LinkedIn is one of the greatest sources to grow your business, personal brand, and network since this professional social networking site connects over 700 million professionals all over the world. There is no better place to find new clients, partners or industry leaders than LinkedIn.
If you run a business, you can showcase your products/services, post content/updates, communicate with your target market, increase awareness for your brand, and generate leads – and all of that translates into business growth. If you want to build a personal brand, LinkedIn is also a great place to network with your peers, influencers, or mentors.
This social platform builds business relationships like no other and is a real game-changer in branding. But how do you leverage it right? Below are some functional strategies that have already proven successful for many brands.
Optimise Your LinkedIn Profile
This is one of the key strategies and the first thing you should if you want to use LinkedIn for business expansion. Use a professional profile picture and a headline that tells exactly what your business value proposition is. Your summary should be short but capture people’s attention and highlight your expertise and results. Try to use the most frequent niche-related keywords because it will improve Google searchability, too.
Grow Your Network
Next, start connecting with peers in your industry, clients, and potential partners to expand your reach. Make sure to personalise your connection requests because this is the only way to develop more meaningful connections – an empty “wants to connect” message is unprofessional and generally goes unnoticed on this site.
Also, join LinkedIn groups relevant to your industry or niche and start interacting with like-minded professionals. The best way to do this is to share useful insights and engage in as many discussions as possible. You should also regularly post content that showcases your knowledge of the industry. Besides, attending LinkedIn events and webinars where you are likely to connect with new people can increase your business expansion opportunities a thousandfold.
Start Your Own Discussions
Besides commenting on other people’s posts, you can start your own discussions. While it’s important to actively engage in threads initiated by others, asking your own questions is an even more effective strategy. Of course, the questions should be related to your industry. But it’s also important to make them thought-provoking to ensure more interaction and engagement with your network.
When someone leaves a comment on your post, make sure you reply, as this will show that every opinion counts and may potentially increase your network. Starting your own discussions not only helps increase visibility but also ensures you build a solid relationship with potential clients, partners, or industry influencers. You can also learn from others, keep yourself updated about the latest trends in your industry, and even use these discussions to get some constructive feedback on what you’re sharing.
Engage with Influencer Content
Influencer marketing on social media rules the day, and LinkedIn is no exception – even though the logic here is obviously different from entertaining sites like TikTok or Instagram. Eventually, you may want to reach out to influencers (more on that later) for collaboration, creating content together, cross-posting, etc. But if you want this partnership to work, you first need to prepare the ground for collaboration.
Start by identifying the top influencers in your industry, research their values, and decide if their audience is relevant to you. Then, start engaging with their content. Like and comment on their posts and share what you believe will add more value to your connections.
Reach Out to Influencers Personally
Once you’ve established some prior connection to the influencers in your industry, you can reach out and suggest potential ways of working together such as joint webinars, guest blog posts, or podcasts. Allowing influencers to promote your business by sharing content with their larger more engaged audience can help you gain massive visibility and credibility. By leveraging influencer connections on LinkedIn, you’ll be able to increase your business influence and exposure.
Keep in mind that your collaboration pitch should be short and to the point, informing why you admire this person’s work and how future collaboration can benefit both of you. You can send a message over LinkedIn, especially if you’re already connected, but remember that pitching collaboration ideas over social messengers is a professional faux pas. Instead, use email, which remains the top (and best) channel for business communication. Normally, influencers are interested in collaboration, so they make their contact details public on social media. But if that information is unavailable, you can use a dedicated LinkedIn email finder to get the data you need. Just make sure to be polite, properly introduce yourself, and clearly explain your reasons for reaching out.
Create Uniquely Valuable Content
Business expansion on LinkedIn is impossible without posting some valuable content to the platform. Sharing regular, relevant, and insightful content positions your business as an industry leader and helps you attract a larger target audience. Ideally, of course, you should create your own, unique content – and if you’re successful with building relationships with industry influencers, it’ll go way easier for you.
But you can always try and make it on your own, of course. First, research top topics that resonate with your LinkedIn connections – looking at the posts they like/share is usually a good start. Use a mix of articles, infographics, videos, and updates to make your feed more engaging. Share any news in your industry, expert opinion, and case studies that demonstrate your expertise and have practical value.
Obviously, you also want to join a few discussions, so make sure that each update includes a question or call to action seeking input from readers because this strategy builds engagement and a sense of community. Remember LinkedIn’s publishing platform can be very effective for long-form articles on topics you are interested in.
Explore Alternative Ways to Expand Your Network
Finally, you should always keep searching for new ways to grow your network. Actively engaging on LinkedIn is a great way to go, but there are a few lifehacks to accelerate this process. For example, built-in LinkedIn search options are more than enough to help you find new connections, but professional contact databases like SignalHire offer even more versatility. For example, you can navigate a company directory to find potential partners or research the competition. Once you have found people who can add value to your business – either as partners or potential employees – connect with those key contacts via LinkedIn. When combined with LinkedIn’s search capabilities, professional databases can help you strategically grow your network and nurture relationships that will lead to opportunities or partnerships, which usually translates into brand growth and business success.
Conclusion
Leveraging the power of LinkedIn can drastically improve your business expansion efforts. If you are active on this site, you will be able to expand your network, make quality connections, and achieve success with your business. The last tip is to stay consistent with your networking efforts – growing your business on LinkedIn is a marathon that takes time and effort, but it always pays off in the long run.
