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LinkedIn is the biggest social networking platform for people who mean “business”. The site is an online directory of sorts of organizations and professional individuals, and helps professionals connect with each other without leaving their offices. Different people use LinkedIn differently. For instance, individuals use the platform for connecting, professional networking, and job searching. Companies use the site to recruit and share company details with potential employees. If you are new to the site and don’t know how to use it to build your profile on the platform, the following tips shall help you learn how to use LinkedIn.

Getting Started

Learn how to use LinkedIn is quite straightforward. Sign up with the site and create your profile. The site provides two primary membership tiers: basic and premium. The ‘basic’ account comes with features such as profile creation, messaging, job posting methods, etc. The ‘premium’ account adds on to these base features with additional resources and features to help expand your presence online and extract more from the service. The ‘premium’ tier comprises four subcategories: Sales Navigator, Premium Career, Premium Business, and Recruiter Lite.

Select a Professional Picture

A good picture on LinkedIn helps make a solid first impression on people who see your profile. The shot should be professional and not casual. You need not necessarily spend a lot of money to get the right picture. But care must be taken when selecting picture background, your clothes, photo lighting, etc.

Write a Solid Profile Summary

Your profile summary helps you put the best version of you out there. Along with your profile picture, the summary helps create a good impression on visitors. A good profile summary comes in particularly handy if you are looking for fresh job opportunities. There is a 2,000-character restriction for this section. Therefore, use fewer words to say more. If you are not good at writing, you may ask someone else to do it for you. LinkedIn recommends creating three to five small paragraphs and leaving good amount of white space so that readers’ eyes do not glaze over upon landing on your page. The site also suggests using tight, short sentences, refraining from jargon usage, using keywords, and writing in first-person voice.

Tweak Your Profile

Besides the summary, your profile on LinkedIn could comprise details on your education, work experience, endorsements, skills, and people’s recommendations. The information should have searchable keywords so that finding your profile on LinkedIn becomes easier. Your profile would benefit if you incorporate relevant keywords that hiring managers and search engines look for. Including such buzzwords in your interests, summary, skills, and past job titles would help your LinkedIn profile stand out.

It is every marketer’s dream to generate leads or increase traffic to their websites without spending dollars on advertising. However, recent Google, Facebook and Twitter’s algorithm changes, while boosting user experiences, have continued to somewhat limit the organic reach of posts from businesses and brands.

Nonetheless, savvy marketers understand that marking on LinkedIn is still a goldmine that anybody can leverage to grow leads and drive traffic to their sites—for free. This doesn’t mean that advertising on LinkedIn is free. On the contrary, there are tricks that you can use to get leads without paying anything.

1. Tag People In Your Posts

Whenever you tag someone in your LinkedIn post, the people who follow them and their connections will see the post. And when a few people interact with the post, it will also be seen by those people’s connections and followers. However, don’t be tempted to tag anyone in your post. It is advisable to only tag people you have quoted or referenced in the post you are sharing.

2. Increase The Ease Of Being Discovered Using Hashtags

Like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn allow its users to follow hashtags to get contents in their feed even if they are not connected or follow specific influencers for the topic. The good news is that LinkedIn suggest some of trending hashtags for you when you are posting content. Even if you don’t use the suggested hashtags, they can give you some inspiration of what to include. If you are still confused about the best hashtags to include, do a quick search for the topic in question to see the number of people or followers on the hashtag.

3. Upload A Native Video

Native videos are video files that are directly uploaded to the LinkedIn platform—instead of sharing a link to a video that’s hosted elsewhere such as YouTube. Like other social platforms that use the power of videos to keep users on their networks for long, LinkedIn tend to favor native videos over external videos. Here are a few tips to include native videos in your next LinkedIn campaign:

• Share videos of your clients’ testimonials

• Create a trailer of a longer video

• Record a short video giving a summary of the post you are sharing

• Review a piece of content or a book

Final Thoughts

Now that you know a few free LinkedIn campaign ideas that you can leverage to grow your leads, you can go ahead and optimize your campaigns so that you can get in front of the right people.

Social media analytics is essentially an approach in which data is collected from blogs and social media platforms. The data is then evaluated and the findings used to help in the decision making process of a business. This procedure goes far beyond the basic analysis or normal monitoring of ‘likes’ or ‘retweets’ to cultivate an in-depth concept of the social end user. This is viewed as a base for empowering an enterprise to:

• Heighten social collaboration over a range of business functions like customer service, support and marketing.
• Make the most of customer experience
• Execute concentrated engagements such as one-to-many and one-to-one

Social media provides a great medium for business owners to understand real-time customer sentiments, intentions and choices. The most established application of this type of analytics is getting to know the consumer base on a more emotional level to assist with more targeted marketing and customer service.

Figuring out the business objectives that can benefit from the data that has been collected and assessed is one of the first steps when a social media analytics program is being established. Included among the standard goals are maximizing business earnings, lowering customer service expenditures, getting feedback on products and services and improving public opinion regarding a specific product or business division. The moment the goals of the business are figured out, the KPIs or key performance indicators to carry out objective assessment of the data has to be outlined.

Included among the benefits of applying social media tools are:

Learning from the Customers

Often, consumers have effective solutions for many of the issues an organization faces. For instance, if a product without proper documentation is on the market, it increases the chances of user errors. The users could solve these issues through trial and error and their findings can be posted in forums. This can assist the company in determining whether better documentation is needed.

Competitive Advantage

Analytics tools enable organizations to get a competitive edge over competitors by assisting with a greater understanding of their brands. Typically, this includes understanding how customers use specific services or products, the issues they faced while using them and getting feedback on the product or company.

Develop Products and Services

There are numerous blogs, tweets, complaints and comments about products and services. These consumer sentiments can be used to assess users’ experience. This data can then be used to assist companies with better performance.

Social media is the new marketplace. In the most recent past, a significant percentage of people have continuously used the social media to shop and seek information about their daily decisions. As a financial advisor, therefore, you have a chance of creating a stronger brand by using these platforms. Several proven strategies exist that can help make your financial advisor branding journey a success, especially if well-executed.

Without further ado, here are some of the strategies that any top Sydney branding agency would recommend:

1. Research

As simple as it seems, using social media is a little complicated, especially if you have a marketing agenda in mind. Not all social media outlets will give you the same results, so you will need to research on the appropriate channels to put out your branding strategies in. You need to also figure about the right social media tools that will give you fast ROI.

2. Have A Content Plan

For you to get the most out of social media branding efforts, you will need to be strategic about what you post, when to post it, and how to respond to people that react to your posts. If this is done well, it helps to create credibility for your brand. In the end, more and more people will begin to consider you as an authority.

3. Keep It Simple

As much as you desire to build your brand as a financial advisor, mind the terminologies that you use because not everyone is conversant with the financial jargons. In an endeavor to look intelligent, you may lose your potential followers and customers due to use of hard vocabularies.

4. Leverage The Power Of Call To Action Texts

People respond to action and only when asked to. Rarely will people reach out to ask fundamental questions about you and your brand if your posts do not lead them to do so. This means that you have to learn to create leading content that will invoke this reaction.

5. Hire A Content Manager

Financial advisor branding is not necessarily easy; social media marketing and branding is a vast topic and there are times when you may need help. As your brand expands, hire a Sydney branding agency to manage your posts, respond to your contacts, and direct business your way.

With these incredible tips, you are ready to make most out of branding using social media. Always be careful not to get lost in the ocean of social media interactions. Keep them purely for business and be a force to reckon with.

LinkedIn Premium plans don’t come cheap, and they are not an easy sell to the platform’s over 60 million users. However, there are an army of people who are willing to pay for the premium features on a monthly basis. But why is somebody willing to pay $30, %60, $80 or even $120 to just access LinkedIn Premium features and data? Well, here is why:

1. More Introductions

The introductions feature allows you to connect with people outside your network, especially if they are connected to someone already on your network. This might not sound like a big deal if you have never leveraged this feature, but if you have, you know very well that you can only get 15 such connections with a free account. With a Premium plan, you get up to 35 depending on the plan that you go with.

2. InMails

InMails helps you avoid “the long way” when it comes to connecting with your prospects. It is a great way of getting attention of people outside your network by making available an otherwise forbidden capability: sending private messages to second and third level connections.

3. More search results

Whenever you perform a search on LinkedIn, you will have far less results than you should access. If you have a free account, this will be clearer once you try to access page 11. On the contrary, a Premium account allows you to see up to 7X the amount of results. If you are a marketer who is trying to find leads beyond your local area, this feature is a goldmine.

4. More saved searches

It is normal to keep doing repeated searches once you have dialed into your target market, especially after performing an advanced search. An often overlooked perk of upgrading to a Premium plan is the amount of saved searches that you can store at any given time—it is increased from 3 (in a standard account) all the way to 10 (in Exclusive Premium Plans).

What’s more, you will receive email updates of new users who fit the criteria that you specified. If you are a marketer, just imagine how powerful this feature can be—receiving alerts whenever new prospects in your target market match the exact criteria you are looking for. This is literally delivering leads right into your email box!

Bottom-line

This post is not a promotion for LinkedIn premium but just a highlight of the valuable features that you can take advantage of when you decide to upgrade. If the above features don’t seem to provide immediate benefits to you, then you are just fine with a free account. However, if you are not sure and would want to learn more, subscribe to online free LinkedIn training tutorials for more comprehensive insight.