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Among the many other new social media available to grow your small business, LinkedIn can be
one of the most perplexing. By now you probably know that LinkedIn allows you to find potential
employees and customers based on their interest and experience. But apart from that - how can it
actually help your business grow and generate revenue? Here are several methods that will make
the best of use of LinkedIn to help grow your business:
1) Understand how the "Degrees of Connection" Works
It will be impossible to successfully use LinkedIn without understanding their process of attributing
"degrees" to your connections with people. A first degree connection - which is the best type of
connection to have - means that you and the other person agreed to an invitation to be connected.
A second-degree connection means they are a connection of your connection. Third degree
means a connection of your second connection. Obviously, it is important to acquire as many first
and second degree connections as possible on the site.
2) Identify Your Target Market
Search for individuals on LinkedIn based on their interests, their profession, their location, etc. It is
not effective to try to connect to everybody without any reason for why they should accept your
invitation; you want to try to seek out first and second degree connections and prove to those
people that you are someone with whom they want to connect. One way of improving your degree
of connection with an individual could be by reaching out to the company where they work, which
will also have the effect of showing that company that you personally want to be involved with
them.
3) Utilize LinkedIn Answers to Make Connections
LinkedIn Answers is a new and growing resource where business owners can ask and answer
questions related to their businesses. The answers are always reliable because you can see how
many answers by subject-matter "experts" have been ranked as "best answers." You can take one
of two strategies here: ask legitimate questions that your business has and try to befriend those
who answer your questions. Also, you can claim to be a subject-matter expert and help those who
have questions related to your business. For example, if you run a restaurant business, you can
help those who want to learn about funding a restaurant business, how to find an ideal location to
set up the restaurant, etc. Both of these methods might allow you to make first degree connections
with others on LinkedIn.
4) Learn Who's Who at a Given Company
2. One of the benefits of LinkedIn is that companies who use it regularly are basically giving you a
map of who's who at their business. While job titles are helpful, we all know they don't describe
everything. Often by seeing descriptions of people's work and experience, and by seeing who in
their business is connected to whom, you can learn about the rank of staff members at a given
company and which person would be the best contact for you.
5) Build Up Your Own Reputation
Even if it is the internet, having a good reputation online will inevitably eventually reflect on your
reputation as a business-person in real life! And having a good reputation will always reflect upon
the reputation of your business as well. Learn about how LinkedIn's recommendation tool works:
you can ask coworkers, former bosses, former clients, and more for recommendations and the
resulting reputation is visible to those that visit your profile. This can be a good supplement in
today's world of job searching - it is not entirely unlikely that potential employers will try to take a
look at your LinkedIn account and, if they access your page, they might take this reputation score
into account.
Like any other social media strategy, be sure that the time and energy you spend investing in
LinkedIn is truly having an impact on the success of your business and ultimately causing you to
generate revenue for your business. If you feel like your efforts aren't paying off, you may want to
look for another way to invest your time.
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Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lily_Faden
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Simplify and Build your Business with this One of a Kind LINKEDIN Software!
http://www.jvzoo.com/c/2240/534/
==== ====