The power of LinkedIn is undeniable. It’s one of the most successful and popular networking platforms for businesses, allowing them to reach new heights, tap into untargeted markets and grow their brand awareness. In this blog post, I’ll take a look at why businesses should use LinkedIn and how it can help them achieve their business goals.

LinkedIn launched in 2003 and was then acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Their mission is to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful” making it perfect for businesses and workers.

As businesses strive to stay ahead of the competition, they need to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies; and one of the most valuable tools for businesses today is LinkedIn. With a growing 900 million+ members in 200 countries, it’s certainly a good place to start.

An area where LinkedIn stands out the most though is through its ‘company pages’ with over 58.4M+ companies listed. Within these pages, a company can build a professional home base and reach its audience on the network.

I’d estimate that as of writing this blog in February 2023, over 50% of my clients use LinkedIn (with me helping them to manage and run the pages). I’m going to share a few of the reasons why businesses should use LinkedIn:

1. To grow your business reach

Over 900 million people use LinkedIn, there’s not many other places you can go to reach as many people at once. It’s a professional networking service so people are already in the mood for ‘business and workplace’ mentality. LinkedIn offers you the opportunity to connect with people you might know or already know, their connections and others that you want to connect to.

You can invite people to ‘follow’ your page so they get alerts every time you post something bringing their attention to whatever you’re saying… all for free. It’s a place where you can spread awareness about your company, share and discuss important articles and updates and find potential new employees or highlight the roles you’re recruiting for.

Because you’ve got people following your page, they can then ‘like’, add their own comments or ‘share’ anything you say, spreading your reach even further.

Tip: As an individual, click the ‘My Network’ button on the top bar to see who you’re connected to, people LinkedIn thinks you might know, people in the same location, people you may know with similar roles, school alumni, people to follow, pages to follow… the list goes on.

2. Sharing company news and updates

LinkedIn is a great platform for a company to announce something, be it news, a thought piece or a role you’re recruiting for. It’s easy to create a post that will then go out to the news feeds of anyone following your company page.

If we’re keeping it simple, I’d say there are five types of posts you can create:

• Post – just words
• Photo – you can include words
• Video – you can include words
• Poll – spark a discussion and gather opinions
• Articles – think of this like a whitepaper

The great thing about LinkedIn is that you can then track and report back on the performance of these things in the Analytics section. You can then test out what type of content works best to maximise your reach, if a particular day or time is more popular and how your content is received over a period of time. It’s giving you the opportunity to further spread awareness of your company, your branding and what you stand for.

3. Credibility

Remember those posts you were creating and wanting people to share, comment or like… well each time that happens it increases your company’s credibility. A company page regularly posting creates a way for people to trust and believe what you’re saying and see you as a place to go to find out further information… which could lead to more sales. It’s an easy, yet free reason why businesses should use LinkedIn.

TIP: When you’re an admin on your company page, check out the ‘grow your followers’ bit in the right side column – you can invite your connections (max 250x a month) to get more people to follow your company page.

4. SEO boost

TIP – you might want to pin this one, it’s such a key reason why businesses should use LinkedIn…

Like other websites or social networks, LinkedIn company pages rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). Creating a company page gives your business another opportunity to be discovered by those searching for your products, services, or brand.

Google likes it too, especially when others share, link or connect to your posts – it helps the ‘useful content’ attribute which started getting rolled out in August 2022. It focuses on ranking ‘people-first’ content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience, while content that doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations won’t perform as well.

It’s another tick box in Google’s ranking algorithm, and with such fierce competition for the top position, it’s another thing you can do to help your business.
Tip: I’ve previously written about how to help you if you want to know how to get to page 1 of Google.

5. Find new candidates

LinkedIn is a great place to find new candidates and spread awareness of a role you’re looking to fill. Over 49 million people use LinkedIn every week to search for a job and 8x people are hired every minute. Can your recruiter hire that quickly?

As people can complete their personal profiles listing their work history and skill set, you can search for particular points or skills and find candidates that match your bill. You can then reach out to these people to see if they’re interested in your role and if they’d like to apply.

Tip: The paid version ‘Premium’ lets you reach out and connect with even more people (without being ranked as spam) as it’s 2.6x more effective than emails alone. Here’s a link to explain the difference between the plans.

So there you have it, we’ve explored how businesses can leverage LinkedIn to their advantage, from increasing brand awareness and boosting SEO rankings to creating a platform to showcase credibility and connecting with new leads. It may only be 5x reasons but hopefully, it’s enough for you to see why businesses should use LinkedIn.

If you’d like any help with creating the content, posting it or spreading the news about the company page, please do get in touch and let me and my team help you. We’ll help you grow your network and reach more potential customers than ever before.

Image from LinkedIn.