3 Ways To Grow Your Business With LinkedIn

Photo by Kevin Dooley CC BY2.0

Now that you’ve built your profile and company page on LinkedIn, you’re ready to start using LinkedIn for business. Unlike social networks like Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn is a social platform built specifically for business, so it’s ideal for networking and building business connections.

1. Develop Your Network

To start building your network, import your contacts from your email account. LinkedIn allows you to important contacts from Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail and other email clients.

Since you want to encourage connections, we recommend having your email address clearly visible on your profile under your contact information. You can simply state your email address or you can make it more personal by providing details on the types of projects or opportunities you wish to be contacted about.

While on Facebook people tend connect only with people they know, LinkedIn is about building your professional network, so we recommend accepting everyone as a contact. You never know who’ll be a valuable business connection.

Show that you’re active on LinkedIn by updating your status. Make sure that your status is professional by posting about business news, industry events and helpful business advice.

Start chatting. The key to building your network is to talk to your connections. Did someone you haven’t talked to in years accept your request? Send them a message asking what they’ve been up to career-wise and update them on what you’re working on. Offer to give recommendations to people you like who you’ve done work with in the past.

2. Position Yourself As a Leader

LinkedIn is a place to show off your expertise and demonstrate how you can help others.

Using the Answers feature to ask and answer questions is a great way to bring your name around to people outside of your circle and thus gives you more opportunities to find people to connect with. Answering questions is also a way to demonstration your expertise and increases the likelihood that someone will recognize your authority and contact you for something further.

Another networking tool to get your name and profile out to people is LinkedIn’s Groups. Joining groups gives you the opportunity to network, participate in discussions and receive business advice. An added bonus of joining groups is that—while a basic LinkedIn account normally only allows you to send messages to connections—you can send messages to group members.

(Find more information on LinkedIn’s subscription plans here.)

If you want to show further leadership by starting your own group, read our tips for managing LinkedIn groups.

3. Promote Your Business With LinkedIn’s Tools

Here are a few tools that will help promote your business:

LinkedIn Events. Adding your events to LinkedIn’s Events section helps to promote your events. You can share the events you create with your connections as well as your second and third degree contacts. Events are also searchable on LinkedIn by keyword and location, which gives your events greater reach.

LinkedIn’s Slideshare app. If you are a speaker and use Slideshare to upload your slides, the Slideshare app is a great way to show off your presentations and expertise on your LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn Ads. Although we don’t have experience using LinkedIn Ads, they could be a useful tool for reaching a B2B audience. This is a helpful article that explores whether you should advertise on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.

Connect to Monique Trottier on LinkedIn
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/moniquetrottier

Connect to Crissy Campbell on LinkedIn
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/crissycampbell

Tips for Managing LinkedIn Groups

Creating your own LinkedIn Group increases your profile and gives you control over the group’s content and reach. The goal with a group is to engage your audience and leverage your company’s thought leadership.

From our experience, it’s best to have a more wide-ranging group for sharing ideas and making connections with people from a variety of backgrounds. If needed, you can create a subgroup later on that is more specific to your company or niche.

Consider taking advantage of LinkedIn’s new Open Groups. With Open Groups, all discussions can be viewed by anyone on the web and be found in search engines. They can also be shared on other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. All of these features increase the potential reach of your group.

1. Choosing a Group Name
When choosing a name for your group, you want to make sure not to limit your audience. Again, you want your group to appeal to a wide variety of people, so use a title that reflects that. Think of keywords people searching for similar groups would use.

2. Inviting Members to Your Group
Start by inviting people who are your contacts already and would be interested in the group. Next, search LinkedIn for prospects who have similar interests and would find your group helpful.

When you send invitations try to make a connection rather than just pitching your group. Have you noticed anything interesting this person’s been doing on LinkedIn? Do you have any commonalities? State clearly why the group will be of benefit to them.

3. Welcome Message
We recommend creating a custom Welcome Message template and setting it to automatically send to new members. The message should include what the group hopes to achieve, some guidelines, and should link to something of benefit to your new members - like a whitepaper or interesting post online.

4. Content
You want to have control over the types of content and quality of discussions within your group. Set the tone by posting content related to significant news in your industry. Be a resource to members of your group by providing quality content and information that is helpful to them.

If you are a resource, it doesn’t matter that you are also a sales person. Research shows that people choose to buy from companies and sales people that have not only been a resource but who have also developed an ongoing relationship with them.

The objective is to ensure a level of trust and credibility that will set the standard and tone for your company overall.

5. Engagement

Tips for Increasing Group Engagement in your LinkedIn Group:

• Find relevant blogs and add their RSS feeds to the group’s news feed. This will ensure that fresh content is being posted to your group and it will also send an email to group members (depending on how members have set their notifications) which will encourage them to visit the group page.
• Post some of your blog articles as news articles.
• Post a message encouraging group members to post their own articles.
• LinkedIn users tend to self-promote. To prevent self-promotion from overwhelming your group conversations, consider setting up a subgroup where people can promote themselves, what they do, and their blog URL, or just invite members to share their blogs and Twitter handles.
• Ask for feedback on the group. You can do this using the Poll app.

How To Opt Out of Facebook’s New Instant Personalization

Revised April 26th with reader suggestions.

If you’ve signed into Facebook in the last couple of days, you’ve probably seen this message

It seems innocent enough, but as this librarian found out, it’s more complicated (and, in our opinion, invasive) than it seems.

There are two parts to this new feature. One, is that Facebook’s “Like” button is now available across the web. This means that you can be on a website, “like” something, and the link to that page is added to both your Facebook profile and your friends’ newsfeed.

The next part is that Facebook now has “select partners” that can access your personal information when you’re on their sites. Currently, these partners are Microsoft Docs.com, Pandora, and Yelp but more websites are expected to join. As Facebook says,

When you visit a Facebook-enhanced application or website, it may access any information you have made visible to Everyone (Edit Profile Privacy) as well as your publicly available information. This includes your Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages. The application will request your permission to access any additional information it needs.

Don’t use these partner sites? You should still be concerned because if your friends visit these sites, the partners can still pull in your information.

If this wasn’t invasive enough, Facebook users have to manually opt out of this feature and then block the applications if users don’t want their information shared by their friends.

We recommend opting out. Here’s how:

Sign into your Facebook Account.

Click on Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites

Here, you have to do two things.

First, unclick Allow next to Instant Personalization. You’ll getting a warning message - click Confirm.

Then you have to manually prevent your friends from sharing your information by clicking Learn More under Instant Personalization. Scroll down on this page to How do I opt-out of instant personalization? and click on the heading link. You’ll see this

Click on each application individually and disallow them by clicking Block Application on the left hand side of the page.

You’ll getting another warning message - click Block Docs.

Note: Facebook will most likely be adding more “personalization partners” in the future. You’ll need to check back periodically to manually disallow them from accessing your information.

Revision: Easier Way to to Stop Your Friends From Sharing Information About You
Go to Privacy Settings > What Your Friends Can Share About You > Edit Settings, uncheck all the checked boxes and click save. This way also keeps future Applications from accessing your information. Thanks to James for pointing this out.

Julien Smith at Third Tuesday Vancouver

Julien Smith, co-author of Trust Agents with Chris Brogan, spoke at Third Tuesday Vancouver this week about the nature of social capital and building tribes.

While I was expecting a bland presentation on the importance of building community within social networks, I was pleasantly surprised. The talk was less on why online communities are important and more about how now is the time to take control, get over our own fears and become leaders of our own social channels. All in all, it was an inspiring talk.

These were Julien’s main points (thanks to Hummingbird604 for live blogging the event):

Touch the burner.
When we’re children we do things that are dangerous (like touching the burner, playing with the electrical socket, etc.). We do this to make sense of the world around us and, once you touch the burner and understand it, your world gets a little bigger. It hurts to touch the burner so we eventually stop, but when we stop, the world stops getting bigger.

We need to continue to explore the world around us—even if it hurts—in order for our world to grow.

Connections matter.
There’s a study that shows that once we get to a certain level of financial gain—$50,000 a year—we are no longer made happier by the next $1,000 or even $10,000 a year. What makes us happy is the amount of connections we have and how central we are to the network.

Building tribes, bringing people together and facilitating the exchange of social capital is one of the best things you can do either personally or for your business.

If you can build the church (the place that people gather by default), you get to be in charge of the channel and the connections that are made there.

Break the pattern.
Breaking the pattern of interaction challenges people to really engage. Never let anybody turn themselves off. Great interviewers, like Larry King, excel at this.

Become the lead goose.
The lead goose reduces the wind resistance for all of the other geese. If you become an experimenter, if you try new things and break the pattern, you’re making it easier for everybody else in your network to break the pattern and develop meaningful connections. Once you establish yourself as a leader, you become invaluable to your tribe.

We will never need more advertising.
We will never need more advertising but we will always need more community and tighter links between those we care about. Learning to build tribes and understanding social capital has never been more valuable.

Pitfalls and Best Practices for Building Online Communities

Building successful online communities isn’t easy. To help us out, Powered recently held a webinar on the Pitfalls and Best Practices for Building Online Communities. Below is what they had to say.

Just because you built it, doesn’t mean they’ll come.

Community: an interactive group of people connected by a common interest.

Marketer’s Sins
* Thinking that you know it all already - Tropicana changed their ‘look’ and didn’t think that they needed to consult with online communities. Result: online backlash.
* Wanting to be something you’re not - Pepperidge Farm tried creating their own online community rather than joining an existing one, but Pepperidge Farm isn’t an online community like FaceBook or MySpace.
* Thinking you’re done once its built - successful communities must by nurtured like a successful cocktail party.
* Assuming more is better - Moms Miami site: there is no common interest so it isn’t sticky for anyone.
* Not planning for anger or responding to it - Motrin example: moms got angry at their ad campaign so Motrin took their site down and went back up with a message saying that they were pulling the ad - did Motrin overreact?
* Wanting what the other guy has - Zune is trying to have what iPod has.
* Wanting it all…and all your way - General Mills’ My Blog Spark asked people not to post anything negative; this was greedy, they wanted to control the message.

51% of online adults are willing to participate in a company’s online community.
Adults across generations will engage in online company forums - they want to be a part of all stages of the marketing mix.

Understand who social media is for: brand enthusiasts who have passion (positive or negative). Get them to market the message for you and make them into brand advocates.

Have a clear objective for your community. Types of objectives include:
* Listening - good for direct customer insight, new product ideas and beta testing.
* Speaking - create an emotional attachment, advertising based on network.
* Energizing - excite your biggest fans, word of mouth.
* Supporting - peer to peer support.
* Embracing - members become contributors, extended workforce.

Focus on customer problems, not your products. Use the community as a way to help members solve their problems. The Axe community helps members solve how to get the girl. This gives Axe insight into their customers to use for more relative marketing.

Ensure the community is ‘heard’ inside of your company; it’s about managing your company to take advantage of what the community can do. Create a process for reporting what you learn from the community.

What keeps members coming back and participating? Hint: it’s not the technology.

Vibrant communities need:
* Sense of ownership
* Shared passions/needs
* Opportunities for self-expression in a variety of ways
* Active facilitation
* A company that demonstrates listening
* Fresh, engaging content

Best practices for creating your own online community
1. Listen - what are your customers saying? Where? Use Google Analytics.
2. Choose - What do you want to use the social community for? Customer research? Sales? Product Innovation?
3. Include - get legal/compliance on board early and often; get them to help you build a social policy.
4. Join - sign up for communities where your customers are (but learn the etiquette first).
5. Engage - thank your customers for telling you what they think; in plain English; ask more questions.
6. Build - if you’ve gotten good at #1-4 consider creating your own community.

Get the full webinar and presentation slides.
Note: You’ll have to give your name, email address and company information to access the video and slides.

Guest Post on TechVibes: Is Pottermania Dead?

My guest post is live on TechVibes: “Is Pottermania Dead?”

July 10-13, 2008, I was invited to Portus 2008: A Harry Potter Symposium for academics, educators, students and fans. Dr. Henry Jenkins of MIT and I gave the two luncheon keynotes.

From TechVibes:

When it comes to Harry Potter, the big question among the media is whether Pottermania is dead. Among booksellers and publishers, the question is who will be the next JK Rowling? And will there be another series as popular as Harry Potter?

As the former internet marketing manager at Raincoast Books, the Canadian publisher of the Harry Potter series, and as a book reviewer at SoMisguided.com, I’m interested in the answer to those questions. In fact, they were two questions posed to me at Portus 2008 in Dallas, TX .

Sponsored by the Harry Potter Education Fanon, Portus 2008 (July 10-13) was the fifth gathering of Harry Potter scholars, students and fans. Over 700 people were in attendance, which answers the first question. Is Pottermania dead? No.

Read the full article on TechVibes ...

ChangeEverything.ca Nominated for a Webby

ChangeEverything.ca, the online community developed by our good friends at Social Signal and built for Vancity, has been nominated for a Webby Award.

Huge congratulations for Social Signal, Change Everything and Vancity!

The competition in the social networking category is really steep:

* Bebo: “a social media network where friends share their lives and explore great entertainment”
* Facebook: “a social utility that connects you with the people around you”
* Flock: “the browser for people who like to be connected”
* Ning: “free online service for creating, customizing and sharing your own Social Networks”

What’s ChangeEverything.ca? ChangeEverything.ca: “the site for people in Vancouver, Victoria and the Lower Mainland who want to change themselves, their communities or their world”

Vote for ChangeEverything in the Webby Award for Social Networking.