that invites attention.

• Start with your actual URL address. The default contains seemingly random characters, but you can change it to your name, nickname, or other short phrases that are easy to remember and difficult to accidentally transpose.
• Next, create a headline that appears directly below your name; make sure to use enough keywords so that you will show up in search results, but try to avoid looking like a thesaurus.
• Make sure that your photograph exudes professionalism. This is not the place to be creative or artsy. There’s plenty of space for that in SlideShare or even in the “experience” section if your portfolio is one of your selling points.
• Do not skimp on the skills section as members with fully fleshed out skills listings get up to thirteen times as many views of their profiles.

When you are confident that your profile portrays your brand powerfully, you can create a badge that you can use in your other social media or emails.

LinkedIn’s groups feature is another great way to get yourself noticed. You can make a name for yourself by contributing quality content to a quality group. This is the ultimate in networking as you’ll be associating yourself with others who have already identified themselves as having similar professional interests, and you can view their profiles and tailor your posts to appeal to the group members who you most want to impress. And once you’ve established your reputation, you can even start your group and position yourself as a thought leader.

LinkedIn is the place to be if you want to reach business owners and decision-makers, either to advance your career or personal brand or if you are promoting your business brand. LinkedIn is responsible for over 80% of all B2B lead conversions on social media! This means that this single platform generates four times as many leads than Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and all of the other platforms combined. So, if your social media marketing efforts are not yet as robust as you’d like them to be, LinkedIn is where you should focus the bulk of your efforts. Instead of using your company page as little more than a directory, make it work for you by actively soliciting leads and sales.

• Generate interest by making your image inviting. You want a user to want to learn more about what you have to offer.
• Also, use the company description as a direct pitch to your audience. You have them looking at you; take advantage of this and capture their interest with a compelling tagline.
• Make sure to regularly post in the Update section as this is another excellent opportunity to sell your products or services as well as keep your page looking fresh and relevant.
• The Showcase pages allow for even more focused content since you can create separate Showcase pages to highlight your top-selling or most interesting brands, products, or services.

LinkedIn is a virtual career fair and happy hour all rolled into one platform. It is a place where you can meet, greet, and impress everyone from interns up to CXOs. There is nowhere else on the net that puts your brand and content into the inboxes of millions of high-quality, high- impact targets. You can reach high if you choose to sell yourself here.

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