Social Media Room – Part 9: How to Use LinkedIn to Market Your Company
Furniture World News Desk on
3/3/2014
Photo caption:LinkedIn is a site expressly designed to help market and promote your company. But it requires some time and effort to take full advantage of its features.
By Mary Lou Denny, Executive Vice President
Walt Denny Inc.
Most corporations know about LinkedIn and many even have LinkedIn profiles, but LinkedIn is an underutilized component of many companies’ marketing strategy. That’s a costly mistake, whether you’re a furniture manufacturer, importer, distributor, sales professional or a home furnishings retailer. If you aren’t using this powerful marketing tool, you’re missing a tremendous opportunity to promote your corporation to the very companies most likely to purchase your products and services.
LinkedIn is a social network specifically designed to help professionals promote themselves and their companies. Using LinkedIn, you can locate, gain introductions to and collaborate with business community members who can help you achieve the growth you seek for your company. LinkedIn also allows you to post blogs, answer questions posted by others and gain recommendations, all of which can help you cement your status as an authority in your field.
LinkedIn currently has more than 277 million members in over 200 countries and territories. Members are twice as confident in information found on LinkedIn as any other site. In a recent Hubspot study of over 5,000 B2B and B2C companies, LinkedIn was found to be
277 percent more effective at business lead generation than Facebook and Twitter.
Select Comfort provides product brand summaries as well as links to helpful installation and customer testimonial videos. Salesforce.com displays hundreds of recommendations touting its products. Ford Motor Company, Apple and
General Electric all have completed LinkedIn profiles, and they’re no slouches when it comes to ringing up success.
It’s very easy to join LinkedIn, but not quite as simple to fully leverage its marketing power. Embrace these strategies to begin marketing your company through LinkedIn:
- Create a company profile that gets noticed. Complete your company’s profile, making it easier to find by adding keywords in the summary, specialties and experience. This will give prospects good reasons to contact your company.
- Talk up your company page. When you take part in discussions via LinkedIn, direct other participants to your company profile. Post the profile’s URL on your website, business cards, blogs and anywhere else it will be seen.
- Link your blog. Use WordPress or BlogLink applications to connect your blog to your personal and company’s LinkedIn page. You can even link product demos or how-to presentations to LinkedIn pages via SlideShare. Such steps can help build your brand by delivering additional traffic to your website.
- Answer questions on LinkedIn. LinkedIn affords you the chance to respond to questions related to your industry that are posted on the site. In your answers, offer links to articles or blogs on your website, solidifying your expert reputation.
These steps are just a fraction of the ways LinkedIn can help you market your company. We strongly encourage making use of all of them. For more on using LinkedIn, contact Walt Denny Inc. 708-246-4211, email
walt@waltdenny.com or visit
www.waltdenny.com.
Since its founding in 1989, Walt Denny Inc., a full service public relations and advertising agency, has been The Home Products Agency, working with a national client base and building each organization’s positive brand awareness through bold results and individualized strategies. Client experience includes industry-leading organizations such as Whirlpool, KitchenAid, HomeCrest Cabinetry, Knauf Insulation, The Tapco Group, Johnson Hardware, Amerock, a division of Newell-Rubbermaid and Leaders Bank. Follow us on twitter @waltdennyinc, join us on LinkedIn http://bit.ly/WDILinkedIn or like us on www.facebook.com/WaltDennyInc.
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