How To Use LinkedIn Effectively For Business

LinkedIn is a helpful platform for certain businesses. It’s not exactly for everyone or every business. It’s a place to try out and examine.
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What LinkedIn isn’t is a place to show a lot of personal stuff. People on this platform are there to talk about business. A tiny bit here and there of your life behind the scenes is great, but otherwise, stick to the work at hand. And, this is how we want to get into how to use LinkedIn effectively for business.

​How to use LinkedIn Effectively for Business

1. First make sure you have optimized your LinkedIn Presence. When people come looking for you you want to make sure you look like you know what you’re doing right. And, sometimes that can take an expert to give you some tips. Just filling in all the boxes might not be filling in the boxes well. You want to appeal to the people you want to appeal to. You aren’t trying to grow a following of peers exactly. You want to appeal to the people you want to serve… your clientele

2. You want to be active. So once you are set up and ready to go with your accounts - use the account. Leaving it stagnant really gives off that feel. You aren’t active here and they people will move on.

How Do I Meet Other People On LinkedIn?

There are lots of ways to mingle and meet people on LinkedIn.

Local People. When you search to make your connections - one thing I love to do is search for people in my local community. So, I search for my city here and outside of the larger cities nearby and reach out to connections like that. When they see that I am from their area they will instantly have this connection right and then we can “connect” on LinkedIn.

Repeat. You can do this over and over for areas you live near, activities you like, meet other connections in your field, or especially fields you want to work with. 

How To Use LinkedIn For Business Development

Remember, this is building relationships and connections with people you might not know. It’s about being social. We are all on LinkedIn to find work and exchange pleasantries and work related ideas and mingle about work. Yes, Network.

Direct Message. So, you can really just message people and say something about what you liked about their page/the info they posted. Become friends with people. Reach out through a message and chat with them. If you check out their posts first, you can like and comment on those posts and then message them about something in their posts. It’s a great way to connect!

It’s great to compliment them about something you like about them or their work or content. You were attracted to them for some reason - make a nice comment about it. 
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Checklist. If this doesn’t come naturally you can build a checklist to kind of mimic this strategy until it becomes easier. And, hopefully, it develops into something fun.

​How Do I Use LinkedIn to Get Leads

Develop Relationships First. After you’ve spent some time developing these relationships - and you don’t need to be intimate friends with everyone on your list. That would probably be impossible anyway. You’ll start to develop greater connections. You can meet offline or on a zoom, etc. this is how so many of us meet now. Especially during pandemic times, we can still grow these connections.

This is how Nettie Owens and I met! We have mutual friends in our industry. We started to follow each other and it’s developed professionally and personally. Like any other relationship you would develop, right. We have something in common. We like each other's company. There you go.

Try Something New. Online Media Platforms are new. So some generations just aren’t familiar with the concept of using LinkedIn to develop business relationships. But, they can certainly expand their minds and head out into the world of online relationship development. Imagine what it must have been like when they introduced the radio into people’s homes… the box that talks to me? What! Or the phone! Some people probably thought it was witchcraft.

​Expand your horizons and try something new!