2. Identify Buyer Personas and Conversations In order to achieve the above objectives, it is important to identify the buyer personas with whom your company is looking to connect, and then determine if, and where, they are active on LinkedIn. Do some preliminary LinkedIn Answers and Group searches to see if your target audiences are active on LinkedIn prior to diving in. At this time, flag any relevant conversations or groups to share with your team. Note: It may be helpful to create an Excel document that lists potential groups with descriptions, links and notes to reference later.
3. Select Employees to Lead Participation Designate a few employees to be internal LinkedIn champions. To be most effective, these individuals should be social-network savvy; knowledgeable about your products, services and brand messaging; and have a desire to engage with target audiences. Participants should also have the time availability each week to respond to LinkedIn discussions and questions relating to their areas of expertise. Note: See Step 5 for tips on how to alleviate some of the time commitment required from individuals.
4. Have Employees Optimize Their Profiles Encourage your employees to optimize their profiles. Be sure that all individual profiles are completely filled out — including the Summary, Specialties and Job Position sections — with keyword-rich descriptions. Also, include links to Twitter profiles, as well as optimized links to your company website and blog, if applicable.
5. Set Up a Monitoring System LinkedIn Answers and Groups provide the most opportunities to connect with prospects, customers, vendor partners and peers. For this reason, it’s important to monitor these sections on a regular basis, and contribute meaningfully to discussions.
6. Participate & Engage in Conversations On an ongoing basis, encourage employees to actively participate in priority groups and respond to relevant LinkedIn Answers queries. In addition, employees should update their LinkedIn statuses often. This increases their visibility on the site by ensuring that they appear more often on their connections’ home page feeds. Note: By integrating your Twitter account with LinkedIn, Tweets that contain #in will automatically be posted to your LinkedIn account.
7. Set Up a Monitoring System Employees should also be encouraged to proactively request connections with business contacts, and to continuously work to nurture those relationships. Some tips include: passing along relevant content via status updates and individual messages, and connecting like-minded individuals when appropriate.
