LinkedIn is the the mother of all business networking sites with over 65 million members and over 700,000 discussion groups and it offers a number of ways to promote one’s expertise and advance one’s business. Given that it’s a networking site, blatant commercial appeals are discouraged, thought they do have banner advertising available, and sponsored links and that kind of thing. But the most effective 2 means we’ve seen to both attract and sustain attention is a) participation in discussion groups, and 2) founding your own group, and it’s in these contexts that it’s crucial that your participation is genuine and not overly self-promoting.
Like most social media sites, with LinkedIn you have to join and create a profile for yourself. Most of us are familiar with this. It’s this profile that is the basis for your interaction with others in the group. It contains both business and personal aspects about yourself and you should give a fair amount of time and consideration in crafting it. It’s also the means by which you connect with others in the network. It’s this profile that a group manager sees when you apply to become a member of a group. We encourage you to have a look at some of the curricula out there for crafting an effective profile, which is a topic unto in itself.
And, of course it makes lots of sense to connect with others as the size of your network does have some impact on your credible appearance to others in the network. But the network itself we’ve seen few direct outcomes from. It’s from joining and participating in groups and interacting with a larger number of prospects, as a group, that results come. It’s a more credible stage, if you will, because you clearly have more on the line than you do in 1:1 communications. And, as you can see, LinkedIn offers a variety of ways to discover a group that works for your specific needs. You can search by keyword, or type of group, and so on. Once you find the ones that see most related to what you do, and appears to have enough members to provide a good stream of discussions for you to involve yourself in, you simply apply and usually you are made a member in a relatively short amount of time. You can belong to as many as 50 groups at a time.
Once you’re a member of a LinkedIn group, there are a variety of ways to become involved. Certainly you can read the news and look for jobs, but most people are reading the discussion threads and that’s where you want to be. On a typical group overview page, you’ll see several featured discussions, but they have many, many more, with dozens posted each day, to which you can make a contribution. You can also start your own discussion thread. If you recall, though, being non-commercial is key so there are ways to start a discussion and ways not to.
The best and most acceptable way is to start by posing a question. Posing a question provokes others to reply, and then that action allows you to reenter the dialogue and add further comment. Now, from a business development prospective, your question needs to be relevant to your offering and is, essentially, a question for which you already have the answer. But if not a naked commercial ploy, folks will want to engage you and others around the topic, provided you’re in a relevant group. In many cases, they suspect you hold the answer, but they’re all there for the interaction, and to be heard themselves, so if the question is well-posed and relevant, people will participate in the discussion.
When you make your post, you can choose to “follow” the discussion. This enables you to be notified as people add to the discussion thread. It is by this monitoring that you can determine your own point of re-entry to the discussion. And that re-entry to the discussion can be a comment, another question, or an invitation to view a video, or attend a webinar, on the subject. It may seem circuitous but it is this kind of social media interactivity on LinkedIn that can really bring about some positive results. Each and every time you provoke a discussion, or contribute a meaningful answer, or extend an invitation to a relevant event, you are adding to the perception of yourself as an expert by others and increasing the body of information around your profile.
You can also make separate posts to the news area of a LinkedIn group. To do this, you must have a hyperlink to an external site. This can be to your website, a newsfeed or, as we’ll see in a moment, your own blog. If you’re offering a webinar, or hosting a trade event or seminar, you can post links to their respective registration pages, and so on.
And, of course, if there are multiple LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your profile and offering, and usually you’ll find a dozen or more that do, participation in these other groups will only amplify your visibility and add to the perception of your expertise across multiple groups.
By now, you may be wondering why I mashed up LinkedIn and blogging together. It’s simple: a great way to build your own LinkedIn group is to build your blog CONCURRENTLY TO IT. I say that because the point of a professional blog is much the same as a LinkedIn group: engage prospects and clients around meaningful content. We also say that because you can “kill both birds with one stone” by making posts to one and then using newsfeeds to populate the other.
LinkedIn allows you to “plug in” news feeds from other legitimate locations. So, you can make posts to your own blog, plug them into your LinkedIn group as a newsfeed, and voila, instant content so to speak. You can also, by the way plug in your YouTube videos, press releases and so on. Connecting your LinkedIn group and your blog together is a great example of getting the most bang for your buck. Basically, once you’ve got your blog and your group in sync, it’s just a matter of making occasional posts and moderating your audience’s contribution.