Why Businesses are Turning to LinkedIn

With more than 300 million members, LinkedIn is the largest social media platform for career and business professionals. It’s known as a recruiting tool for employers, hiring managers and recruiters, but using LinkedIn provides many other benefits. It is a promotional platform for company products and services and corporate culture as well as a way to share valuable content and expand a company’s marketing reach. Your LinkedIn business profile is a valuable sales and marketing tool that is much more cost effective than many other forms of advertising. It’s free and available to millions of online viewers as well as search engines, groups, and forums.

Effective Recruiting Tool

A LinkedIn company page includes a careers section where you can post new job openings and promote your employment brand. Companies can use the LinkedIn careers section to point visitors to their website and other social media such as Facebook to further engage prospective candidates. LinkedIn’s paid feature, Recruiter, has a recommendation engine that matches posted job descriptions with qualified candidates and sends “People You May Want to Hire,” making sourcing candidates a more automated task.

Develop Business and Industry Credibility

As a social network, LinkedIn is a platform for sharing and communicating. With a business profile on LinkedIn, you have a way to share updates about what’s going on with your company, post a blog with relevant communications about your business and your industry and join discussions with other LinkedIn members and groups.

Expand Your Company’s Marketing Reach

You can attract new clients with your company page. The overview section lets you describe your company and your business, including your mission and vision, industry and company size. LinkedIn company pages have sections to promote products and services where you can provide detailed information about what your company does. LinkedIn has promotional tools to target your audience by industry, location and other distinguishing factors, as well as provide coupons, banners, discounts, videos and recommendations.

Build Your LinkedIn Business Profile

Don’t put basic information about your company in your LinkedIn business profile and then just let it sit there. Build your LinkedIn business profile so that it’s an engaging, compelling destination for candidates, prospective clients, vendors and other players in your industry. Customize your page to your business demographic and look at similar businesses for inspiration. Add your logo, make your page attractive with a cover photo and add regular updates so visitors get a good feel for the personality of your company.

Other Ways to Improve Your Business Profile

Improve your LinkedIn business profile to ensure visitors to your page are interested and always leave with information that is valuable and encourages them to come back or contact you. Use LinkedIn’s Developer’s page to create a Follow Us button for your website. Offer sponsored updates to reach more readers and gain more leads. Get people involved by asking questions and replying to them, or using them to create better content. Use your business page to highlight your products or services, especially when you have sales or special offers.