There are plenty of compelling sales and marketing benefits of LinkedIn, especially for B2B organizations. But most of the networking and marketing on this social media site for professionals takes place on the personal level—not via your company or organization’s business page. While you definitely want a business page to establish a presence for your brand, it has limited functionality. The site is first and foremost about people. Which means you market yourself on LinkedIn as much as (if not more than) you market your brand.
If you’re new to the site, or maybe just taking it seriously for the first time since signing up—or if you’ve been using it but haven’t seen much success at generating new leads and sales—we have some tips to help you effectively market yourself on LinkedIn. And even if you’ve been successfully using the site, it never hurts to brush up on best practices.
How to Market Yourself on LinkedIn
- Use a high-quality, professional profile picture of yourself
- Add a high-quality, relevant, tasteful background image to your profile page that’s 1,584 x 396 pixels
- Customize your profile page URL so it ends with something simple and logical, like your name
- Include keywords throughout your profile that people would use when looking for what you provide; remember to optimize your company page for search in the same way
- Share well-written, valuable original and curated content that’s of genuine interest to your target audience; remember to make company status updates from your business page, too
- Use the @ symbol before a person or company’s name to tag them in your updates and they’ll be alerted about the mention; only do this when there’s a legitimate reason for it, though
- Leave thoughtful, relevant, non-self-promotional comments on other people’s posts
- Emphasize the problems you solve and the benefits you offer over the features of your products or services and the details of the work you do
- Fill out your skills, but don’t get carried away; ask people you know to endorse you, and endorse others you know for a few of their skills, which may prompt them to return the favor
- Let others see who you are when you look at their profiles by adjusting your privacy settings under “Profile viewing options”
- Pay attention to the “Who’s viewed your profile” feature and reach out to people who’ve looked at your page
- Focus on developing relationships over connecting with as many people as possible
- But don’t be afraid to connect with people you don’t know yet; it’s a necessary part of expanding your network
- Join relevant LinkedIn groups and start one of your own; be interesting, helpful, and genuine, rather than self-promotional
- Once you’re a member of a group for 30 days, you can send messages to other group members even if they aren’t first-degree connections
- You can email all members of your own LinkedIn group up to once per week; make sure your emails are valuable to the recipients, and don’t abuse the privilege
- Encourage people to connect with you on LinkedIn with a brief invitation and a direct link in your email signature, on other social media profiles, and on your website bio
- Take advantage of LinkedIn ads and paid sponsorship of updates, which offer lots of useful targeting options
- Also avail yourself of the ability to show customer recommendations on the site; you can even pay to display them more prominently
- Fill out the jobs section of your company page thoughtfully to attract new talent
