Archives for November 2012

LinkedIn can help you accomplish multiple business objectives, from attracting business leads, to recruiting new talent, and discovering potential opportunities for partnering.

Attraction is Alignment

To get what you want in business today you need to consider the expectations of your target audience. If you are looking for talented recruits you need to know what they will find attractive in a business. The same goes for sales leads and new partners.

What your business wants has to be aligned with the community you are targeting.

You have to speak their langugage, show you care about them, and reflect all of that in appearance and form. For example, if you are recruiting college students, your LinkedIn company page should include relevant experiences from recent hires, not just commentary from the marketing department.

In other words, your business has to be what it desires to attract.

If you want to attract employees that are fun to work with you need to show them your work environment is already fun. New prospects will expect to know that you have successfully served other customers like them.  All of this is easily accomplished online with video.

Every business is being judged by its online presence. In fact, a recent study indicates more consumers are placing their trust in online content.  How does yours stack up?

Everyone is An Influencer

Traditional business practices favored big customers and the executive team that focused on them. Large customers were wined and dined and came to expect that. This is why you lost some of your smaller customers who did not receive that attention.

Corporate enterprises still lavish perks on their top executives. This is one reason they have difficulty attracting top talent. If they did a better job caring for every single team member they would realize they all have influence for attracting more good people just like them.

Everyone is an influencer within their circle of friends, and these circles intersect within the communities you serve.

Thus, you now know why you should should connect on LinkedIn with employees, customers, and even some of your better competitors.

Networks connect influencers of all shapes and sizes, and become powerful forces that affect what your business is trying to accomplish.  This is why it’s best to have only one personal presence on LinkedIn.

Influencers today are not businesses, but people who may be associated with a business.

Play The Game

Savvy businesses realize that sites such as LinkedIn are designed for specific purposes and will change over time.

For this reason, to accomplish your objectives you need to learn the many nuances about the respective sites to make them work in your favor.

In regards to LinkedIn, I have written a number of articles that will help you out, including this comprehensive article on LinkedIn that includes video tutorials.  In addition to that, it’s essential you understand how social graphs work to create alignment on every social network.

Whether you seeking new talent, more leads, or business partners to help guide you into new markets, there are only two ways to make those connections:

a.  Connect the Dots.  This is necessarily a process that requires having a highly active and integrated network to then begin working backwards to make new connections.

b. Be more Attractive.  Search drives the web, and the most effective way to get what you want is to use that understanding of how it affects the social marketing process.

That’s how it works in real life, so it only stands to reason that it will work the same on the digital networks.

LinkedIn is no exception.

How are you using LinkedIn to attract more business?   

Leave a comment below to share your thoughts.

Until next time, Jeff

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