Small Business Internet Marketing

LinkedIn was actually launched back in 2003, but had a slow following until the recent popularity of social media sites for business.  With more than 46 million users worldwide, LinkedIn is most frequently used as a way of networking with business colleagues and potential employers and employees.  In the past it was considered bad form to use social sites such as MySpace or Facebook for business purposes.  I’d say there’s been a shift there, wouldn’t you agree?  If you have yet to be so bold: Go here to add your LinkedIn profile (or, if you prefer, your resume) to your Facebook page: http://apps.facebook.com/my-resume.

The main idea of LinkedIn is/was to connect business professionals with other business pros that they trust, have worked with or know personally. These connections are carefully maintained by the site to avoid spammers and friend gatherers by asking questions before making a connection with another person. It also helps connect your “6 degrees of separation” by joining groups of other like-minded professionals that you can network with.

LinkedIn for Business

But what about LinkedIn’s use for businesses?  Well, the big dogs have been on board for awhile now.  More than 40% of Fortune 100 companies pay to use the site to find talent among its 46 million members.  But it’s not just about finding talent, although let’s not ignore that completely.  Did you know that you have the opportunity to showcase your business on LinkedIn as well?  Yep, it’s true. The 46 million and growing members of this network can read all about you, your company, and the potentially mindblowing things that you can do for them, their business, their friend’s business…you get the point.  Go here to get started: and Select “Add a Company”.   Or you can go look at ours, here.  You can also pay for premium profiles and those are custom quotes apparently.

There are a lot of ways to use LinkedIn for business and, for the sake of brevity and not reinventing the wheel, here’s a fantastic article by Meryl Evan of Webworkerdaily called: 33 Ways to Use LinkedIn for Business.

Growth & Innovation - Look Out:

There is a “buzz” growing around LinkedIn.  I’m actually writing this because clients keep asking about it and figured it was time I looked into it a little deeper.  Speaking of “buzz”, this is cool:  LinkedIn has what called a Company Buzz application, which allows members to track what is said about a company on Twitter. The application is a filter for Twitter conversations based on search terms and can be customized by members, allowing them to see who is talking about a specific company and products.  The application shows Tweets, trends and top keywords.  Very nice way to track and consolidate what is being said about your biz.

As for growth, these number are just out today:  In Europe the network  just crossed the 11 million members barrier, which cements it’s position as the preferred professional online network in Europe and the rest of the world. Globally, a new professional signs up for LinkedIn every second. LinkedIn currently gets a million new members every two weeks. LinkedIn is a global network, operating in 200 countries and across 170 industries. The’’ve launched local language sites in France, Germany and Spain and there are more in the pipeline.

 

You may want to think about checking it out.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under SEO Consultant, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Small Business Internet Marketing, Uncategorized, Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.