How to use LinkedIn to help grow your business

Every second, someone creates a new profile on LinkedIn.

Crucially for you – as a business or franchise owner – these people tend to:

1. Be decision-makers in their company (50% of LinkedIn members are)

2. Have average household incomes of over A$155 000

This means that figuring out how to get business from LinkedIn is a great way to grow your business.

Here is how:

Use LinkedIn rather than Facebook

For B2B purposes, LinkedIn is going to be better than Facebook for most brands.

In an ideal world, you would have both. But if you need to choose, probably go for LinkedIn. 41% of B2B marketers said it was their favourite platform.

One of the main reasons for this is LinkedIn’s lack of a filtered feed. Every follower you have has a chance to see something you post instead of being hidden behind an algorithm.

The maths is a little disheartening (you need to post approximately 20 times per month to reach two-thirds of your audience according to LinkedIn). But it is still better than Facebook’s impossible!

2) Use LinkedIn to help you fill your job slots

One of the main benefits of LinkedIn for business use is that it makes it easy to find new hires employees.

Most importantly, these are more likely to be new employees which will be a good fit for the opportunities you have available.

Social media has seen something like a 73% increase in the amount it has been used as a job search platform in recent years. This is likely to be a trend which is set to continue.

The relatively new “LinkedIn Recruiter” tool makes this even easier.

3) Use LinkedIn to boost your brand

Your audience on LinkedIn is going to be primarily professional.

This makes it the perfect place to start growing your brand – and establish yourself as a thought leader or influencer in your niche.

Some of the best ways to use LinkedIn for business brand-boosting are to:

1. Republish (not share!) your best content on LinkedIn

2. Use LinkedIn Answers to offer your expertise

3. Use LinkedIn Groups to find certain audiences

4) Use LinkedIn to boost your search visibility

Step One in how to use LinkedIn to promote your business is optimising your personal profile and company page.

You do this by:

⚫ Selecting and properly using the most suitable keywords

⚫ Making sure you complete all description fields

⚫ Link to your website and your blog

5) Use LinkedIn to grow your business passively…

If you have just started your own business or become a franchisee, you might not have a lot of time on your hands.

But with LinkedIn, you can even get benefits by not doing much at all! All you need to do is create your profile and build up your connections while keeping your information up-to-date.

In the same way that buying a franchise gives you instant access to a whole network of new business-oriented people, so does LinkedIn.

It is a whole new way to reach people you might otherwise not be able to.

6) Or use LinkedIn actively

But, of course, the more you put in, the more you are likely to get out.

As well as all of the steps listed above, you might like to look into LinkedIn advertising (it is still relatively cheap) or even a paid LinkedIn membership. Why not go for a free trial when they are up for grabs?

You will soon see why you need to use LinkedIn for business.