Jimmy Gilmore

Edi­tors Note: This is another post in my series of cheat sheets. These were ini­tially cre­ated to aid a client but I thought they would be use­ful for oth­ers and decided to share them here.

Would you believe Linkedin is one of the top traf­fic gen­er­a­tors for our agency blog and our cor­po­rate site? Why? Because we’re a busi­ness ser­vices com­pany that cre­ates, among other things, busi­ness to busi­ness mar­ket­ing. Linkedin is where our cus­tomers are so we actively tar­get the site. Many peo­ple view Linkedin as a job net­work­ing site but with the addi­tion of groups and upgrades over the past sev­eral years, its influ­ence has risen sig­nif­i­cantly. Espe­cially in the B2B relm where there are not always a lot of other oppor­tu­ni­ties to network.

1. Cre­ate a cus­tom url and use it in your email sig­na­ture. You can do this in “edit profile.”
2. Have all your employ­ees cre­ate URLs too and add them to site bios and their out­bound email.
3. Con­sis­tently update your pro­file and let col­leagues know they are expected to do so too.
4. Sta­tus updates. Do them weekly. This will ensure your sta­tus shows up in Linkedin’s weekly email.
5. Con­sider link­ing your company’s or your per­sonal Twit­ter account account to your pro­file. This can show up as your sta­tus update.
6. Update your com­pany page on Linkedin. Do it every month or so. This way, you’ll be sure not to miss any addi­tions or edits by some­one else.
7. Some Twit­ter apps allow you to update your sta­tus and read those of con­nec­tions. This makes it easy to update fre­quently and keep tabs on your network.
8. Add your com­pany blog or your own blog to your profile.
9. Join lots of groups.
10. Par­tic­i­pate by com­ment­ing on posted news items and par­tic­i­pat­ing in group discussions.
11. Start a group dis­cus­sion and reply back when some­one comments.
12. Add news arti­cles in groups and offer insight in your link description.
13. Use appli­ca­tions to raise your profile.
14. Use in-messages to con­tact prospects you feel strongly you can help.
15. Answer ques­tions in your area of exper­tise to demon­strate thought leadership.
16. Ask a ques­tion to learn about your prospects and maybe even draw one out.
17. Post your blog arti­cles in groups and ask a ques­tion to encour­age commentary.
18. If your product’s user base is large, con­sider cre­at­ing a group for it. For exam­ple a search for Java yields 1,000 groups.
19. Mul­ti­ply your efforts by hav­ing key team mem­bers par­tic­i­pate as well. Why have one per­son work­ing all day at some­thing when 10 peo­ple work­ing ten min­utes a day will reach far more peo­ple. This is the essence of social networking.
20. Use searches to learn more about your mar­ket. Won­der how many engi­neers work­ing in a par­tic­u­lar field there are on Linkedin? Type it in the search box.
21. If you’re in sales, con­sider upgrad­ing your account and to actively tar­get indi­vid­u­als. It’s a valid com­pli­ment to infor­ma­tion ser­vices like Hoovers.
22. Con­sider ban­ner adver­tis­ing on Linkedin if you favor a more pas­sive approach.
23. Use “Events” fea­ture to pro­mote your company’s events. This is more social than than using some­thing like Evite where only other invi­tees will learn about the event.

Note: Gov­ern­ment work­ers, teach­ers, aca­d­e­mics and some other fields that are not heavy users of Linkedin.

While work­ing on this post Mar­ket­ing Profs pub­lished this great arti­cle on Linkedin case stud­ies. Well worth a read.