When Defining your social media marketing strategy it is important to have a gameplan. 
If you haven’t yet integrated LinkedIn marketing into your overall marketing strategy, here are a few facts that might get you interested:

-LinkedIn membership exceeds 130 million professionals.

-About one member joins LinkedIn at each passing second

-The Executives of all the Fortune 500 corporations are members of LinkedIn

While most social networks e.g. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, were founded on the premise of entertainment, LinkedIn targeted the professionals from the very point of its inception.

Here are a few tips for effective LinkedIn marketing.

1. Build a Targeted Network First, and Then Start a Business Group - Your LinkedIn marketing strategy should focus on two important steps as follows:

i.          Build a network of prospects and customers. You should also consider inviting your employees to connect with your company on LinkedIn.  

ii.         Next, create a LinkedIn Group for your company or brand. This open up a lot more opportunities to market your company and extend your reach beyond that initial network. For instance, a group will make it possible to start discussion threads and share important company announcements as well as news with your contacts. You can even use your group to announce job opening in your company. 

2. Use Your LinkedIn Profile Effectively - Your LinkedIn profile is your most important marketing feature. It is what your potential connections will first see before making the decision to interact with you. So, what makes for a good LinkedIn profile?

I.          To start with, use your company website links in the profile and use relevant keywords in the anchor text. For instance, instead of “visit our blog here”, you should consider using something like “pet training blog”. 

II.        You should as well use relevant keywords in all profile descriptions and anywhere else possible e.g. in the experiences section.

III.       Lastly, you should also add your company logo or any other relevant image in your profile. This gives your profile a personal touch and separates you from the crowd.

3. Update Your LinkedIn Profile Regularly - Part of LinkedIn marketing is to engage your prospects and customers and the best way to do that is to continuously update your profile. Various online applications and tools e.g. Blog Link allows you to connect your company blog with your LinkedIn profile.  You can also manually update your profile while logged in to LinkedIn. 

4. Get the Word Out About Your LinkedIn Profile - The last but most important LinkedIn marketing step is to get your potential contacts know about your LinkedIn profile. To do that, you should take advantage of every marketing medium available to your company to reach out to potential contacts e.g. email signatures, newsletters, your blog, and business cards as well as any other materials sent out to your prospects and customers. And if you do a good job on optimizing your profile with relevant keywords, you might as well get some referrals from the search engines like Google. 
Need more help? Feel free to contact me today.! Do you have a social media strategy? Share your thoughts below.

Here are some reasons why people may use LinkedIn.

- To stay in touch with friends and colleagues. 
- To reconnect with old friends and colleagues that you may have not been able to find or be found by otherwise when emails and phone numbers are changed. 
- To get introduced to new interesting friends and business connections. 
- To promote your products and services, find or be found by new customers. 
- To find or be found by new vendors, suppliers or service providers. 
- To find a job through your network and to make it easy for employers and recruiters to find you. 
- To find someone to fill a vacancy that you may have. 
- To find experts and get advice. 
- To share your experience, help others and give advices. 
- To stay updated with the latest news especially about your network and what’s new. 
- To join groups and start or join in interesting discussions. 
- To build and strengthen your personal branding and online presence for you or your company (improving the chances of being found on Google). 
- To find new opportunities for business, partners or investors 
- To consolidate in one place trusted (to some degree) recommendations that you can get from your colleagues, friends and business contacts. 
- To use who you know in common to ask for reference about someone or a company before working or doing business with them. 
- To look up anyone that you need to meet or speak to and find out what you can about them to understand them better and to make a good impression. 
- To be able to post questions and get different answers 
- To be able to create or participate in polls (surveys) and find out the results. 
- To be able to post and share announcements, updates, news, cool things. 
- To be recognized as a subject matter expert in your area of expertise. 

As you can see the possibilities and power of this network are endless. 

How do you get found on LinkedIn? Five places to put keywords

If you want to rank high for a keyword, such as "sales manager" or "graphic designer" make sure to put those keywords in:


1. Your headline
2. Your summary
3. Your current job
4. Your past job
5. Your specialities

For example, I have LinkedIn expert in all five places. When I search my contacts, I

 I come up on the second page out of 18 million contacts for LinkedIn Expert. It works.

 

Be yourself and give a thorough walk through of your story and what you offer.

More Tools and Features of LinkedIn

By now, you probably realize the importance of adding relevant keywords that your target markets may search for to your headline, summary, and specialties sections of your LinkedIn profile. Here are some pro tips to optimize your profile to get found by great new contacts:

Edit your public LinkedIn URL: An example is my personal LinkedIn URL, http://www.linkedin.com/in/Jasonbaudendistel. This will optimize your LinkedIn profile to show up in search results on major search engines when someone searches for your name. It is important to claim those results for your name as they provide a gateway into your personal brand.

Customize your "Website" listings: Under the websites section of your LinkedIn profile, you can list up to three URLs. Choose the "other" option when setting up each of these links and describe them with relevant terms. For example, rather than using the terms "my website," I use "Online Marketing Leads.” Not only is this more descriptive, but it also gives me a better opportunity to rank for these keywords in search engines.

Include a link to your Twitter profile: You can have more than one Twitter account listed, and you can also integrate Twitter into your LinkedIn profile in the "Settings" section.

Best practice: Rather than sending all tweets, selectively send tweets to your LinkedIn status update by adding # in to the end of specific tweets.

Make your LinkedIn profile publicly visible to everyone: 
You want other professionals on LinkedIn to be able to find you and contact you anytime!