LinkedIn has been around for nearly 20 years and has cemented its place as a site for celebrating your accomplishments and colleagues, networking, and representing your business.LinkedIn is an incredibly powerful tool for job seekers and recruiters, but it’s also an excellent business marketing platform.
However, few LinkedIn users realize all of the incredible features this platform offers.
Below we’ll discuss some features you need to know about when it comes to using LinkedIn to its fullest.
Keep Your Connections Private
Marketing on LinkedIn means building genuine relationships with other industry leaders and initiates to let them know that you are worth paying attention to, and your products worth utilizing to further their own careers. Of course, with all the energy you have invested in building a solid connection list and potential client base, you don’t want your connections to be picked up by competitors lurking on your profile. You can change your settings so that only some users can see one another via your connections list instead of it being fully available, protecting your connections from poaching.
When you change this setting, your connections list will be hidden except for mutual connections and connections who have endorsed you for particular skills. This helps you avoid the risk of anyone pulling connections based on your expertise and history in the industry.
That being said, public connections lists can be incredibly helpful for your business marketing. Always be on the lookout for members of your target audience with who you do not yet have a connection. Monitor relevant public lists for new, untapped connections, but keep yours private and away from the competition.
Private Profile Viewing
Say you want to do some discreet audience research before you develop a new product campaign. You can view profiles in private mode, which will hide or obscure your identifying information and picture from those whose profiles you have viewed. Private profile viewing is a great reason to consider LinkedIn Premium.
Private viewing is a way for members to view profiles without running the risk of being bombarded with requests for messages or connections. As mentioned above, it can also help keep people from pulling connections and client lists based on the profiles you view.
The private mode can also be used to build leads and quietly build leads. This way, rather than feeling pressured to contact someone as soon as you locate their profile to clarify why you were reading it, you can take time to write personalized messages that respect their expertise and time. Understanding the value of your customer’s time is especially important on LinkedIn, a platform populated by industry leaders and executives.
Showcase Pages
Showcase Pages are another great LinkedIn feature that can help your business. If your company has multiple initiatives you want to highlight, or separate audiences you want to reach with your products, Showcase Pages are for you! These allow you to create sub-pages linked to your wider brand to better articulate your services on each page. This way, rather than hoping that audiences sort through relevant content released from one page, you can publish different content to these for them to follow and know is meant for them.
LinkedIn encourages you to consider the number of Showcase Pages you create before you develop them. They specifically mention that if you find your team wants to create 10 or more, you should work to unite some of your audiences. This will help you minimize the amount of separate content you have to create and maintain and help your audiences to avoid their becoming overwhelmed with choice. Ultimately, you want to create enough Showcase Pages to helpfully differentiate your content, but not so many that it’s a headache for you or your audience.
You could also use Showcase Pages to highlight new initiatives or broader company news by publishing customized updates to your individual pages. While you’ve separated Showcase links, they all contribute to the broader ecosystem of your organization and users can benefit from your other services they might otherwise not pay as much attention to.
Search Saving
LinkedIn understands that spending hours a week searching for leads is already quite an undertaking without the frustration of having to re-submit your carefully selected keywords and filter settings each time. To alleviate this frustration, they’ve developed an option to save your searches, so that when new LinkedIn users meet your search criteria, you’ll receive an email without their being notified.
Using the saved search feature will make lead generation much easier, and being able to save multiple searches will simplify lead finding for the various campaigns and initiatives your company is putting forward at a time. If you’ve already set up your sales preferences, you can also apply these to your saved searches. They also allow for integration with TeamLink for LinkedIn, which allows you to view and utilize your team’s connections to potential leads.
Message Without Connections
If TeamLink does not offer you a path to contacting a connection through another team member, there are still ways to contact them without connecting yourself.
LinkedIn offers InMail as another feature of their premium service, which lets you send a certain number of messages to people who you do not have a prior connection to each month. This feature is commonly used for job openings or advanced degrees, but it can also work for prospects. InMail is a great option if you do not want to have to wait on an acceptance to reach out to someone, but of course, you should use it wisely.
If you do not have a subscription to LinkedIn Premium and have not purchased InMail credits, you can still contact people without forming a connection. You do this by inviting them to connect and using a personalized message to introduce yourself and your interest in connecting. This should be used as an earnest way of reaching out to relevant people. Do not abuse this feature!
Utilizing LinkedIn Scheduler
Finally, if you have a LinkedIn Recruiter account, you can connect the LinkedIn Scheduler directly to your calendar to simplify inviting potential prospects to conversations and meetings. With the scheduler, you can embed links to calendar invites directly into your messages for them to select and either add to their calendar or hop to a digital meeting link. With all the work you already do seeking out candidates and liaising between teams, this is one fewer hyperlink to create and more time to curate your lists.
LinkedIn has many features that users may not be aware of, and a lot of them can benefit your business. The features above can help you leverage LinkedIn to its full capacity. Use these tools to improve your hiring and marketing processes.
