Utilizing LinkedIn as a Business

What is LinkedIn? According to the LinkedIn Learning Center, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 70 million members and growing rapidly. LinkedIn connects you to your trusted contacts and helps you exchange knowledge, ideas, and opportunities with a broader network of professionals.

When you first log into and sign up for LinkedIn, you are creating a professional profile of yourself including past employment, education and any specialities or honors. Some say its like an online resume where you can connect with past, present and future coworkers, classmates and friends. How can you personally tie LinkedIn to your overall social strategy as a business?

First, locate your company page and edit any websites, blogs, and information included in the overview. The company profile includes a company overview and people that work or have worked at the company (depending on the LinkedIn users profiles). It also has an area for Related Companies which shows what other companies your company is most related to and trends in user work history. They assign this by company’s current employees and where they worked prior to their current company, and past employees worked after they left. New Hires and Promotional or Changes in Positions are also highlighted.

LinkedIn now allows users to “follow companies” to keep updated on a specific company’s changes and updates. This may be a useful tool for job searchers to see if someone leaves the company, and to keep your eye open for a job opportunity.

One of the many opportunities for businesses is to incorporate a LinkedIn widget onto their bios within their website. When someone wants to find out about the CEO or Vice President, they can hover over the icon and read a professional background of the specific person. A few web conferencing tools have already leveraged integration with LinkedIn so as you click on a person in the web conference and their LinkedIn profile will appear. This makes it easier to acquaint you with everyone in minutes, save time on long introductions and get right to work.

As a company, it’s important to keep your overview information updated as future employees, clients and current/past employees could be following your business. Try to encourage your current employees to update their LinkedIn profiles with the company website or link to a bio page within the company site. This will allow another inbound link driving traffic to the website.