A Basic Corporate LinkedIn Strategy for Pennsylvania Businesses: Social Media Marketing in PA
Pennsylvania businesses, if your company decides to participate in LinkedIn, there are many opportunities to improve online reach and influence—additionally, LinkedIn can be an excellent source of leads. This article outlines a corporate LinkedIn strategy, providing recommendations and techniques for businesses looking to leverage LinkedIn, or include LinkedIn as part of their online marketing strategy.
What are some of the benefits of using LinkedIn as part of your social media marketing strategy? You can drive sales and leads, connect with potential customers, current customers, peers, vendors, and partners, build brand awareness, and establish your company’s representatives as industry experts.
If you don’t have a LinkedIn account or presence on LinkedIn, create a business profile that can be linked to your employee’s individual accounts. This is one way to enhance online visibility and encourage participation.
Social Media Marketing in PA: LinkedIn Strategy
Before starting a LinkedIn campaign, it’s important to first identify all groups, individuals, and personas with whom you’re looking to connect. Then determine whether or not they have a large presence and are active on LinkedIn. To achieve your LinkedIn objectives, first do relevant group searches and a preliminary search of LinkedIn Answers to identify whether or not your audience is present and active. You’ll want to flag or save any relevant groups or conversations worth sharing or joining. Perhaps create a spreadsheet listing potential groups, complete with notes and links for future reference.
If you’re looking to designate your LinkedIn and social media marketing in PA efforts to other employees, choose those who have social media savvy, are extremely knowledgeable about your brand, products, services, and other company specifics—individuals who can engage and communicate with a target audience. Your LinkedIn gurus should also have the time available to respond and participate in LinkedIn discussions each week and on a regular basis.
After assessing your audience’s presence on LinkedIn, benchmark any available data related to your existing LinkedIn presence, including Google Analytics referring sites (referring traffic) and number of connections on LinkedIn, i.e. employee connections and recommendations, and even participation levels if possible and frequency of employee participation in conversations.
The next step in your LinkedIn strategy should be to optimize all existing employee profiles. You’ll need to have your team make sure that all individual profiles are completed and filled out, including the job position section, specialties, and general summary. Use keyword-rich descriptions, and have all employees add links to your company’s blog, website, YouTube, and Twitter profiles.
LinkedIn groups make it easy to interact with customers, vendors, partners, and peers. Have your employees monitor interactions regularly so it’s easy to jump on and participate in relevant discussions. Have your employees share relevant blog posts, content, and helpful company links and info. Do not be overly self-promotional, contribute meaningfully, and adhere to group rules.
- Consider having each person choose several groups (3-5) that they’d like to receive regular updates for (emails) and contribute to regularly.
- Add LinkedIn “answer” searches to your RSS feeds.
- Or designate one employee as the group monitor and he/she can designate tasks to other team members. This can be time saving, especially of the monitor can divvy out tasks based on members’ areas of expertise.
- Consider monitoring LinkedIn activity with HootSuite or another social media monitoring tool.
Have employees participate in groups and address relevant LinkedIn “answers” and questions. Instruct your employees to update LinkedIn status frequently, and promote your company’s visibility. Your employees should also be proactive in requesting business connection contracts and encourage those relationships, including sharing relevant content via updates, individual messages, and finding new contacts when appropriate.
If you’re interested in social media marketing in PA or leveraging LinkedIn to increase industry visibility, contact a PA SEO specialist to help you connect with your target audience and generate leads.