A social media site specifically created for business communities, LinkedIn’s vision is to give its registered members the opportunities to form documented professional networks of people that they know and trust.  A typical profile page of LinkedIn’s members prioritizes or highlight working experience or history and education – two of the most important benchmarks on which people are evaluated in the business world for business partnerships or employment.

How LinkedIn Works

Basically, membership is free, and members are referred to as “connections”.  Another basic difference between LinkedIn and social networking platforms like Facebook – aside from its business theme – is that LinkedIn requires that you have a previous relationship with a prospective connection first before being connected.

Many aspects of LinkedIn are designed with a more professional, business-oriented approach than most other social networking sites. Through of course of your LinkedIn exchanges most won’t lead to the light-hearted social interactions that Facebook is full of. However, LinkedIn can be a valuable resource for connecting you with other business or with business professionals and can be an idyllic platform for targeting anyone within that demographic.

The LinkedIn Style of Social Media Marketing

Because this is all about building networks, what you’re actually marketing on LinkedIn is yourself as an entrepreneur or business professional.  Understandably, the more you market yourself professionally, the more business contacts you gain, which is only favorable for your businesses in general.

So how exactly do you market yourself well in LinkedIn?  One way is to build up your profile. Since you are selling yourself, the first goal should be to make yourself look good on LinkedIn.  It isn’t just about being sociable and engaging, like most other social networking sites. On LinkedIn you can sell yourself, and your business, so there is nothing wrong with revealing your strengths. You can build your profile up in LinkedIn using the following features:

Status Updates:  Short statements about you that you think your connections will find most interesting or useful.  Here, you can include content-related links to other sites, including your business’ own, as well as links to other relevant sites and your other social media accounts.

Blog Posts:  LinkedIn lets you easily syndicate your profile with your blog posts and vice versa.  What this means is you can allow your LinkedIn profile to update automatically with your blogs on your business’ website by providing a link and abstract of your blogs.

Presentations: You can also post slide presentations such as Google Docs, PowerPoint or SlideShare on your profile.

Events:  You can post events on your LinkedIn profile to promote your events.

Tweets: LinkedIn also allows you to connect your Twitter tweets to your LinkedIn status updates to better keep your connections and followers updated on your latest happenings.

Maybe one of the best features is the ability to brand your LinkedIn address by customizing it.  Much like a personal website, a branded LinkedIn address can help boost your professional image. Wisely choosing the address you select will represent your company. You’ll want to appear professional and also select something well suited to what your business sells, offers, or represents.

Can We Help You with Your LinkedIn Profile?

Web Rocket Media Media provides you with premium support to strengthen your marketability on LinkedIn. We would be happy to tell you how we can offer customized packages to suit your specific needs. Let us know if we can help.