Lesson 5
Social Media Marketing on LinkedIn
Find out if it’s appropriate for all types of businesses to be on LinkedIn.
See how you can add other things, including your blog posts and books you’ve written, to your profile.
Get a green star and gain expert status!
LinkedIn is a social platform for professionals, enabling you to focus conversations around your industry or niche.
Interact with other LinkedIn members via posting, messaging, and connection requests to build your professional network.
Add applications that let you show off your knowledge and experience and increase your social authority.
Find new customers by asking and answering questions, participating in LinkedIn groups, creating an event, advertising, and more.
1. Isn’t LinkedIn just for corporate business networking?
Not anymore!
2. I hear that the LinkedIn groups are just spammers. Is this true?
Learn how to vet a group before joining!
3. Searching for people on LinkedIn feels like lurking.
Only if you do it incorrectly.
4. Do my advertising dollars make sense here?
Depends on who you’re targeting.
LinkedIn, contrary to popular belief, isn’t just for job seeking. It’s developing into a robust social media platform with a firm footing in the workplace. Connection is the key word in LinkedIn, and it isn’t about just connecting with people you know in your own industry, but with expanding those connections using some of LinkedIn’s best tools, like Introductions, Answers, and Groups.
Right up front I will say that there’s no way to completely explain all the wonderful social and marketing aspects to LinkedIn in the few pages I have here. There’s a great For Dummies book you can explore: LinkedIn For Dummies, 2nd Edition, by Joel Elad.
In this lesson, I hit the highlights and focus on the social media marketing connection. Here, you’ll find out how to maneuver around the LinkedIn structure (it’s a bit different from navigating Facebook and Twitter). You’ll also learn how to post correctly, answer and ask questions that will increase your social authority, and join a group. Then I teach you how to create an event, and I give you some ideas on how to market it. You’ll also get a short lesson on using advanced search tools and finally dip into the world of advertising on this platform.
Filling In Your Profile
The first thing you’ll want to do after you’ve signed up for LinkedIn is fill in your profile. To fill it in, follow these steps:
1. Click the Profile tab at the top-left side of the page.
2. Select Edit Profile from the drop-down menu.
3. When your blank profile screen appears, fill in all the information and click the Save button.
Set aside a good amount of time to fill in this interface (shown in Figure 5-1) as fully as possible. You’ll notice as you fill things in your percentage of completeness (right side of page) will change. Try to get to 100%. To get there, you’ll need to add a position, your education, a picture, a summary (this is your long bio), and your specialties, and ask for (and get) a recommendation or two.
Figure 5-1
If you ever need to update your profile, click the Profile tab. When you click it, an interface opens where you can edit your profile and see how it looks to someone viewing your profile.
You can drag and drop sections on this dashboard to alter your profile’s layout. I suggest you drag your Summary section to the top position under the main profile box, and then drag the Recommendation section under that. By doing this, you make these two sections the first things visitors read as they scan your profile.
From this dashboard, you can edit everything and tell how far along you are in completing your profile. In Edit mode, look at the progress bar that shows your percentage of profile completeness in the top-right corner of your profile (see Figure 5-2).
Figure 5-2
There are four very important tasks you’ll need to attend to right away: adding the profile picture, your website address, your Twitter account, and your public profile URL. Don’t forget to click the Save button when you’re done.
Adding a profile picture
To add a profile picture, do the following:
1. From the Edit Profile tab, click the Add Photo link.
2. Click the Choose File button and find the image on your computer, and then click the Upload Photo button.
You now see your photo for your profile.
3. Select your photo visibility.
You have three choices: My Connections, My Network, and Everyone. You’re here to network, so choose Everyone.
Adding URLs
On the Edit Profile tab, click the Add a Website link. On the Additional Information page, add your URLs. Click Save Changes when you’re done.
Always choose Other as the type of link, as shown in Figure 5-3. That way, you can name your link. Instead of letting LinkedIn name your link “Website” or “Blog,” you can use the actual name of your website, such as Be Socially Congruent. Note: You get only 30 characters for this field.
Figure 5-3
Adding a Twitter account
From the Edit Profile tab, click the Add Twitter Account link. A new dialog box opens to connect your Twitter account to LinkedIn. Type your Twitter account username and password and click the Allow button. Now you can send your LinkedIn posts to your Twitter account with the click of a button.
Changing your public profile URL
When you create a new LinkedIn account, they give you one of those ugly URLs with a bunch of numbers in it. The nice bit (unlike Facebook) is they let you change it right away!
From the Edit Profile tab, follow these steps:
1. Click the Publish link in the Public Profile URL section.
2. On the new page, click the Customize Your Public Profile URL link.
You will see a field to fill in. The first part is the same for everyone:
www.linkedin.com/in
3. Complete the URL.
Use your real name (no spaces, symbols, or special characters) like this:
www.linkedin.com/in/phylliskhare
Even if you’re branding your business in your other social accounts, use your real name here.
4. Click the Set Custom URL button (see Figure 5-4) and then save this URL for use in your other accounts.
Figure 5-4
Exploring the Home Tab
When you log in to LinkedIn, you’re on the Home tab (a screen like the one shown in Figure 5-5).
Figure 5-5
Going down the left side from top to very bottom, you’ll see the following areas:
A space for creating a status update: This area looks a lot like the status update field on Facebook. You can write as many as 507 characters in this space and add links and photos. You can also post to Twitter and change who can see it (everyone or just your connections).
LinkedIn Today: This is LinkedIn’s attempt to create a real-time news magazine of sorts. If you click any of the stories or the right double arrows, you go to the LinkedIn Today interface, where you can read stories and post them in your LinkedIn status updates.
One unique aspect of this interface is that, if you click the hyperlinked number of shares, a box appears that shows you all the other people on LinkedIn who shared that post. You can find all sorts of good connections here. After all, birds of a feather flock together. If you don’t want to see this interface on your Home tab, remove it by clicking the x in the top-right corner of its section.
A space for seeing all the posts from your connections: Figure 5-5 shows All Updates, but you can filter them by Shares, Groups, and other criteria listed on the More drop-down menu.
Click More and you access 10 filters. For example, you can click More and choose Photos and see all your connections that have changed their photos.
A space with links called Just Joined LinkedIn: In this area below the updates from your connections, you find people who just joined LinkedIn and put the same company or school in their bio as you.
You can click the Home tab at the top of the page and choose Advertise on LinkedIn from the drop-down menu. You can read about creating an ad for LinkedIn in the later “Advertising on LinkedIn” section.
Starting at the top on the right side of the Home page and going down, you see these areas:
A People You May Know block: Here, LinkedIn suggests people you might want to connect with based on similar jobs, connections, groups, and location. If you click the See More link, you can refine these suggestions by your current company, past company, and school — make your selections in the Filter By area on the left side of the page. Clicking the Connect link next to a person’s name takes you to an interface that sends the person an invitation to connect with you.
Spend some time with the People You May Know section. Every time you open LinkedIn, add connections, but keep in mind that there’s a strategy to adding connections, too. Add people who can recommend you and make introductions in different fields and, of course, add potential clients and customers.
An ad block: This space is reserved for large corporations. When you create an ad yourself, it won’t show up in this space, but more on that a little later in the “Advertising on LinkedIn” section.
A Who’s Viewed Your Profile? section: If you click through, you’ll see a list of people who have viewed your profile. (To see the full list, you need to upgrade your account. At this moment, I don’t recommend upgrading. After you’ve fully explored LinkedIn and learned how to do everything as a regular user, then you can see if the features for the upgrade would actually help your business in particular.)
A Your LinkedIn Network section: If you understand network marketing, you understand how LinkedIn is organizing this. If you have 231 people directly connected to you and you count how many people are connected to each one of those people, you can get a number in the millions. You can find and add people through this interface also by clicking the Add Connections button.
A Jobs You May Be Interested In section: This is a gold mine of opportunities for you based on the job descriptions you put in your bio. If this book were focused on getting a job, this area alone would constitute a whole lesson!
The Events box: This is a great source to see what events your connections are attending. As you create events, they show up in this section. I devote a whole section, entitled “Creating and Marketing Events,” on creating events!
You may not have anything listed next on your right column. As you add applications, they will show up here.
Finding Your Way Around LinkedIn
At first glance, LinkedIn can be a bit confusing. Thinking of it as a more professional type of Facebook will help. In fact, LinkedIn recently made some changes to its design that mimic the Facebook environment. There’s a distinct place to create a status update, just like on Facebook, and you see a stream of posts made by people you’re connected to, just like Facebook.
LinkedIn is a social media platform, but it’s not as social as Facebook, even though a particular discussion can go on for months (even years) inside a group. Instead of using the site for casual conversations and sharing, LinkedIn is where you can focus your conversation around your industry or niche. You’ll find all sorts of wonderful people, all over the world, who can expand your marketing efforts.
Viewing your contacts
Clicking the Contacts tab at the top of the Home tab allows you to sort those already connected to you, add more people, invite more people, import more names from your e-mail lists, remove connections, and in general manage everything about your connections. The nice bit about this tab is you can see all your connections alphabetically or sorted in some fashion. When you click a name, that connection’s info appears in the right column, as shown in Figure 5-6. Click the Edit Details link to add notes about this person. What a great way to have a simple customer relationship management (CRM) system right on LinkedIn!
Figure 5-6
Notice that when you click the Network Statistics tab in Contacts, you might see a few ads on the right side of the page. Keep this in mind as you go through the section on advertising, as this is one of the places your ads might show up on other people’s accounts.
Jumping to your groups
The Groups tab puts you on a dashboard for LinkedIn Groups. I have a whole section on Groups later in the chapter, but this is a nice dashboard to explore right now. Notice there are five subtabs:
Groups You’ve Joined
Following (These are individual posts you’re following, so you see any new additions to that conversation stream.)
Groups You May Like
Groups Directory
Create a Group
I tell you more about groups later in the “Joining Groups to Find New Customers” section, but for now click the Groups You May Like tab and see if there are a few you wish to join. First click the name of a group — not the Join Now link — and scan through the posts and read through the discussions. See if it is a match for you before you ask to join. If you like what you read, click the Join Group button (see Figure 5-7).
Figure 5-7
Seeing your jobs
The Jobs dashboard helps you find people for jobs you list, and/or find a new job for you. The marketing connection for this dashboard is just in its ability to find people and companies with your keywords.
At the top of the Jobs page, type one of your main keywords in the Search for Jobs text box and click the Search button. For example, I searched social because that’s my field of interest. When I clicked the Search button, over 4,000 jobs are listed (as shown in Figure 5-8) that have the word social in them. I can then filter the search on the left side by time, location, company, and many other attributes. In this way, I can find certain companies in a particular field or location that I might want to connect to and develop a relationship with. You can also click the Save Job link to the right of the listing (you have to hover your cursor over the listing to see the link). Clicking that link puts it on the Saved Jobs tab so you can access it later.
Figure 5-8
Social media marketing is all about the conversation, so you need to find people and companies to talk to! This is one way to do that.
Understanding your Inbox
The Inbox tab has two subtabs: Messages and Invitations. Messages are actual messages people have sent to you directly, just like in e-mail. Invitations contains a list of people who have asked to be connected to you, people LinkedIn suggests to you, and another space to upload your e-mail contacts to see who you already know on LinkedIn to connect to.
The Inbox tab is important as you develop and expand your connections. Click it regularly and explore new people. Keep your marketing goals in mind and connect with people who will be a help to you in your marketing efforts, remembering that this is a social network, too!
Exploring the Companies tab
When you open your account and put your company information in your Summary section, past and present, it links that information to the Company Pages on LinkedIn.
If you’d like to add your company, click the Add a Company link on the right side of this dashboard. You need to type the company name and your e-mail address at the company, and verify that you are the official representative. Note that your e-mail address needs to be the domain name of your company; for example, The Social Cafe e-mail address needs to be phyllis@thesocial cafe.com. After you add your company, it shows up in searches.
Working with your company profile is an advanced marketing subject, but feel free to explore LinkedIn’s own Help section on this topic.
Looking at the News and More tabs
The News tab takes you to LinkedIn’s online news magazine section (shown on the left in Figure 5-9). Here you find all sorts of interesting news to read, share, and save. You can click the Save link next to any article and then go back later and click the Saved Articles tab under News to view them all. Consider this a daily newspaper for all the interesting things that have been posted on LinkedIn. You can see who in your network is connected to certain events and the thumbnail faces of other people who have shared or posted events and news articles. In a way, it also has a bit of Twitter in it, as it shows the number of shares each article has, and is easily shared again. Several tabs in the top navigation bar further refine what you see.
You can also find LinkedIn Answers from this tab as well as the Learning Center to expand your knowledge of LinkedIn.
Use both the News and More interfaces (see the More drop-down menu on the right in Figure 5-9) to find interesting people who are actively using LinkedIn, connect with them, and reinforce your social authority by posting and sharing relevant things. You can follow companies that post, including Mashable, directly too. This interface turns LinkedIn into a vibrant social platform akin to Twitter Lists and Facebook Pages.
Figure 5-9
Posting, Messaging, and Making Connection Requests
This area of communicating in LinkedIn is the area where you’ll spend the most time. Using LinkedIn as a social platform means you need to be social! You’ll be manually posting and commenting on other posts and sending private messages to people who might be potentially strategic connections. It’s time well spent. But you need to know how to proceed, and you need to follow the etiquette — all of which I explain in the following sections.
Requesting connections
To send a connection request, find someone you want to connect with in the People You May Know section and click the Connect link. You see the screen shown in Figure 5-10, where you need to choose how you know this person:
Colleague: This is a person you work with now or have worked with in the past. If you choose this radio button, a new drop-down list appears with all the companies you have listed in your Work History Summary. Choose the one that fits, type a personal note, and click the Send Invitation button.
Figure 5-10
Classmate: This is someone you went to school with. If you choose this radio button, a different drop-down appears with the names of the schools you listed in your School History on your profile. Choose the one that fits, type a personal note, and click the Send Invitation button.
We’ve Done Business Together: This is a person you work with, but not necessarily at the same company. You see basically the same options here that you see if you click the Colleague radio button. Choose the scenario that fits, type a personal note, and click the Send Invitation button.
Friend: This is someone you have a personal, rather than a business relationship, with. If you choose this radio button, you can just type in your personal note and click the Send Invitation button.
Other: These people don’t quite fit in the other categories. If you choose this radio button, you have to type the person’s e-mail address, which has to be the e-mail address he used to set up his account on LinkedIn.
I Don’t Know This Person: LinkedIn will not send the invitation if you select this radio button, and you’ll see the warning shown in Figure 5-11.
Figure 5-11
The etiquette of requesting a connection is most important. How you request is a very important marketing skill. The default for a requesting notice just says, “I’d like to add you to my professional network.” Always, always, replace that text with a personal note. Remind people how you know them; mention personal things that will jog their memory of you. Make it real and authentic. My biggest pet peeve is getting a request from someone who just says, “I saw you on the Social Group Page. Let’s connect.” That does nothing for me. Take a moment to dig a little deeper and type why it would be a good connection.
Once you’ve sent an invitation to someone to connect and he accepts it, you’ll get an e-mail from LinkedIn with the subject line, “Learn about Brian, your new connection.” Take a moment to look at this e-mail (see Figure 5-12), as it lets you do a couple of important things: Click directly to connect to one of his connections and click to follow some of the companies in his network.
Figure 5-12
Posting on LinkedIn
Posting on LinkedIn is the same thing as posting on Facebook, except that the message goes out to your LinkedIn connections. (You can set it up so that anything you post in LinkedIn is also automatically posted to your Twitter account. More on that in a minute.)
There are a couple of different types of posts:
Update on your Home page: Here, you can type an update, add a URL, change who can see the update (as shown in Figure 5-13), and connect the update to Twitter to auto-post there as well. When you post something here, it’s shown in your activity stream on your profile for anyone to see (unless you change the visibility setting on the post; notice the drop-down list in Figure 5-13). The post might also appear in an e-mail update that LinkedIn sends to people.
Figure 5-13
Discussion post on a group page: You’ll see a similar interface on a group page, except this kind of post shows up in the activity streams of the group only. You have 200 characters to use in the main post and another 200 in an extra posting space, and you can attach a link to an article or blog post outside LinkedIn.
A post isn’t the place to put a direct marketing pitch. Keep your posts about sharing content or experiences. If you want to include a marketing pitch, use a promotion.
Sending messages
Posting on your Home page is a public communication, whereas messages are private communications between two people on LinkedIn. You can message anyone who is one of your 1st-level connections by just hovering over her name and clicking the Send Message link. Clicking that link brings you to a Compose Message page, where her name is automatically listed in the To field. You can complete the message and click the Send Message button.
To send a message to someone who you aren’t currently connected to, you have three options: You can try to add the person to your network, you can get introduced through a connection, or you can send InMail (through LinkedIn’s premium messaging service). All three of those links are on your profile page in the top-right corner (see Figure 5-14).
Figure 5-14
Getting introduced
Remember those two levels of connection, with the 1st-level connections being those you’re directly connected to and 2nd-level connections being connected to the people you’re connected to? Maybe someone in your 2nd level could be a key player for a new promotion or marketing strategy you’ve developed. You can ask for an introduction to that person through your common connection on your 1st level.
You know the name of the person you want to connect to
If you know the name of the person you want to connect to, follow these steps:
1. Type that person’s name in the Search bar at the top of your LinkedIn page.
2. Scroll through the search results, and then hover your mouse over the listing and click the Get Introduced link shown in Figure 5-15.
Figure 5-15
3. Select a first-degree person from the list of connections available to introduce you to that person. Click the Continue button.
4. In the Request a Connection page that appears, select an interest that you have in common from the Category drop-down list.
If you don’t want to share your contact information at this time, deselect this box.
5. In the Your Message area, type a message to the person you’re requesting to be introduced to, as I’ve done in Figure 5-16.
6. Type a brief note to the person who will forward the introduction.
7. Click the Send button.
Now it’s up to your 1st-level connection to forward the invitation to the requested person.
Figure 5-16
If you don’t know the name
If you’re searching for people who might be able to help but don’t know their names, follow these steps:
1. Click the Advanced Search link next to the Search bar.
An expanded search interface opens. You have fields for keywords, location, industries, and more.
2. Type the keyword that defines what you need.
3. Select 2nd Connections.
4. Click Search.
You get only five of these introductions at a time, and your 1st-level connection will need to forward the request to the person you want to connect with — so choose wisely.
Asking and Answering Questions to Attract New Customers
LinkedIn developed a special area where you can ask and answer questions. This particular area gets a tremendous amount of activity. But let’s be very clear about this; it’s not designed to help you recruit people outright, or to advertise something you have to sell, or to announce that you’re looking for a particular type of job.
There is a fine line sometimes, but think of Answers as a place to just help someone. By authentically helping, you’re increasing your social authority (and racking up good karma points at the same time). People on LinkedIn will report your questions if they cross that line, so use this aspect of LinkedIn only if you feel you can really help people.
Asking questions
You want to ask questions that attract people to you. Then you can connect with them and start having a conversation — all good things for attraction-based marketing.
More than likely, your question has already been asked. It’s worth your time to first check the Advanced Answers Search tab, which is shown in Figure 5-17.
Putting in your keywords and drilling down into the categories helps you find your answer quicker. You might also find some really interesting people you want to connect with.
Figure 5-17
If you don’t find the answer to your question after your search, go ahead and ask. You can ask publicly or privately.
To ask a question, follow these steps:
1. Type your question into the Ask a Question box (shown in Figure 5-18) on the Answers Home page and click the Next button.
Figure 5-18
2. Target your question.
You can decide who will see the question, add details, categorize your question, focus it to a specific geolocation, and check whether this is a promotion or recruitment.
• To ask your question privately, click the Only Share This Question with Connections I Select check box.
Doing so means your question won’t appear on LinkedIn and will be delivered as an e-mail message to the specific connections you choose.
• To send a public question, leave this check box deselected.
3. Click the Ask Question button.
If you did everything correctly, your question is now listed for all to see.
If you ask your question publicly, it appears in these places:
Answers tab: It’s available for anyone to see on the Answers Home page, and it shows up in search engine results (based on the keywords in the question). Your question is open to responses for up to seven days (or you can close the question before that). You can reopen a public question at a later date, too.
In the Activity box on your profile: Anything you do in LinkedIn shows up in your Activity feed and in the feed of your 1st-level connections. You can filter your feed and see those people who have asked questions by selecting the Answers link at the top of the Updates area, as shown in Figure 5-19.
Figure 5-19
Closing questions and ranking
When you set up your question, it’s automatically open for seven days. You can close the question before that time is up if you want, but either way, when the question has run its course, you need to close it and rank the answers. To close a question and rank the answers, follow these steps:
1. Click the My Q&A tab on the Answers home page.
2. Click the question you want to close to open the Q&A page for it.
3. Click the yellow Close Question Now button.
Next to each answer, you’ll find a check box named Good, as shown in Figure 5-20.
Figure 5-20
4. Click the Good check box for each answer you consider good.
If you select only one answer, it’s labeled Best.
The people who receive Good marks gain a point in expertise.
Answering questions
There are people who spend most of their time on LinkedIn answering questions. They dedicate up to an hour or more doing this one activity. What’s the benefit of spending so much time answering questions? Every answer you post that gets a Good rating earns you a point in expertise (denoted by a green star as shown in Figure 5-21), and gaining Expert status in a category on LinkedIn is a strategy in gaining a type of social authority, if done correctly.
Figure 5-21
When I asked a question on LinkedIn about answering questions, the answers were quite clear — don’t game the system! That means, don’t look at this as a way to continually post your particular message across categories and groups, and don’t think of this as a way to get free advertising. People will report you, and your reputation will suffer — so take the high road, people!
Here’s how to find questions and answer them:
1. To find an answer, click any of the questions in the New Questions from Your Network section or click a category on the right side to browse questions by category.
The categories include things like Management, Finance, and Marketing, among many others. Choose your area of expertise.
Alternatively, click the Advanced Answers Search tab, select the Questions Only radio button, and enter your keywords or navigate through the categories.
2. On the page with all the previous answers, click the yellow Answer button.
You’re taken to a page with all the previous answers on it.
3. Click the yellow Answer button.
4. In the interface that appears, type your answer.
As shown in Figure 5-22, you can also add URLs to support your answer or provide more information, and you can suggest an expert from your network. You can also write a private note to the person who asked the question.
5. Click the Submit button.
If your answers are qualified as good, you get expert status. You’ll find your green star denoting your expert status on your profile.
Figure 5-22
Joining Groups to Find New Customers
The second most mentioned activity to do on LinkedIn, after answering questions, in my research and experience, is to join a group. Some people find creating a new group to really help establish themselves works well, too.
I highly recommend joining a group as a social media marketing strategy. You’ll connect with like-minded people and businesses and gain social authority by being yourself and answering and responding to the conversation within the group.
There are several ways to join a group. The easiest way is to join an open group, which allows anyone on the site to see the discussions. You can also join a closed group, which restricts access to the discussions to members only. The following sections shows you how to join both types of groups. And you may, at some point, decide you want to leave a group; you can find that info in this section, too.
Joining an open group
An open group generally grants membership automatically, and all the discussions can be found in searches. You don’t have to be a member to comment, but you do have to be a member to start a conversation. You can also share posts made in an open group to Facebook and Twitter. Follow these steps to find an open group to join:
1. To find a group to join, from your Home page, click the Groups tab and then select Groups Directory.
2. Click the name of any group that interests you.
An open group doesn’t have a lock icon before the group name, but closed groups do, as shown in Figure 5-23.
3. Peruse the group’s Discussions page to see whether this group interests you.
Figure 5-23
4. Click the Join Group button if you’d like to join the group.
A disclosure dialog box opens (see Figure 5-24).
5. Click the Continue button.
6. Click the link in the e-mail confirmation and you go to a welcome page.
Now you can post or comment, like a post, and follow a commenter.
Figure 5-24
Joining a closed group
Closed groups are usually very specific in their focus, with a small number of members. It’s really a closed environment. You can’t share things posted there, and you can be kicked out! If you find a really great closed group to join, you’ll need to be very clear in the group’s own rules of conduct. You might find a closed group to be an excellent place to network with like-minded professionals.
To find closed groups, enter the keyword closed in the search column on the Groups Directory page and click Search. You’ll see all the closed groups (notice the small closed lock icon in front of the group name).
You join a closed group the same as you join an open group (see the preceding section), except now your application is reviewed by the group’s owner. If you’re accepted, you’ll get an e-mail saying so.
Leaving a group or changing the notification settings
If a group you’ve joined isn’t helping, you can always leave the group. Or if you’re tired of seeing the updates from the group, you can just change your notification settings so that you see the updates only when you visit the group page on LinkedIn.
To leave a group, follow these steps:
1. To get to your settings page, choose Your Groups from the Groups drop-down menu.
2. On the group page, click the More tab and choose Your Settings.
3. On the Settings page, shown in Figure 5-25, click the Leave Group button to leave your group.
You see a check mark and text confirmation of the action at the top of the page. No e-mail or public notification will happen.
To change how you’re notified about group updates, look at your options in the Contact Settings area. You can update your e-mail address to be notified of any updates. You can also get an e-mail when a discussion is started, a digest of activity, announcements, and messages from members. Don’t forget to click the Save Changes button when you’re done.
Figure 5-25
Using the Search Tools to Find New Clients or Customers
The Advanced Search interface is great for finding new people to connect with. You can target the search by
The area you live in.
A city or country you plan to visit for business.
Or a particular company plus a keyword.
To perform an advanced search, follow these steps:
1. Click the Advanced link in the top-right corner of your LinkedIn Home page.
2. Enter all your search criteria and click the Search button.
Be sure to fill in your important keywords. For example, because I’m looking for people who might be good candidates for advertisers for iPhone Life magazine, I’ve chosen these keywords: iPhone, iPad, and apps (as shown in Figure 5-26). I’m keeping everything else wide open because I need advertisers from all over the country, but you could specify a postal code if you wanted to find local connections in your search.
Figure 5-26
3. (Optional) If your search results in an overwhelming number of people, you can click the Sort By drop-down menu to sort them by relevance, relationship, relationship plus recommendations, connections, and keywords.
4. Click the Save link to save your search.
You can then find all your saved searches — you get three — on the Saved Searches tab.
Creating and Marketing Events
Creating an event on LinkedIn is basically creating an announcement of an event you hold as a webinar, a teleconference, or even a live, in-person workshop or conference. If your business lends itself to events, this is a great way to advertise them for free!
To create an event, follow these steps:
1. Click the More tab on the Home page and then choose Events from the drop-down menu.
2. At the top of this page, click the Add an Event tab.
The Add an Event page appears (see Figure 5-27).
Figure 5-27
3. On the Add an Event page, fill in your event’s details:
Open the Add More Details section by clicking the plus link. There are three main areas to fill in:
• Event Details: Type the title, date and time, whether this is a virtual event, any associated website address, and a 300 character description.
• Event Categorization: Take the time to include lots of keywords that you think people will use search within LinkedIn for your event.
• Event Organization: Select the I’m Attending radio button and then also for being the Presenter, any costs and where to purchase tickets, recurring info and who can edit the event.
4. Click the Preview Event button to see what your event will look like.
Figure 5-28 shows how an event looks on your profile.
Figure 5-28
5. When you’re ready, click the Confirm & Publish button.
As soon as you publish your event, a notice goes out to your network, and it shows up in your connections’ Activity feeds. From here, you can do many things to market your event. Here are a few ideas:
Add the event to your business e-mails as a postscript.
Create a blog post about the event.
Invite people directly on Twitter and Facebook.
Call or e-mail your key players or best friends and ask them to promote it to their lists.
Put the event invitation in your regular e-mail newsletters.
Get interviewed on Internet radio stations and talk about the event.
Send the recording of the radio interviews to mainstream media contacts.
Create a social press release (review Lesson 2).
Advertising on LinkedIn
If you’re sure your main demographic is on LinkedIn, think about spending your advertising dollars right here. But I have to say, if your demographic is equally on Facebook, the studies have shown better results with your money on Facebook.
You’ll find ads in these two places on LinkedIn:
On your profile page, at the top between your profile and the top navigation links.
On the Jobs home page.
When you create an ad, you complete these four general steps:
1. You create your ad campaign.
2. You target who you want to see your ad.
3. You set your campaign budget.
4. You give your payment information.
These steps take you through the whole process:
1. Click the Advertising link at the bottom of any LinkedIn page.
2. Click the yellow Start Now button and, if necessary, enter your password to enter the Advertising section.
3. In the Create Your Ad Campaign box, enter the name of your ad campaign.
This name is just for you to organize your ads under. This text doesn’t show up on the ad itself. See Figure 5-29.
Figure 5-29
4. Decide whether your ad will go to a URL or a page on LinkedIn itself.
• Your Web Page: You can create an ad that goes to your website, your Facebook business Page, your e-commerce site, or any other appropriate web address. After you select the radio button, just click the field and add your URL.
• A Page on LinkedIn: After you select this radio button, you can click the drop-down arrow and select any page you’re connected to, such as your company page, profile, or a group.
5. Add an image by clicking the Add Image link.
Always add an image to an ad. Consider adding a simple image like a face (as shown in Figure 5-30) or logo instead of something complicated like lots of text.
Figure 5-30
6. Type a headline in the Headline Goes Here box.
Pull out all your copywriting skills. Create something that grabs the attention.
7. Underneath your headline, enter a description.
You get only two lines containing no more than 75 characters. The character count below the text field shows you how many characters you have left and when you’re over that count.
8. (Optional) Click the Add a Variation link.
You have the opportunity to create a variation (up to 15 variations!) that can be rotated within this campaign.
9. Click the Next Step button.
The Targeting page appears.
10. Fill in the appropriate fields (as shown in Figure 5-31) to target your ad by geography, company, job title, group gender, and age, and decide whether you want to include the LinkedIn Audience Network.
The LinkedIn Audience Network is a collection of partner websites that display targeted LinkedIn ads on their sites. You can decide if having your ad outside the LinkedIn environment is good for what you’re trying to achieve.
Figure 5-31
As you adjust the targeting, notice the Estimated Target Audience number change in the upper-right corner.
11. Click Next Step.
Now you’re on the budget interface.
12. Set your campaign budget.
• Select CPC if you want to pay every time someone clicks your ad link, and then fill in the dollar amount.
• Select CPM if you want to pay for every thousand people who have the ad show up on a page they are viewing regardless if they click the link, and then fill in the dollar amount.
13. Select the daily budget and the dates you want your campaign to run.
It’s always best to start off with a small budget and then readjust it as you see success with your ad.
14. Click Next Step.
15. Fill in your billing information and click the Buy Now button.
Now you’re on your ad campaign dashboard. This is where you can check the status of an ad, the clicks, impressions, click-through rate, average cost per click, and the total you’ve spent.
You can always access your dashboard again from your home page by clicking the Home tab and choosing Ads from the drop-down menu. Monitor your ads and adjust them as needed. I always advise to start small and find what works best for you and your particular business.
Summing Up
I’m always amazed at the networking possibilities LinkedIn offers. Not only can you can connect with people in your industry or your fields of interest with a nice conversational interface, but you can also present a solid business resume complete with recommendations on your profile. And because LinkedIn uses the tiered system (1st-level, 2nd-level, and so on), you can expand your connections through the people you already know. It mimics a real-life process of networking.
You can find a place on LinkedIn whether you sell a product or a service. You have options that range from straight up conversations to holding events. You can create a company page that contains all your products or just promote your job offerings on group pages. So many options!
In this lesson, you explored the social media marketing possibilities that this business-focused platform offers. You learned how to
Post correctly.
Answer and ask questions.
Join a group.
Create an event.
Use the search tools.
Advertise.
Know This Tech Talk
1st-level connection: Anyone you’re directly connected to on LinkedIn; you requested the connection and the recipient responded with a yes
2nd-level connection: Anyone who’s connected to the people you’re connected to. It’s a bit like a network marketing structure
follow: If you click the Follow link under someone’s name in a group, you’re now “following” anything he does, which means you’ll see his activity within this group in your Activity feed on your Home page. If someone follows you, he’s notified anytime you post or comment inside this group
Groups: The LinkedIn feature that allows people to congregate around a subject, activity, or event
InMail: LinkedIn’s premium messaging service. With it, you can reach anyone on LinkedIn, no introduction or contact info required. (Normally in LinkedIn, you need to be introduced to someone outside your 1st-level connections.)