Social Network Your Business With LinkedIn

You may be surprised to learn that when it comes to using social media marketing for your professional services or product-based business, one of the best platforms to use is actually LinkedIn.

LinkedIn offers you a place where you’re most likely to find an engaged and potentially interested audience (be it customers, partners and joint venture opportunities) for what you do and in this article, we provide a simple tactic for getting your business actively using social media.

Right now, LinkedIn have provided three placeholders in Company Pages for very specific information about your business – 'Company Overview', 'Career' and 'Products & Services'.

Your Company Overview

The 'Company Overview' is where you enter a description of your business services, as succinctly as possible. Ideally you have the keyword phrases that are relevant to your business in the opening paragraph of your Overview (as this is the only text that is guaranteed to be seen by visitors to your LinkedIn Company page).

When editing your 'Company Overview' you’ll find there are fields for you to enter in your ‘Company Specialties’ – these you need to describe in a way that includes the keywords for your business. Just like your personal LinkedIn Profile - you want to have the keywords for your business repeated wherever possible.

Career Listings & Recruitment

The ‘Career’ placeholder is for recruiting new talent into your business and is only displayed as part of your Company Page when you add a job posting.

Add Products & Services

The most important placeholder for a professional services business is the ‘Products & Services’. Here is where you showcase the things you do for clients, gather testimonials and so much more.

It’s best to start by putting up a description of a service you offer, making sure to include your unique value proposition in the description. Add any video testimonials (if you have them), or pictures of media clippings, diagrams; anything that increases the understanding of the value of your services for prospects.

It’s important that you also include links back to ‘more information’ that’s available on your website. The link should be to the one page of your website that has just the information relevant to the service you are describing on LinkedIn; you will dilute the impact and results you get if you link to a web page that’s generic.

Make sure to provide the contact details for your sales consultant or the person in your business that inquiries need to be directed to in your service description, that way people interested in your service can make direct contact.

Leveraging Your LinkedIn Company Page

Once you’ve entered a few of your services, contact your clients and ask them to visit your LinkedIn Company page and leave their comments or provide a testimonial against one of the services you provided to them.

Doing this has two affects, the first is that you get new testimonials for your business, and the second is your clients may encounter a service they never knew you had and want to engage you… and that’s a great type of effortless sale to make.