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6 Ways Businesses Must Leverage LinkedIn | ymarketing

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LinkedIn has quietly posted some very impressive numbers once again.

Sure, Twitter gets all the media attention, but it's warranted given its explosive 802% year-over-year growth. But LinkedIn's 89% YOY numbers look remarkable when compared to anything but Twitter or Facebook. But look deeper at the numbers and you'll find that LinkedIn actually grew 6Xs faster than Twitter in August, and 4.5Xs faster in July, according to compete.com

Consider LinkedIn's vitals (as of August 2009):

• 27 million total users
• 14.2 million users in August 2009
• Representing all 500 of the Fortune 500 (how many companies can say that?)
• Average stay: Over 7.3 minutes per visit
• Visits per person, per month: Over 3.7
• Pages per visit: Over 13

• Rank: #67 among all websites (ahead of USA Today, Southwest Airlines, HP, Wells Fargo, TicketMaster, Priceline and MLB.com mid-summer)

But this isn't meant to be one more blog raving about LinkedIn's interconnected networking prowess. What we're looking at is LinkedIn's power to elevate your business for free; specifically to lend search equity from LinkedIn's mighty vault into your company website's SEO account.

Here are six (6) ideas you can implement to improve your website's search equity leveraging LinkedIn:

1. Company Page

Within LinkedIn your company page serves as a "cliff notes" version of your website and as a valuable "peek inside your company" as it will contain links to the individual LinkedIn profiles of each of your team members who has associated their individual profile with the company's. This serves you well as long as the page is kept up-to-date and as long as individual members keep their profiles in good shape. We recommend businesses ask all key employees to setup profiles, keep them up to date, and associate them with company page.

2. Anchor Text

Nearly every LinkedIn user knows they can include their company website (example shown), but the common setting does not give your company's site as much value as it can. By selecting "Other" instead of "My Company" you can use descriptive text, keywords that describe your business. After all, you don't want your website to be found for the term "My Company", do you?

The way to really leverage this idea is to get everyone in your company using the same keywords, the same descriptive text. This works because of the inherent Search Equity that LinkedIn has earned (and passes each time it links to your site) and because of the extra value search engines place on keywords placed within anchor text (the descriptive text that contains a hyper link).

3. Join a group, Create a Group

As our good friend from Hubspot Pete Caputa says so well, "LinkedIn Groups are an amazing opportunity to build an opt-in email list quickly. (Almost like the early days - late 90s - of email list building.) If you're into internet marketing... you should join the HubSpot Pro Marketers list." (nice plug, Pete!)

"You should also start your own group about a topic related to your business, which would interest your target prospects," Caputa notes. "LinkedIn Groups spread quite virally throughout LinkedIn because group badges automatically display on members' profiles. Once your list is built, you can gently promote your educational content, blog, etc. For example, if you sell software to accountants, create an 'All Star Accountants' group or something along those lines."

4. LinkedIn Answers

Answer a question and your connections will see it in their Network Updates feed. LinkedIn rewards quality; you will gain expertise points when the person asking the question votes your answer as the "best answer".

5. Network Updates

These are the LinkedIn equivalent of your Facebook Status update, or your latest update on Twitter, and they tell your entire network what you're up to. This is a great place to let people know of your latest blog post.

6. Direct Advertising

While the minimum advertising level used to be $50,000 a month, LinkedIn has followed Facebook's lead and rolled out an innovative new advertising platform they call "Direct Ads" that, at a $50 minimum and a pay-per-action / pay-per-click model, is affordable to a much broader array of businesses.


Ads are simple to create, targeting is powerful and relatively simple, and the scale and access to high profile decision makers is unparalleled on any network.

We've been running these paid campaigns on LinkedIn and Facebook for our clients and have developed a testing strategy that works. With the right strategy and attention, you should be able to recognize results from your paid social network efforts as well.

Feedback
What do you think? How are you utilizing LinkedIn in your business? Do you have some great ideas we missed? We'd love to hear from you and add to this list...