Since its launch in 2003, LinkedIn has become an invaluable resource for those on the job hunt, from recent graduates to professionals of any age. However, if you think that this social media platform is nothing more than a job board, you’re missing out on the largest professional network on the Internet (a pretty big space to dominate, if you ask us). With 187 million members around the world, including executives from all 2012 Fortune 500 companies, and 2.6 million companies with Company Pages, LinkedIn is no longer riding on the social media bandwagon. It’s driving the car. Read on to find out how your company can capitalize on its momentum.

• Create a Company Page. If you already have a personal profile on LinkedIn, you know how useful the platform can be for networking. When you create a Company Page, it not only allows you to connect with existing colleagues, but it also allows you to promote your business to potential customers. To best leverage your Company Page, write compelling, keyword optimized copy for the “Overview” and “Services” tabs, which are opportunities to “sell” your brand and its service lines to potential customers. And don’t forget to include a call-to-action, such as directing customers to your company website for more information.

• Participate in Group Discussions. Through your personal profile, you can join Groups and participate in discussions. This is the perfect opportunity to get involved in conversations about your industry – and to direct other participants to your company’s white papers, blog posts or articles related to the topic at hand. This “thought leadership” will reinforce your brand’s credibility as an industry expert.

• Respond to Questions in LinkedIn “Answers.” Another way that you can build credibility for your brand on LinkedIn is by answering questions posted by other LinkedIn users. For example, if someone is thinking about switching auto insurance companies, and you work for an auto insurance agency, it’s the perfect opportunity to jump in and let them know about the auto insurance rate comparison tool on your company’s homepage or to offer to email them a quote directly.

• Drive traffic to your website. This past July, LinkedIn released its new design, which, not surprisingly, looks strikingly similar to that of Facebook and Google+. There is also a lot of overlap in regard to the available features, such as wall posts that users can “Like,” “Comment” on or “Share.” These posts allow you to address timely news and events, promote a product or service line you offer or ask an engaging question to your audience.

Already have a Company Page? Contact MoreVisbility to maximize your efforts and create a more effective page that speaks to your target audience.

LinkedIn has introduced video ads on their social media advertising platform to target to its 175 million members. The new video ads will appear in the standard 300×250 ad units across the LinkedIn site and will compete with traditional text and image ads for impressions.

The targeted video ads take over the entire ad space when clicked and allow LinkedIn users to click directly through to an advertiser’s site once the video has completed playing. In addition, advertisers can target professionals by job title or function, industry, geography, company size or name as well as other targeting options for these video ads.

Advertisers can create video ads on LinkedIn by using existing YouTube videos. When creating a new video ad, advertisers can enter the YouTube video URL during the ad creation process.

These video ads are available on pay-per-view and pay-per-click models and can be created without having a set media buy. Advertisers can set daily budgets for a campaign as low as ten dollars per day with a minimum cost-per-click of two dollars.

The network says that video ads have a three time higher click through rate than regular ads on the network. The average click through rate on LinkedIn is approximately 0.20%.

Below is a screen shot of how to create a video ad on LinkedIn.

Within the last two weeks LinkedIn has introduced multiple changes to make connecting with other sociable professionals easier.  Here are the top three we think you should know about.

Endorsements

You can now endorse your LinkedIn connections for a skill that they have listed on their profile or better yet, you can recommend them to add a skill that they haven’t listed.  There are two ways to endorse your connections:

1. By going to the new Skills & Expertise (beta) page from the “More” drop down menu on the LinkedIn home page.

2. By clicking the yellow “Endorse” button in the blue box on the profile page of your                        connection as you can see in the screenshot below.

LinkedIn will notify you by email if you get endorsed. You can also scroll to the bottom of your profile page to see the people who’ve endorsed your skills.

Follow Professionals
As you might know, if you aren’t a colleague, old classmate, friend, in a group with or done business with someone on LinkedIn you cannot connect with them.  Now, LinkedIn has made it possible to follow other professionals.  Currently, you can only follow what LinkedIn considers 150 of the most influential leaders.  Some of those as you can see in the screen shot below include Presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Sir Richard Branson.

Once you follow any of these thought leaders, you will be able to like, comment and share their posts.  Fortunately, LinkedIn plans to expand their list of influencers within the next few months to individuals who they consider to be industry specific movers and shakers.  Want to get on that list?  LinkedIn is also offering you the opportunity to submit a request to become an influencer by going to http://partner.linkedin.com/influencer/.

New Company Pages
LinkedIn started testing new company pages a few weeks ago a select few companies. Recently they rolled out the new company pages to more than 2 million companies.  The changes on the new company pages are mostly aesthetic.  It now includes room for a larger cover image, easily visible content and they are now viewable on mobile devices.  You can see what the new company pages look like in the screenshot below.

Businesses that are B2B marketers should consider the value of LinkedIn as a growing professional network for its potential to generate leads.  A recent infographic published by LinkedIn marketing, shows that LinkedIn generated 212 million business leads in the U.S. for 2011. They found that 46% of the audience follows industry discussions and 43% use LinkedIn to learn about companies.  It’s easy to make a case for participating in the network, when you consider that 60+ million U.S. members use LinkedIn as a professional resource. If you already have a LinkedIn company page, the next step is optimizing it.

You can optimize your LinkedIn Company page with the following features:

• Add Unique SEO Copy - Create unique, keyword rich copy for the Company Overview, Description, Products/Services, Promotions, and Status Update sections.

• Optimize Your Page Design - Create designs for up to three banners that include strong calls to action and visually support your business model. Include a Thumbnail on each Product/Service listed; up to 5 can be featured. Include a YouTube video about the Product/Service on each landing page. Add copy for a promotion about  to the service,  that links to your website.

• Optimize Individual Profiles - Each company page connects to an individual profile, and more than one profile can be linked with the page as a contact resource. Each optimized profile can create and participate in Groups, Answers, Discussions, and Add Events.

• Target Audiences - Once the LinkedIn “default” Company Page is complete; you can duplicate it and adapt the content toward target audiences. You may choose to alter your page’s banner design, featured services, and text that will only show for specific designated page filters. This will ensure that the customized company pages are specific to the industry, job function, geography, etc. of your choice.

These tips can be used to improve your LinkedIn Company Page, in order to make it more effective in generating traffic to your website and capturing leads. If you are interested in pursuing this type of optimization, but don’t have the internal resources to accomplish the outlined tasks, you should contact us for information about our LinkedIn Optimizer program.

LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com) isn’t just for job seekers.  Over 120 million members makes LinkedIn the world’s largest professional network; a network your firm could use in a variety of different ways:

• Establishing a Professional Presence: By including information about your firm as a LinkedIn Company Page, users of the social network can learn more about your firm on the medium of their choice and then move to other off-site mediums, such as your website, if they choose.  Additionally, as lawyers in your firm grow their professional profiles, they have the opportunity to add sections that could include slide presentations, blog posts, or other content that would help inform visitors to their professional profile about your firm. 
• Resource & Knowledge Center (Groups): Groups on LinkedIn is a wonderful way for a firm to interact with those in an industry.  Individuals from your firm can ask questions, look through members interested in the same area as your firm, add job postings, and more.
• Social Networking: The lawyers in your firm can network with other users who may seek legal services.  Be careful to abide by any restraints on who you may network with by checking with The Bar Association in your area.  Additionally, your firm can use LinkedIn to network with colleagues, perhaps those in other firms to whom you refer or are referred business.
• Link Building: As the lawyers in your firm build professional profiles, they can post content including links back to your website or blog.  Their connections could read these posts and see the links and choose to link to your content.
• Hiring: LinkedIn, with their built in Job section, is a wonderful way to connect with those looking for opportunities in the field of law.

The LinkedIn Learning Center has a User Guide specifically devoted to helping individual attorneys as well as law firms to take advantage of all of the opportunities LinkedIn has to offer.  If you are interested in growing your social media presence or hearing how MoreVisibility can help you grow on LinkedIn, please request a quote or contact us for more information.

Nearly every large and successful company employs a number of SEO initiatives to stay successful. However, in many cases they can get a large number of conversions simply because of their brand name. On a deeper level, this is symbolic of the fact that these companies have authority – they are leaders in their industry.

You can do a lot to establish trust and authority for your business through the right kind of engagement on almost any social media site. LinkedIn, in particular, is a stellar example that often gets overlooked. Many professionals view the site as a way to keep tabs on their colleagues, but it is probably the best website you can use to increase your clout and authority in your given field.

Obviously, one of the best ways to establish yourself and your business as an authority is to answer the pressing questions in your industry. LinkedIn has the perfect venue for this with their Answers page. On Answers, members can post questions related to any given field of expertise. When you answer a question, your answer may be selected as a “Best Answer,” which is noted on your profile. By consistently answering questions related to your field, you can quickly build authority in your field among your target demographic.

In addition to Answers, you should also be interacting with your profile page by posting relevant company updates. If you author any blogs or press releases for your company, post them to your profile to get them to spread around. If you write prolifically enough on behalf of your industry, you may be able to become a Source on LinkedIn. If LinkedIn selects you to be a source, your writing will appear in LinkedIn Today – which has the potential to vastly multiply your traffic. If you’re interested in being a source, you must contact LinkedIn.

These efforts to build authority require a significant time investment on your part, so they may not be a fit for every company. However, the payoff can be significant.

You can use your LinkedIn profile for much more than managing your professional connections. By starting a LinkedIn Group and engaging your professional community, you can also have a small but solid link building campaign.

LinkedIn Groups are special pages that anyone can set up on LinkedIn. They gather like-minded professionals to discuss their respective industries. LinkedIn Groups foster a lot of interaction among professionals and are a good starting approach to link building.

When you are starting your own group, you must keep in mind that LinkedIn hosts hundreds of thousands of groups. If you want yours to stand out and gain members, you should try to target a niche theme or audience. If your group is too similar to the others pertaining to your business, you may not gain much traction.

When you start a new group, you become the group’s manager – allowing you to do things such as moderating discussion posts or approving new members. More importantly, you also have more control for displaying your links. There are a lot of link building options you have when you’ve started the group, including:

• Putting your website link in the “about this group” section
• Sending a weekly message to the group with a relevant link
• Adding your site to the RSS feed in the News Section
• Creating a discussion and including your link (as the group manager, you have some automatic credibility so you can post your links a little more frequently).

By maintaining an active group that contributes to the professional community, your posted links can get a lot of traffic. Furthermore, if you’ve developed your group to target a specific audience or demographic, you’ll be getting meaningful traffic – and hopefully, higher conversion rates.

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network on the Internet, has over 120 million members as of August 2011.  These individuals are browsing the internet and when they come across good onsite content, they have the same urge many of us do – to share what they have found with others in their network.  A simple snippet of code, typically added to a section of your website near other buttons such as Google’s +1 Button, Twitter’s Tweet Button, and Facebook’s Like or Share Buttons is all that is needed for set-up.  You can build a LinkedIn Share Button through LinkedIn’s Developer Network.  The buttons come in three basic designs: No Count, Vertical Count, and Horizontal Count (example below).  No Count is simply the button without a numerical count of how many people have clicked the button to share the content.  Vertical Count places the numerical bubble count above the button and Horizontal Count places the bubble count to the side of the button.  

http://mashable.com/2011/08/22/khan-academy-kno/

Upon clicking of the LinkedIn Share Button, the count (if shown) will increase by one and a pop-up will appear (if you have pop-ups allowed).

http://blog.linkedin.com/2010/11/30/linkedin-share/

The pop-up box has three options of how you can share the snippet: Post to updates, Post to group(s), and Send to individuals.  The first option, Post to updates, allows you to add a personalized message to the snippet, post to Twitter at the same time you post to LinkedIn, and adjust the visibility of the post (anyone or connections only).  The second option, Post to group(s), auto-completes a group’s name as you type it into the Group(s) field.  If there is a grey lock symbol next to the group name, this signifies that the group is Members Only and that posts will only be visible to members.  If you are posting to an Open Group, note that the post will be visible to everyone on LinkedIn.  After selecting your preferred Group(s), you can also add a subject and details to the post, both of which are optional fields.  The third option, Send to individuals, allows you to share with people who you are not currently connected to by entering their email address in the To: field.  You can also include a personalized message and check a box to disallow the recipient from seeing your name and email address (the default for this box is checked – where those you are sending the post to would see your name and email address).  Once you have decided how you would like to share the snippet of content (and you have the option of using any combination of the three options) you can click the blue “Share” button.

LinkedIn for Business
Thursday June 8, 2011

MoreVisibility’s Twitterchat (#MVCHAT) took place today. The discussion corresponded with MoreVisibility’s live webinar on “Leveraging LinkedIn for Business” with EVP @DanielleLeitch.  LinkedIn has and continues to play a large role in networking and connecting with other professionals. Working the channel as an individual as well as a representative of a company enables you to leverage your professional network in unique ways.  This week’s #MVCHAT highlighted the most important aspects of LinkedIn and explained how companies can optimize their experience and efforts within this growing social media network.

MVCHAT is a weekly 30 minute discussion starting at 3:30 pm (est) covering a variety of online marketing topics. Clients, advertisers, and online marketing enthusiasts are invited to participate in this rapid-fire conversation by following and including #MVCHAT in tweets. Read more about #MVCHAT in the news here.

LINKEDIN COMPANY PAGES

I was invited to attend Connect10, LinkedIn’s annual brand and marketing summit held in NYC this week.  In addition to recapping some of the features rolled out to the platform during 2010, they made a major announcement to introduce a new feature on Company Pages - Services.  Our company was one of a select few to participate in the pilot program for this and is very excited at the possibilities it offers advertisers.

MoreVisibility’s Company Page (you will need to be logged in to see a robust version) on LinkedIn features this new section (as a result of our participation in the pilot for the program) but it is still being rolled out to all companies – so you may or may not have the feature yet.  It appears on your Company page as a third tab, next to Overview and Careers, on your Company Page.  Adjacent to this (on the right) is where you will find the options of adding or editing this area of your page.  You must have a company email address in order to be able to modify the page for that company.

SERVICE/PRODUCT DETAILS PAGE

On the main Services page, you are able to list out your products or services, in addition to designated some as “featured”.  Companies can also segment products or services to specific audiences they select.  This is especially helpful for vertical focused solutions you offer.

To provide more information on each service or product, there is an option to create a Details page for each. Here is where you can elaborate with additional text, video and images which all support that specific product or service.  You can also request recommendations from client on specific products or services, which will be displayed on this page.  This is a great Landing Page to consider, as it offers contact info for your team and individual endorsements by others.

When signed into LinkedIn, please visit our Company Page to see this new feature in action!  We would welcome an opportunity to discuss your company’s strategy to leverage this channel, through paid advertising options and this free Company Page.  Email me or let’s connect through LinkedIn.