What is LinkedIn used for 

What is LinkedIn used for ?

What is LinkedIn used for you might ask? The simple answer is short – to find opportunities. If you’ve been living in the 21st century for long, you’ve probably heard of LinkedIn. You may even be intimately familiar with LinkedIn and its general purposes because you’ve been active on LinkedIn. If you haven’t ventured out into the LinkedIn space then this is for you. What is LinkedIn used for?

There are FOUR main reasons to use LinkedIn (and more below):

1. LinkedIn Job Hunting and Recruitment
2. Online Resume / Portfolio for professionals
3. Growing your company’s online value
4. Lead Generation / Data Mining (Using linkedin for sales)

1) What is LinkedIn used for? Job Hunting and Recruitment

LinkedIn becomes very helpful when you want to find a job. One can develop their own LinkedIn profile when still in College. Many employers have a function on their employment pages that will allow you to link directly to your LinkedIn profile. Now that doesn’t mean that you can skip the fill in the blank portion, but it does make you look very up to date and in front of the technological curve.
And if you’re applying for a technical or Internet position of any type, I would urge you to create a profile before applying for any job in those spaces. If you don’t have an Internet presence, you already look amateur.

Do yourself a favor, job-seeker and create yourself a profile, make it good and promote yourself.

2) What is LinkedIn used for? Highlight Your Skills & Experience

Another purpose of LinkedIn is to create a work history and highlight your skills and experience. This can be very useful if you’re going to be looking to work for another company or if you want to create a portfolio to help with advancement within your own company. LinkedIn allows you to log all your work history, accomplishments, awards, skills and Certifications. You can also ask people to recommend you with a short write up or endorse you for a skill.

All of this looks very professional to a prospective employer – or potential client for your business.

3) What is LinkedIn used for? LinkedIn Business / Company Page.

Another great feature of LinkedIn is building a profile for your own company. Sending clients to take a look at your business page is a great way to show some content and tell about what your business does. Then sending traffic to that page with a good call to action can surely get you some prospective clients.

4) What is LinkedIn used for? Lead Generation and Data Mining

Using LinkedIn to get leads is soooo valuable – list building is key to ALL businesses. In fact, the majority of business VA Staffer does for our clients is getting sales from LinkedIn for our clients by finding qualified leads based on a set criteria.

With LinkedIn our team is able to target specific geo-locations, industries, even specific tites of people at companies that would be valuable to make contact. There are some things we do to collect email addresses that I’d rather not list here since it’s borderline insane, and I’d rather not let our competition know the secrets to our success. What I can say is that we’ve been doing lead generation on LinkedIn for almost two years now and collected over 150,000 contacts / leads / prospects for our clients with a 80-90% accuracy rate. You can leverage our virtual sales assistant team to grow your contacts, and everyone in sales knows it’s about the numbers.

Benefits of LinkedIn

Besides the benefits of LinkedIn mentioned above, there are other general benefits of using such a well-known and powerful social media platform.

1. You can easily give links to your profile on LinkedIn for professionals or clients.
2. Create a network of like-minded professionals for furthering your career.
3. Reach out to prospective clients or employers using features general accepted better than cold call or cold email.
4. Do research on competitors, build a list of like-companies, find prospective clients.

LinkedIn Research

Doing LinkedIn research is easy because you’re reaching within the platform to build a list of people who fit within a parameter. With LinkedIn features you can reach out to them and begin to build your client base or prospective employees.

LinkedIn for Business

Using LinkedIn for business is a must. If you have any type of professional service or even a product, having a Business Page is definitely important for other seekers to find you within the platform. Just as you would be doing research for a client or employer, others will be doing the same to find you.

LinkedIn Business Best Practices for B2B Sales

Make sure that when you connect to people you have a valid reason. I like to explore content they’ve posted, or things they like. Post here and there, follow their blogs / conversations, look for their other social media accounts.

Don’t just go and connect to them, even better yet – let us help find email addresses and reach out to them before connecting.

LinkedIn People Search

Unless someone doesn’t want to be found on LinkedIn, names and pages are public. If you have specific people you’d like to view, connect with or research, you can type their name in the field and pull up the results. If they’re visible and they have a profile on LinkedIn, you can pull up their page.

However, one caveat; if you don’t have a connection in common, you need special paid features to request connection with those people. This cuts down on people pinging others for non-legitimate reasons and being spammy.

There’s an etiquette to LinkedIn and if you’re new to LinkedIn, I suggest getting some help with creation of your profile and know the ‘rules of the road’ when reaching out.

So, what is LinkedIn used for?

Answer: to find opportunities, whether you are trying to recruit for your company, find new contacts for B2B sales.

Let VA Staffer help you optimize, maximize, and realize your potential on LinkedIn – the BEST social media platforms for B2B communications.