LinkedIn for Your Professional and Business Promotion

Founded on December 2002, LinkedIn, a social network for people in professional occupations, is one of the best ways to promote professional products and services. This is simply because it was created just for that purpose, a networking tool.

LinkedIn works well neglecting whatever the industry you're in. It's not just a place where you put your résumé, nor a place dedicated to recruiters. LinkedIn is a network where business revolve around selling professional services.

Getting to the statistics, with hundreds of millions of users registered in which 35 percent of them use their account daily, has millions of groups that helps you get leads and increase sales. This makes the professional social network full of wandering professionals and businesses seeking for relationship that benefits both party.

Below is a list of points that you can do to promote yourself, and/or your business, in a professional way.

Picturing Yourself

"People do business with people they know, like, and trust?" Having a LinkedIn photo in your profile is essential, especially one where your personality shines through. It will go a long way to establishing likeability and trust. Make sure that your LinkedIn photo shows your face clearly, and show your side of professionalism.

Optimizing Your Profile

LinkedIn profile is just as important as any profile page on other social networking sites. The importance of the page is solely because it's the first page where people gets to know you. Having it well-optimized means that your profile shows perfectly what industry you're in, how people can professionally contact you, and your experience regarding your profession. A well-optimized profile page is likely to see an increase in people viewing it. If your experience and skill set caught the interest of viewers, you are one step closer to build a professional business relationship.

Visualizing Your Profile

Many businesses and professionals are in a visual industry. Until recently LinkedIn was very text heavy. But with the visualization of the social web, LinkedIn also became more visual. To appear attractive to other hundreds of millions of users, using visual content can turn your once "standard" black and white profile page into one designer-friendly profile. A profile that stands out gives you the opportunity to showcase the work you've done in the past in a visual manner rather than the usual text.

Sharing Contents

Social media is all about sharing. And to be number one is social media is to share. It's more valuable to share when you have your own contents to share. If you have a blog for example, you can use it to share within your company's page, your personal profile and groups. Sharing quality contents will drive readers to your website/blog, and by sharing, you're not only sharing your expertise and building you authority, you're also increasing the chance to gain a lead. LinkedIn provide numerous apps that can help variety of industry professionals.

Connecting and Expanding

LinkedIn is a social network. And to be social means to connect. To connect means to create relationship with other people that are interested in the service you provide. By having connections with others, you can learn more than what is already there. You can see how people work in your industry and how they show their professional selves to the web. The more relationship you have on social media, the higher the chance that others will promote you. LinkedIn, and social media in general, are about building relationships. If you want others to help you promote your services, start by promoting others.

LinkedIn as a Business Marketing Method

There are two main ways to dive into LinkedIn business promotion - using a passive approach or taking a more aggressive stance.

Passive LinkedIn marketing is simply creating a profile, building connections and keeping all the information in it up-to-date. This passive method can pay off by giving you exposure to people hunting to your products and/or services. LinkedIn provide a streamlined search function that eases both businesses and other professionals in finding you.

On the other hand, aggressive marketing provide a more active marketing efforts. This takes a full advantage of the possibilities the network has to offer. This includes: regular status posting, active group participation, sending messages and invitations, answering questions, trying LinkedIn advertisements, upgrading to a paid LinkedIn membership, and so forth. Taking social network as your business model will open the communication between your customers and other businesses.