We often think of LinkedIn as a professional social network for individuals, but did you know LinkedIn could also help build your business? At BusinessNext 2013 (presented by NMX), speaker Stephanie Sammons, CEO of Wired Advisor, presented “7 Powerful LinkedIn Marketing Strategies for Building Your Business” – and today, I wanted to talk about one of the most important aspects she covered: profile creation for your employees.
“Everyone in the company needs to understand how to set up a good profile.”
The more your employees are visible on LinkedIn, the more your business will be visible on LinkedIn. Visibility leads to brand recognition, talent acquisition, and more, so it’s definitely good for every company to have a presence on LinkedIn. Consider spending a day training your employees on this platform, or at least covering the basics of creating a good profile. According to Stephanie, here’s what your employees need to keep in mind when creating a profile.
- Professional and Accurate Information
One of the biggest mistakes people make with LinkedIn is not keeping the information up-to-date. An employee who is now a manager or even higher in your company might still have their previous job listed. Worse, employees might choose to have unprofessional information listed on their LinkedIn profile, which could reflect poorly on your company as a whole. Go over what is appropriate with your employees and encourage them to update often.
- Frequent and Consistent Status Updates
Most people who use LinkedIn do not use the status update capability or they have it linked to Twitter, where updates are commonly pretty casual. Instead, encourage your employees to update LinkedIn during the day, posting professional (and non-confidential) information about the daily happenings at the office.
- Network Growth
Make sure your employees are linked with one another and encourage them to allow connections with other people they know. More 1st level connections lead to more 2nd level connections, which lead to more 3rd level connections…and these are all people who are, in some way, connected to your company. If your employees grow their connections, your visibility on this platform grows as well.
This just scratches the surface of Stephanie’s BusinessNext session at NMX 2013. Want the whole thing? Check out our 2013 Virtual Ticket, available exclusively at NMX University for access to her session as well as hundreds of other session recordings from our event.
