LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network, and is known as the ‘professional social network’. The network has 150 million members worldwide, apparently adding 10 new members every 5 seconds!  It’s a great tool for lead creation, relationship building, and customer acquisition; and is a really effective marketing tool that can drive leads to B2B websites in particular.

Although the core of the site is based around personal profiles and connections, recent developments have led to the Company Page, and now companies can create a compelling profile on LinkedIn.  This is a fantastic opportunity for your company to create a branded experience, which also in turn is great for SEO.  LinkedIn is highly ranked in all top search engines, and your LinkedIn page can easily show up in the top 10 in search engine results for certain keywords. That’s free organic traffic with minimal effort!

These are the main things to include on your LinkedIn Company Page:

• Company image – you can add an image to represent your company which appears at the top of the page – alongside your logo.  The image needs to be 646 x 220 pixels.  It should reinforce your brand and can work towards brand awareness.
• Updates, posted regularly.  LinkedIn should never be used for blatant sales promotion.  Think of your audience – your contacts.  You need to post information that is useful to them, and interesting.  It’s really easy for your contacts to share information with their contacts – herein lies the real power of social media – reaching people you couldn’t using any other medium.
• Links – it’s easy to direct people to your website if you include a relevant link to each post.  Use shortened links to every blog you post, every newsletter you publish, or any interesting information you update on your website.  It’s a great way to increase your website referral traffic, and you know that the right people are visiting your site.
• Videos – use customer testimonials, case studies, how-to’s, share advice.  Videos are engaging and if kept relatively short (2-3 minutes is best) an effective tool for selling your services, subtly.

The objective with a company page is to get people to ‘follow’ your page.  Once they click follow, they will receive every update you post, and you can really start to engage with them.  The easiest way to attract followers is to ‘share’ your company page updates via your personal page.  This way all your contacts see the update from your company page, and can choose to follow the page.  Another way is to just ask people to follow the page.  You do need to give them a reason to do so, so tell them you’ll be posting regular, useful information that they will want to read.

It’s easy to measure the effectiveness of the page and your posts.  24 hours after you’ve posted an update, you will be able to see the stats for that update which give you insights into the number of people who have seen the post and any action they have taken as a result.  You can even tailor the audience of particular posts, by selecting which of your followers will be notified about your post.

If your business is B2B then using LinkedIn to promote your business really can be effective.  If used properly it can increase your visibility and brand name, and can add more credibility to your image and brand too.  Integrate it with the rest of your marketing and you’re leveraging a great social networking site.