The final part of our four-part series, you can find parts 1, 2 and 3 by clicking on the numbers.

We’ve seen LinkedIn used successfully across a wide spectrum of needs from staff engagement to sales, and we constantly see new uses evolving and cannot see any sign of that stopping as increasingly all things social just become part of our everyday work and life.

This means that the understanding of digital toolsets like LinkedIn is increasingly assumed, but we know from experience that is often not the case, and if you need a little help in the right direction from us then don’t hesitate to give us a call.

To finalise our list of twenty things to do with LinkedIn that you never knew you could here are the last five:

1. Channel management
If your business sells through a channel such as the worlds of IT, retail or insurance then you need to think about how you can manage channel relationships, share relevant news and find new channel partners.

As the biggest database of business professionals mapped out it makes it easy to spot and engage with potential partners in your channels.

2. Networking (so often overlooked!)
The best definition of a network I have ever heard is that it is your safety net when you need it to be and your fishing net when you need it, and the worst time to find out just how good it is? When you need it!

Networking is at the core of every executive’s success both inside and outside of their own business, team and market. It gives you a great stream of outside impetus, referral potential and access to people you might normally not come across.

3. Keeping in touch (yes really keeping in touch, not just connect and forget)
On LinkedIn there is a huge temptation to surround yourself with good people and then unintentionally ignore them all.

We simply forget to keep in touch and LinkedIn will tell you when you connected on each connection’s contact details within the desktop or laptop experience, and you can even sort all of your connections by recency (see here).

LinkedIn gives you a whole cornucopia of ways to keep in touch with messages, status update posts and articles as well as simply engaging inside and outside of LinkedIn on the phone or over a coffee (my personal preference).

4. Award / Poll / Influence / Politicians
You can always coerce and shape agendas using your networks to shape perspective. Think about how you could engage with politicians for example, leverage public comments, use networks to gain access and more and the same applies across a broad range of networks of influence.

We’ve seen this employed by good causes across sustainability, politics and even to access large corporations just using LinkedIn to change perspectives and shape agendas as we would in real life.

5. Website replacement
Within the UK there has been more traffic on social platforms than the traditional internet for some time, part of this is the increasing prevalence and convenience of mobile and another part is thehuman behaviour of asking or following those we value the opinion of (think friends and family whom you ask about trades people, builders etc).

One of the emerging trends we’ve seen in start-ups is using a LinkedIn company page as a fledgling website and we have to say it’s actually quite smart! LinkedIn company pages personalise the viewers experience for free once your audience is big enough, they’re hosted for free, branded and you can share other content from other web resources or even from profiles and posts – good cost effective first steps.

Of course, as they progress they transcend into full blown professional websites as and when required and we’re not for a moment suggesting that as a long term solution as websites are still important in our view – you may well be reading this on our blog for example.

So that is it, twenty things to do on LinkedIn to help you with your role you may not have thought about, but by the time you’ve read this we will probably be writing yet more blogs about other ways of working as we come across them.

Of course, we’ve not mentioned GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) within our 20 as this is now just part of the modern landscape but LinkedIn messages, interactions, InMail messages and more are all compliant just as long as you stay within LinkedIn.

If you’re using LinkedIn differently again then get in touch and let us know how.

Or just shout, spam and wonder why it doesn’t work …

19 September 2018

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