LinkedIn offers you access to influential business decision makers, as well as a space to market your brand. Here's how to take advantage of the site and its functionality.
Membership in online professional communities is growing fast. The business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn has 23 million members, with 1.2 million new members signing up each month. By enabling dynamic connections between industry professionals, these communities effectively hit the overdrive switch on word of mouth referrals. They also provide a way to reach decision-makers and influencers when they are assessing business products and services.
But this presents both an opportunity, and a risk. Evangelists can tilt the balance in your favor or even get you on the consideration list, while detractors can cause your next deal to cave in at the 11th hour or turn prospects away forever.
While there are good guerilla marketing tactics you can employ to make the most of your presence on LinkedIn, one key principle to remember is that the site is a user-driven community where users create content that you cannot control. While the drawbacks are obvious, the good news is that you get pure, unfiltered and unbiased points of view. The following article provide tips for fostering the good, listening and reacting to the bad and applying beauty treatments to respond to the ugly.
1. Analyze the chatter.
You can gauge the overall reputation and health of your company by seeing what people are saying and by gathering insight and specific recommendations for improvements. Search on your company or product names and see what comes up. Are people bashing your product or recommending it? Are there specific recommendations for improvement? Here’s an example of a thread opened in the Questions section of LinkedIn that generated a lot of feedback: .gif)
This open-ended question, posted 11 months ago, garnered 60 responses. Here’s one of the more interesting ones. Note the level of detail:
Clearly, this feedback and information is valuable for product management. It points to a specific capability that can be used to benchmark, compare and identify improvements to a difficult and critical process: migrating a user base to the next version of a product. The questions and answers are attributed to users. You can view these people's profiles and contact them directly for a private dialog. Who knows? Maybe they’ll be valuable participants in your next focus group!
2. Identify and network with decision makers and influencers in large organizations.
Conduct an advanced search in the People section of LinkedIn with your target account name and a few keywords related to your product, service and the customer decision-making process. Review the profiles of the people the search generates and ask your contacts for an introduction, or upgrade to the InMail direct contact feature to gain access to these people directly. Asking for feedback is a good way to engage these people. People like to share opinions. Be genuine. Are you writing a piece of content for your website? Deciding what tradeshows to attend or publications to advertise in? Conducting a survey to improve your offering? Ask for their feedback.
Here's an example from my network. I conducted a search on current and past GE employees that list Marketing and Advertising as their vocation. Note the number of people that appear -- over double my total network size of 236, providing me with plenty of people to reach out to for insight. In my case, this might be to learn how GE markets online so we can tailor our message or approach when pitching our services to them.
When looking to expand your network to reach these experts, don’t underestimate your fellow undergraduate or graduate school alumni. They can be a valuable source of intelligence for building account-specific profiles and intelligence to arm your salespeople and support their efforts. As your network grows, the chances increase that one of your direct contacts has a personal or professional connection to a valuable prospect account. Ask your contact to broker an introduction for you or to share what they know about the company.