Social Media Marketing

How to promote yourself on LinkedIn

15 tips to help small business owners grow connections and get more leads 

Social Media Marketing

How to promote yourself on LinkedIn

15 tips to help small business owners grow connections and get more leads 

Kartina Rosli, Founder, Tin Communications

3 March 2020

Social media is a powerful platform for businesses to be connected with their followers and reach potential customers. For B2B businesses, LinkedIn topped the charts for being the best marketing channel for lead generation and gaining more sales. According to Hootsuite, the platform boasts more than 590 million users and a network of influential, high-level executives that most businesses are targeting in their B2B marketing campaigns. If you are looking into reaching the decision-makers for your products and services, LinkedIn is undoubtedly the best channel for you to focus on.

Content Marketing Institute

Source : Content Marketing Institute

For many small business owners, getting started on social media can be a little daunting, especially when you are boot-strapped or face lack of manpower and time. However, it does not have to cost very much to grow your business on social media such as LinkedIn. 

Here are 15 ways on how you can promote your business and grow your connections organically on LinkedIn.

  1. Define your purpose.

Identify the specific goals you want to reach depending on the stage of your marketing funnel. Is it to build awareness of your business, garner more engagement or convert more people to transact with you? Then, develop a simple social media strategy and tactic with reasonable outcomes. For example, if you are at an awareness stage, you can set to have a 100 connections every month. If its engagement, consider the % of engagement rate from adding your your likes, comments and shares divided by your total followers x 100%. If its conversion, set a X number of sales you convert from LinkedIn leads. 

  1. Build a LinkedIn business page.

According to Forbes, only 57% of companies have business pages. The remaining 43% are missing out on a free opportunity to generate leads, talent, and, ultimately, revenue. Utilise your business page to share content, information and advertise your solutions. Remember to provide ideas or solutions that can help alleviate your target audience’s pain points. While building your own LinkedIn personal page is important, a business page allows you to focus on providing value-added information that your customers can relate to.

3. Showcase your thought leadership

For people to follow your business, they will have to trust the person behind the brand. LinkedIn is a great place to build your thought-leadership, brand authority or expertise area. Use it to your advantage to connect with like-minded individuals and grow your network. 

4. Focus on one niche 

Decide on one niche area and post content that your connections will be interested to consume and engage. For example, as a boutique PR agency in Singapore, I focus on providing insights and tips on effective public relations practices and social media marketing solutions for small businesses in easy and bite-size styles.

 5. Personalise your connection requests

To add connections, try to send a personalised note along with it than just clicking on the ‘Connect’ button. For new connections, send a note to say how you resonate with their area of expertise or articles and the reason for you to be connected.  If you met someone at a networking event, take the opportunity to be connected on LinkedIn using your mobile phone.

6. Ask for comments

One way to find out what engages your LinkedIn community is to study their posts that garner a lot of interest and comments. You can use them as a benchmark to curate content that can initiate similar interactions from your connections. Include a Call-to-Action (CTA) in your posts or ask for their views on the topic you are sharing. 

 7. Follow-up 

You do not ask for comments and leave your connections high and dry. Follow-up on their feedback, suggestions and comments. If a connection sent a direct message, do respond promptly. Similarly, it may be good to take your connections from online to offline. Nothing beats a good networking meeting where it may open doors to new opportunities. So, put a face to a name after some time. 

8. Engage, Engage, Engage

You do not aim to be on LinkedIn to just be a bystander and watch the rest of the world go by, do you? Use the platform to start conversations with your connections. Engage on their posts  and this means going beyond just giving a like. Share your insights to the topic being discussed and value-add, where relevant, on other people’s comments as well. 

9. Add visual elements

It is a fact that people get attracted to content when it is complemented by videos, images, and infographics. Add visuals of your products and services, create posters, banners, social media images or even quotable quotes to boost interest and engagements. If you do not have any inhouse designers to assist you, you can consider using a free tool such as Canva or Crello or Fiverr to get some designs done at an affordable rate. 

10. Promote your business page

Do not be shy to promote your page across all your platforms. Share them on your personal LinkedIn profile, website, your other social media channels, at the footer of your email newsletters and e-signatures. You can also reflect them on your article contributions to magazines and publications. 

11. Push out regular content

There have been many articles suggesting the number of times you should post on your LinkedIn page. I would suggest once a day and include a CTA to garner more engagement. By posting regularly, you provide a good source of fresh content to your followers. Develop a monthly social media content calendar using Hootsuite to make it less daunting. Alternatively, engage a social media manager or agency to help you manage your page while you focus on your business. 

12. Publish blogs on LinkedIn Pulse

Use the LinkedIn Plus feature to write articles that can help rank your SEO better. If need be, hire an SEO company that can help you identify keywords you can use not only for your article but also on your website to get your business ranked better on Google and other search engines. 

13. Start your own groups

Garner your friends, teammates, colleagues, and connections to start your own discussion group. Initiate and engage in topics that are trending in the industry that your group can benefit from. Empower your teammates to be your brand advocates and their connections to grow followers.

 14. Be realistic

It is an inevitable feeling to wanting to grow your connections quickly. However, focus less on vanity metrics. Instead, create small goals as mentioned in Tip #1. Remember, while vanity metrics is nice to see, getting quality engagements and better leads with the right target audience are much more ideal.

15. Maintain good business etiquette and manners

While networking is a good way to build relations, respect your connections. Never promote your product and services the moment they accept your request to be connected to avoid being annoying. Continue doing that and you may end up having a bad reputation in the community or worse, blocked by your connections.

Building connections and followers take time. Just like Rome was not built in one day, growing your brand on LinkedIn requires time and effort. Study the metrics and observe what works well and improve on the rest. Of course, you don’t have to work on all these suggestions at the same time either. Focus on several and add others along the way.

Kartina is Marketing In Asia’s Editor for Indochina and Founder of Tin Communications. A media specialist with over 20 years of experience in both public and private sectors, she helps SMEs grow their business through strategic media and marketing plans. Connect with her on LinkedIn and website. You may also reach her by email at kartina@tincomms.com.

For many small business owners, getting started on social media can be a little daunting, especially when you are boot-strapped or face lack of manpower and time. However, it does not have to cost very much to grow your business on social media such as LinkedIn. 

Here are 15 ways on how small businesses can grow their connections organically on LinkedIn.

  1. Define your purpose.

Identify at which stage of your marketing funnel you want your business to focus on and set goals to reach them. Is it to build awareness of your business, garner more engagement or convert people to transact with you? Knowing your business goal will help you work on a strategic social media strategy that will produce successful outcomes at every stage of the funnel.

  1. Build a LinkedIn business page.

According to Forbes, only 57% of companies have business pages. The remaining 43% are missing out on a free opportunity to generate leads, talent, and, ultimately, revenue. A business page allows you to post content, advertise your solutions and how it can alleviate your target audience’s pain points. While building your own LinkedIn personal page is important, a business page allows you to focus on providing value-added information that your customers can relate to.

Online and offline advertising
Types of advertisements in Singapore
Online and offline advertising

Fill up the form to receive your free keyword ideas

Q

Upcoming FREE SEO Masterclass

 26 May, Tues: 2pm-5pm

 Caleb Sim

 Zoom

Share This