Yes, Another Post on Ways LinkedIn Can Help You Win New Business (but it will help, I promise)

I know, another blog post on the X (insert number here) things you need to know about yet another social media platform, but before you stop reading, here’s why I’m posting on the topic of LinkedIn.

I believe I’ve said it previously, but social media for agency new business is like new business overall, in that most agencies don’t have time to engage in it the way they want to. And what a great majority of the social media advice agency leaders are given fails to incorporate is that all the great social media info in the world won’t help you if time isn’t considered as a factor.

LinkedIn is one of those platforms that is not overly time-consuming and most likely has the greatest concentration of your prospects.  Your Agency LinkedIn page is important of course, but you should make sure your personal pages are equally up-to-date, as there’s greater functionality to personal pages, as least in LinkedIn’s current incarnation.

So that’s the reason for this post and if you’ve gotten this far, then I encourage you to read, 7 Ways To Market Yourself On LinkedIn from Lewis Howe’s eponymous blog.  I realized after reading I was only incorporating 2 of the 7 into my LinkedIn activity, and the other 5 can be incorporated with minimal effort.

l

The 7 ways below with brief descriptions of each: (but read the entire post for full descriptions)

1.  Give: This is important to do on any social networking site, not just LinkedIn, but it’s particularly important to do on LinkedIn when so many people are focused on wanting to receive something for themselves or their business.

2.  Complete It 100%: Your profile.  It needs to be completed 100% in order to properly market yourself. Most people do background checks on others whenever we want to buy something from them, bring them in to speak, or do anything with them.  We Google people to do our research.

3.  Connect With Everyone: It pains me to see when people only have less than 100 connections and they think that having a “small trusted network” is the way to go.  That’s a joke, and those with that mindset are going to be asking themselves why their message isn’t spreading to the world and why they haven’t achieved their marketing goals.

4.  Make It Personal: In general, people love human interaction.  We don’t want to connect with a business, we want to have relationships with others who we know, like, and trust.

5. Start Your Own Community: I like to make things easy, don’t you?  Wouldn’t it be fun if you could lead a community of the exact people you wanted to market yourself to?  That would be pretty sweet, huh?

That’s what I did a while back when I wanted to market myself and my sports business blog.  To achieve accelerated marketing success I started the “Sports Industry Network” group on LinkedIn.  When people join the group they see my name as the creator of the group, and my website as the primary website.

6.  Create A Call To Action: People need to be lead in the right direction.  You can’t just expect people to come to your LinkedIn profile, learn about some of things you do and how you help people without telling them what to do next.  If you don’t create a call to action, then you are guaranteed to get less than what you desire.

7. Use Advanced Applications: The advanced applications are designed to help you market yourself better.  You an author?  If so, there is an Amazon app that you can put on your profile and showcase a picture of your own book.  When people click on the book, it’s takes them to Amazon where they can buy it.

Take advantage of these tips.  If time for social media is hard to come by and you have to pick one platform, LinkedIn is your best bet for time management and new business effectiveness.