Social media is a great way to keep in touch with friends and family. But if you’re running a business it can be really tough to make a case for the ROI of updating Twitter and Facebook all day.
I’ve always been a strong advocate of using LinkedIn as the primary tool for B2B companies trying to leverage social media to drive business.
Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn is a business networking site. You won’t (or at least you shouldn’t) see funny pictures and profanity-laced updates. More importantly you post stuff to LinkedIn that most of your personal connections on Facebook probably don’t care about.
Related: Stop Polluting Your Personal Facebook Page with Business Updates
Another reason why LinkedIn is becoming more important everyday – as of March 2012, professionals were signing up to join LinkedIn at a rate of approximately two new members per second. And while 160 million members might not be Facebook numbers, it is a huge pool of potential partners and customers.
So the trick is to find a way to reach all these potential clients and turn them into real world business.
Now here comes the awesome part. LinkedIn actually makes it very easy to show visitors to your website how connected they are to you and your company.
If you run a website – you already know about the LinkedIn Share button and it’s ability to send your content to specific individuals, groups or simply post it as a status update.
But LinkedIn has a lot more social media options to help your business integrate with it’s members beyond simple sharing.
You probably haven’t heard of LinkedIn’s Member and Company Profile plugins (for any site – not just WordPress). But they are essential tools for any business looking to leverage social media effectiveness. Simply by dropping a small piece of code onto your homepage, LinkedIn members who come to your site from any traffic source will immediately see how “connected” they are to you or your company.
If you want to see it in action check out the home page of my site here. How are we connected?
Why are these tools important? Well if a prospective client sees that you are connected through a mutual business partner, that acts as a “soft referral” or endorsement of you and your business. And we all know that the more connected someone is to you the more likely they are to send business your way.
So here are the links to generate the code:
Member Profile
Business Profile
Go ahead and pass this post to your webmaster. Get these tools dropped onto your site today and start turning LinkedIn members into real clients.
How else are you using LinkedIn and other social media to grow your business? Let me know in the comments.