In Business to Business marketing, LinkedIn is one of the must have social media platforms. Although it was primarily used as a recruitment tool early in its existence, LinkedIn is increasingly being used by people in their day to day professional lives. Having already covered setting up profiles on LinkedIn for both yourself and your organisation in my last post here. This article moves on in the process to focus on two key ways you can add content to your profiles and use them in your online marketing:
- Posting updates to LinkedIn
- Getting involved in LinkedIn groups.
Posting Updates
As part of your joined-up marketing plan, you should already be posting news stories, case studies and the like on the news pages of your website or blog. This makes it to continue the process and add these stories to your LinkedIn Profile as an update to either your company or personal profile, as appropriate. To do this, simply go to the relevant profile and locate the “share an update box” 
Type a short, pithy intro to your article, then copy and paste the link to it in into the box. LinkedIn will do the rest and add a snippet of text plus an image from the linked article into the update. 
Now simply delete the link from the update (You don’t have to do this but I think it looks neater. The snippet and image will remain) and click share. The update will appear in your LinkedIn update stream for everyone to see.
LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn Groups are places where people with similar interests can “meet and discuss” issues relevant to them. Once you have joined a group, you can then post discussion topics into that group and make comments on topics that others have posted. Of particular interest is that every time you post or comment on a topic, an update gets emailed to every member of the group who has subscribed to receive them. As an example. I am a member of a group called “Business Peak District”. This LinkedIn Group is dedicated to the issues of businesses (mostly SMEs) in and around the Peak District area of the UK. As a member of this Group. I can start a discussion around my new series of Articles. I simply go to the group and type my discussion topic into the “Start a discussion..”. I can also add links to my post (see above). 
Once you start looking, it is likely that you will find groups relevant to your line of business. Joining these and adding to the discussion is a great way to network online and raise your profile across a relevant and like-minded audience.
Next time …
As you start to grow the content in your profile you will want to spread the word even more! In the next article in this series we will be looking at building your contact network, and how to use LinkedIn to build contacts within relevant companies. In the meantime, if you would like to learn more about using LinkedIn as a marketing tool, I recommend this e-book as a good starting point, or feel free to get in touch Finally, please connect with me on LinkedIn. Just mention that you read our blog and I will be happy to add you to my LinkedIn Network.
