Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business

by Ted Prodromou

  LINKEDIN CAREER PAGES

  One of LinkedIn’s premier recruiting packages is called the Career Page. Subscribing to the Silver or Gold Career Page offers many enhancements to your company page that will improve your recruiting experience and build a loyal following for your company. Your Career Page, alongside your company profile, is a powerful tool to educate and inform active and passive job candidates. As potential candidates explore your company page to learn more about your company, they will see your current job openings on the same screen. You can display customized content for each visitor, based on their LinkedIn profile data. If a software engineer visits your Career Page, specific content related to software engineers will be displayed, including open positions that he may be qualified for. This targeted content helps convince candidates that you are the right company for them.

  Upgrading to a Career Page will give you more flexibility and let you customize your company page. Some features of the Career Pages include:

  ■ Your messages dynamically adapt to the viewer based on information from her LinkedIn profile.

  ■ Targeted job postings appear for each viewer.

  ■ You can feature employees in the Employees Spotlights module so viewers can get a sense of what type of people work at your company.

  ■ You can add a custom video to your page so viewers get to know your company better.

  ■ You can display a list of benefits of working at your company.

  ■ You can link to additional information on your company website.

  ■ Viewers can contact your recruiters directly.

  ■ You can create three additional customizable modules so viewers can learn more about the culture of your company.

  You can also set up ads that run on LinkedIn to drive people to your company page to learn more about your jobs or products and services. (You can prevent ads from other companies from appearing on your company page if you choose the Gold Career Page package.)

  The LinkedIn Career Page can help you position your company as an “employer of choice” by providing insight into your company culture and your community of “followers.” Candidates are more likely to respond to your recruiting messages when they are familiar with your company and products. The Career Page enhancement also acts as a mini-web portal driving traffic to other important sites, such as your company website, blogs, and social media communities.

  WORK WITH US ADS

  This is not only one of the simplest recruiting and advertising solutions on LinkedIn but also one of the most effective. The Work With Us Ads let you display your advertising on your employees’ profile pages and your company page. In Figure 17–6 you can see a Russell Investments ad displayed on the profile page of one of their employees.

  FIGURE 17–6. Work with Us Ads

  To run Work for Us ads, go to https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/job-ads, provide your creative material, and it will automatically place your ads on all your employee profile pages and your LinkedIn Page. If you are only going to run one marketing campaign on LinkedIn, this is the one you need to do to protect your brand.

  CONCLUSION

  As you’ve seen in this chapter, LinkedIn gives recruiters a lot of tools to make finding new employees easier and more effective. No matter how big or small your organization is, LinkedIn offers a premium recruiting solution to meet your needs. Of course, you could choose to search for new employees using the free search tools, but the automated solutions will streamline your efforts so you can stay ahead of your competition.

  In the next chapter, we’ll explore LinkedIn’s solutions for sales and marketing professionals. Just as it has tools to help recruiters, the site also offers premium services designed to help sales professionals generate leads for their companies.

  For additional updates and how-to videos, visit https://tedprodromou.com/UltimateGuideUpdates/.

  Chapter 18

  LinkedIn for Sales and Marketing Professionals

  If you’re in sales, you have to be licking your chops at the prospect of LinkedIn. With more than 500 million members and a growth rate of two new members per second, it’s a golden opportunity for all sales professionals. Whether your product has a long or short sales cycle, LinkedIn provides a perfect networking platform to build lasting relationships with clients and prospects alike. Building and nurturing relationships keeps your sales pipeline full.

  We’re assuming you’re a seasoned sales professional, so we’re not going to get into Sales 101 in this chapter. If you’re just getting started in sales or are starting your own business, read everything you can about sales, social networking, and social selling to learn the fundamentals. The internet and social media allow salespeople to cast a wide net to find new prospects, if they know how to use these tools properly. The process of selling hasn’t changed, but the tools used to find prospects are evolving rapidly, allowing you to reach more prospects with less effort. If you use the internet and social media to find new leads but don’t do it strategically, you’ll attract lots of leads—but not the ones that lead to relationships and closed deals.

  You are probably already aware of the importance of building a strong professional network and contact database. In the old days, salespeople used a Rolodex as their contact “database.” I use the term loosely because the Rolodex was just a device that stored specially shaped index cards in alphabetical order. Each contact had their own index card where you wrote their contact information and scribbled reminder notes. If you lost the card, you lost your contact information. The Rolodex was bulky and sat on your desk next to your telephone, so when you traveled to visit your prospects and customers, you didn’t have access to your contact database.

  Obviously, times have changed. Today we carry our entire contact database on our phones. Our database also resides in our customer relationship management system (CRM), which is accessible from any internet connection. We can now also keep our contacts on LinkedIn, which is accessible from anywhere. The LinkedIn app lets us add new contacts and search existing ones from our smartphones. Today it’s easier than ever to build a large electronic database of prospects and customers. Your challenge is to build a targeted database—it’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing on quantity rather than quality.

  BUILDING YOUR LINKEDIN SALES NETWORK

  In Chapter 11, I went into great detail about building your network. Now is a good time to briefly review the different networking strategies so you can decide which approach is best for you as a sales professional. There is no right or wrong answer, as there are a lot of variables to consider. Let’s review a few LinkedIn networking strategies, discuss the pros and cons of each, and help you decide which one is right for you.

  We already talked about the different ways to build your professional network. The first was being an open networker where you connect with everyone who sends you an invitation. This allows you to create a very large network, so you have access to literally millions of connections in your 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-degree connections. Open networking is a great option for recruiters, real estate salespeople, and some other sales professionals because you have indirect access to so many LinkedIn members. The downside is that your network is unfocused so you have to spend more time digging through your many connections to find specific contacts or skill sets.

  Your other option is to cast a smaller net, which will bring you fewer opportunities but a more focused network. Your audience will be highly targeted, so it’s easier to connect with the right people. This requires you to carefully review every invitation to connect and vet every person who wants to join your network, meaning you may have to exclude some of your friends if they don’t match your criteria.

  How big should your network be? As you read in Chapter 11, studies conclude that it’s impossible to effectively manage a network of friends or colleagues if it gets too large. You can communicate with only 100 to 150 people on a regular basis and maintain a strong relationship. If you build a network of 2,000 member
s on LinkedIn, you will not be able to maintain a strong relationship with everyone because you just don’t have enough time.

  Does this mean you should limit your network to 150 members? Maybe. It depends on what you are selling and how many people are in your target market. If you are selling a specialty product that is only used by senior bioinformatics scientists in the United States, your target market is very small. It wouldn’t make sense to connect with 1,500 other people just for the sake of connecting. Bigger is not always better.

  The third option—and the most popular one—is to build a network somewhere in between the niche networker with 150 contacts and the open networker who has the maximum 30,000 connections. While many LinkedIn members have fewer than 500 connections, I see many with somewhere between 500 and 1,000 connections. The longer you’ve been in the workforce, the more connections you have. I have around 16,000 connections at the time of this writing, many of whom are current and former colleagues. I started aggressively building my network after I was laid off from a corporate job and restarted my own business. I’m constantly looking for quality connections to expand my LinkedIn network in order to generate more leads and, in turn, more sales.

  The Pros and Cons of Different-Sized LinkedIn Networks

  The size of your network depends on what you are selling, whom you sell to, and how much time you want to spend managing it. Being an open networker gives you a lot of opportunities to connect with others, but you will have to dedicate at least an hour or two a day to accepting invitations to connect and answering emails from your network. Open networkers tend to be aggressive networkers, so they are constantly reaching out to their network and pounding the pavement for new leads.

  If you are a recruiter who fills jobs nationally or internationally, you need to build a huge network to keep your pipeline full. As they say, it’s all about who you know, not what you know. Many positions are filled because you have a friend who has a friend who’s looking for a job. You have to be willing to dedicate up to half your day working your LinkedIn network for leads to fill open positions and for new jobs to post. But there’s nothing wrong with spending 20 to 30 hours a week networking on LinkedIn if it’s your primary source for job listings and quality candidates.

  If you are selling niche products, it probably doesn’t make sense for you to spend more than an hour or two a day on LinkedIn. You probably have a few key contacts on LinkedIn who can connect you with the right people, and you know which Groups to participate in.

  Most salespeople choose the middle-of-the-road approach. They have a professional network of 5,000 to 10,000 connections, which gives them access to millions of 2nd-and 3rd-degree connections. They also have a smaller core network, with whom they communicate on a regular basis.

  Figure 18–1 on page 201 is a table that describes some of the pros and cons of each style of LinkedIn networking. The optimal size of your network depends on many factors that only you can determine. Everyone’s situation is different, so weigh the benefits and disadvantages of each networking style and decide which is best for you.

  Of course, you can always change your mind if you choose a style that doesn’t work for you. If you start out as a niche networker, you can easily switch to build a medium-sized network or become an open networker. It’s harder to begin as an open networker and reduce the size of your network. It’s a long, tedious process to remove the connections that are not highly targeted. Some people even close their existing LinkedIn account and rebuild their network from scratch with a brand-new account.

  Take a look at Figure 18–2 on page 202, which is from my profile. My network consists of 23,401 connections, which includes 15,904 1st-degree connections and 7,497 followers. (You can follow someone on LinkedIn without being a 1st-degree connection.) Look at what happens at the 2nd and 3rd degree. The number of potential connections I have access to grows exponentially. Imagine what these numbers would look like if I were an open networker. Looking at my numbers, it’s easy to see why so many sales professionals choose that strategy.

  As new members join LinkedIn, I don’t even have to add anyone to my 1st-degree connections to expand the reach of my 2nd- and 3rd-degree networks. As more of my 2nd- and 3rd-degree connections connect with others, my network is growing exponentially without my lifting a finger. When I started writing the latest version of this book, my total network had around 4 million members. It has almost doubled in size in the two months it took me to finish, and I’ve only added around 1,000 1st-degree connections.

  LinkedIn’s growth shows no signs of slowing down, so by the time this book hits bookstores, my total network could be well over 20 million people. Why would I want to take the time to grow my 1st-degree network when my 2nd- and 3rd-degree networks are growing like crazy all by themselves? If and when I need to reach out for new connections, I can easily tap into those networks.

  SHOULD YOU GO ANONYMOUS?

  I’ve seen blog posts and articles from LinkedIn experts recommending a technique where you go stealth by creating an anonymous profile and spy on your competitors. I leave it up to you to ponder the ethical questions. The technique will let you view others’ profiles on a limited basis, monitor your competitors’ LinkedIn Page and Groups, and essentially be an anonymous LinkedIn member. You do this by creating a second LinkedIn account with a fictitious name and lock down your profile, so members will only see that Anonymous viewed their profiles. You probably won’t be able to join your competitors’ Groups because they have to approve memberships, but you can still learn a lot about them. LinkedIn changed its policy in 2013, which affects anonymous profiles. If you lock down your profile and do not share profile information with others, LinkedIn limits what you can see on others’ profiles. Something people do is use fake names, company names, profile information, and even stock photos as their profile pictures in their stealth accounts to make everything look real.

  FIGURE 18–1. Pros and Cons of LinkedIn Networking Styles

  FIGURE 18–2. My LinkedIn Network

  Again, I’ll leave it up to you if you want to use this approach—but personally it’s not for me. Oh, by the way, it’s also against LinkedIn’s terms of service, so if you get caught, you will be removed from LinkedIn.

  LEVERAGING YOUR COMPANY PAGE

  There are many reasons every B2B company should have a LinkedIn company page—increasing sales being at the top of that list. The obvious reason is that it is the largest business networking site in the world. In Chapter 7, you learned how to set up and manage your LinkedIn company page. If you haven’t done it yet, go back and set one up right now.

  Assuming you now have a company page or have the right person working on it, let’s get back to the benefits of a company page and how you can use it to increase your sales. As I mentioned in Chapter 7, your company page is accessible to others even if they aren’t a LinkedIn member. Take a look at https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft/jobs/ to see a sample company page. This page is accessible to everyone, LinkedIn member or not. Your company page also shows up in Google search results, giving your company additional exposure online.

  LinkedIn Pages allow you to share new product announcements and other news in the Recent Updates section. You can post as many updates as you want. You can also recruit the best talent by posting your open positions in the Jobs section. The best part of the company page for sales professionals is the Showcase Pages section. You can create up to ten Showcase Pages featuring your top products, which will also show up for both members and nonmembers. Your customers can write recommendations for your products, building social proof for your company that you can share with your LinkedIn network. For example, if you were selling the Microsoft Dynamics 365

  CRM software, you could post links to the product and to the recommendations as a status update on your LinkedIn profile and in your Groups. Here’s a link to the Dynamics 365

  Showcase Page so you can see what it looks like: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-dynamics?trk=
biz-brand-tree-co-name.

  LinkedIn Pages are like mini-websites for your company that you can share with your LinkedIn network. When people see your products and recommendations, they can reach out to you on LinkedIn or visit your website to learn more. Companies can now share their employees’ best LinkedIn posts on their LinkedIn page so all of their company followers will see the article or video.

  LEVERAGING A COMPANY GROUP

  LinkedIn Groups can allow you to build an online community for your company within the larger LinkedIn community. Since most of your customers and prospects are already on LinkedIn, it makes perfect sense to give them access to the Group as well. There they can ask questions, find resources, and get to know your company better. The discussions on your Group can give you insight into what your customers are struggling with and what they want more of. They’ll also tell you what they like and dislike about your products, and they’ll even help other customers by answering their questions.

  Sales professionals should always monitor their company’s online communities to keep their finger on the pulse of their customers. If customers are complaining about the performance of your product, you can reach out to them or get the right people involved to help them. Being proactive and helping dissatisfied customers is a great way to build strong relationships and show prospective customers that your company provides excellent service.