If you are looking to do B2B marketing then LinkedIn is probably the social media platform for you.  According to Quora, 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn, and 79% of B2B marketers say that LinkedIn has been an effective avenue for lead generation.  With this in mind, you need to make sure your profile is solid so that you can promote your products and services, and have a clear LinkedIn marketing plan.

Who to Connect with

LinkedIn is for business so think carefully when adding connections.  Family and friends can catch up with you on Facebook.

Company Pages

It is important to have a company page if you employ more than 1 staff member.  However LinkedIn is all about connections and people are 10 times more likely to interact with employee profiles over company pages.  Considering this find 5 of your most engaged employees and ask them to share content from the Company page adding their own comments.  You could also ask them to create their own original content to share.

Showcase Pages

These are extensions of your Company Page and allow you to showcase different aspects of your business with their own messages and for their own target audiences.  For example Adobe has various products (Acrobat reader, Photoshop etc) so they have split their offerings over 5 Showcase Pages.  There are some other good examples in this Demodia article.

You can share company updates and sponsored content with LinkedIn members who follow your relevant Showcase Pages.

Quintly

Quintly is a LinkedIn analytics tool which can be used to analyse your followers and benchmark them with your competitor’s followers.  It can also be used to measure engagement data from your LinkedIn updates so you can tweak your content strategy.

Sharing Content

Don’t just share your latest blog just because you have written it.  Make sure you have clear and engaging reasons why someone may want to read it.  Videos work well on LinkedIn too.

Other useful tips

• Use your expertise to help others. If you are recognised as a person who helps others then you will get a Career Advice Hub option on your profile
• If you are doing mailshots, you can check that contacts are still working in the same business and cross-check their business title
• If you are posting articles to LinkedIn and are struggling with images, check the size of the image as it would need to be a maximum of 8MB
• Ensure your business profile (and personal profile) has key words in it
• Join industry specific groups (or create your own) and share your expertise
• Ask for recommendations and verification of skills and endorsements

However you go about improving your LinkedIn profile, do take a look at this Business2Community article for some suggestions of LinkedIn marketing tools to help you build your brand presence.