Linkedin: Why Is It so Important?

LinkedIn is often not utilised as much by companies than other social media sites, with some businesses and professionals not even having a presence at all. LinkedIn is a professional business and employment focused platform and has around 500 million users, which makes it a great place to advertise your company. LinkedIn allows users and companies to connect with potential customers and business partners, recruit and look for jobs, as well as post content that relates to your company. LinkedIn is a very important social media website to employ and here are a few ways you can utilise it.

Publish Valuable Content

Like every other social media website, LinkedIn allows you to post various types of content, from a simple text post to video and image content as well as write your own articles. Posting this content gives your company more of a chance to be seen by more potential customers, employees, and business partners. As LinkedIn is a more professional social media platform, content posted is usually more professional and educational.

LinkedIn content has a higher-ranking potential, meaning that more often than not when someone searches your company, your LinkedIn content will appear high in the results. This means that the content you post on LinkedIn can be very valuable and could be seen by more people than your other social media sites, so tailoring this content to what your target audience will find interesting is a brilliant marketing technique.

Competitor Research

LinkedIn is also a great way to do competitor research. If you already know who your competitors are, you can easily search for the company and find out more information on them. Some companies will have information such as employee number, a description of what they do, and you can see what sort of content they post, which all reveal a lot about a company. By keeping an eye on a competitor’s employee number, you can get a gist of whether they may be hiring or firing, and you can even see any jobs that they might be advertising on there too. This can show you how the business is doing: if their employee number is rising, they must be doing well; however, vice versa, if the number is decreasing it could show that it is a good time to increase your marketing and try to push to take over them and improve your business. You can also look at the competitor’s employees and what sort of roles and skills they have to get an idea of what services they could be offering that you may need to employ to keep up with them. If you don’t know your competitors already or want to find more, you can use the advanced search to find companies in your location that are in the same industry. Finding companies that are perhaps in the same industry however aren’t classed as competition, as they are in a different country or area, can be a great opportunity to get in touch with them to offer each other advice and to swap ideas, helping improve both your companies.

Connect With People to Work With or Customers

LinkedIn is a great website to find potential clients and business partners, as every user states where they work and what position they hold in that company. This makes it easy to target particular people, especially as they offer an advanced search where you can narrow it down to factors such as industry, location, or particular job titles. Once you have found the people you would like to get in touch with, you can connect with this person and send a message. This is great for businesses as it means you don’t have to spend hours trying and failing to find particular contacts emails; instead you can find it all in one place on LinkedIn. As well as making it easier for you to get in touch with individuals, LinkedIn gets a much higher response rate than sending emails out as it is more personal and easier to see. When you receive a message on LinkedIn, you get a notification in your account alerting you to it and now as many people have the app for LinkedIn, they will get the notification come up on their phone, and so are more likely to respond quickly. This means you are far more likely to create more leads and generate more business.

Recruitment

LinkedIn is also a great way to recruit new employees by posting your new job vacancies and making it easy for people to apply, and by allowing them to upload their CVs to their profiles. This helps cut out any middle men and the additional costs that come with using a recruitment company or website. It allows you to easily see someone’s CV and job history, as well as any references, skills, and endorsements that have been posted on there by previous employers or colleagues to help you make an informed decision on who to give the job role to.