Summary – Video Script
LinkedIn brands itself the world’s largest professional network, with over 150 million professionals around the world. Unlike some of the social channels focused on friends and family, LinkedIn’s focus is on the user’s professional identity and enabling the user to control that online.
The channel has business focus where the users are sharing information about their industry, their work experience, skills, day to day working activities; and making new contacts or renewing existing ones.
Although it may be seen as leaning more towards serving the recruitment industry, there are opportunities to use the community for lead generation, finding new contacts or even for gaining knowledge from an industry expert. The reach of your website content can be increased by enabling users to share articles that may be seen as too dry for sharing on a more informal channel.
LinkedIn has:
Profiles
Individual users who are encouraged to complete their full profile including work history, experience and education.
Groups
Groups are formed around professional areas of interest e.g. Cloud Computing.
When you join a group you gain the opportunity to share knowledge, best practices, gather advice and opinion and if you desire become an active member of that group.
They can be either closed or open groups where the content is publicly available, so everyone can see and share the information and search engines will index it.
Company Pages
Enable you to create a LinkedIn entity for your company that employees and those interested in your business can follow.
In your company page you can provide key information, share the latest company updates, link to your RSS feed, showcase your products and services (which can be recommended by LinkedIn users) and share career opportunities.
To help you in gauging the performance of the company page, admins are able to see a hidden analytics tab.
Company updates are seen by followers in their home page and they can either like, comment, or share on the information. Your reach can be increased by using the LinkedIn share button on your website against relevant content, allowing individuals to share articles they find interesting with their professional network.
When an individual shares an article on LinkedIn, it appears on their newsfeed and has a headline on LinkedIn Today where it can be seen by all those who are following that specific story and it has the opportunity to be picked up and shared again.