Using LinkedIn to Create a Social Media Sales Strategy

  

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How can LinkedIn help you create a social media sales strategy?sales?  What special features does LinkedIn have that will enable you to capitalize on creating a strong sales opportunity? 

This post will help you begin to distinguish among the many functions LinkedIn offers and see how those can help you identify qualified leads and shrink the sales cycle.

LinkedIn began, not as a social network, but as a business network.  In contrast to Facebook and other social networks, LinkedIn disallowed opportunities to post photo albums or to converse freely with the contacts.  In the early days, the founders of LinkedIn saw an opportunity to create a social media site that was a little less “social” and a little more “professional."

Four tips to use LinkedIn to develop your Social Media Sales Strategy:

• Search Options.  On LinkedIn if you have a significant number of followers, you can gain access to people in certain jobs, industries and/or groups that you would otherwise never have.  Unlike Facebook which only allows you to search friends.  LinkedIn lets you search for companies, jobs and answers to questions, as well as for people.  For salespeople the ability to search companies and locate additional network connections within those companies gives you a competitive advantage over others not using LinkedIn to the fullest. Imagine the number of qualified leads you might unearth with this function alone! The search below produced over 260,000 Vice Presidents of Sales in my network.

• Gain Expert Status or Credibility in your field.   When LinkedIn began, the Question/Answer section of the site was a powerful place for you to showcase your knowledge.  You could either post a question to the entire LinkedIn population or to segments of the network.  You could answer questions other people posted.  Many members answered questions and became experts in that area.  Updated and expanded functions on LinkedIn enabled members to ask and answer questions within specific groups in which they are members.  By becoming an active giver of information, you create credibility and trust with a wide range of people. Salespeople who use this widely create visibility and credibility for their business.  This is one of the most powerful uses of LinkedIn.
• Recommendation function.  LinkedIn gives you a great opportunity to showcase the value of your features without advertising.  Businesses who use the recommendation section wisely do just this.  LinkedIn requires three recommendations to complete your profile.  Many businesses place many more than three.  We caution, however, to make sure your recommendations give an accurate picture of the value of your services.  Think of them as LinkedIn's way to advertise.
• Visibility of Blog posts.  Using one of the blog posting applications included with LinkedIn, you can publish your blog posts directly to your LinkedIn profile and to any and all of your groups.  This feature enables you to give your blog much broader visibility across the LinkedIn network.  Instead of merely posting your blog to your profile or on the status update as is the case with Facebook, you can post it to an unlimited number of groups within your profile and you can niche your blog posts.  In my case, instead of posting to just 350 friends on Facebook, my blog post could go to 30,000+ people in my LinkedIn group network. Often, I don't send the post to all my groups, just those groups where I think there's an interest.