How Essential is Linkedin for Growing a Small Business?

Linkedin is an ideal platform for the recruitment of highly skilled employees, building and nurturing business relationships within your sector and without, legitimate and strong lead acquisition opportunities, and establishing your brand as a credible authority/influencer in your industry. My reasoning is as follows:

Linkedin has been highly regarded as one of the premier sources for recruitment of highly skilled and professional employees. Our company utilizes a host of HR tools and software plug-ins to Linkedin that allows us to thoroughly vet job applicants prior to the initial interview and subsequent job offer.

Given that the vast majority of Linkedin members are educated professionals, we advise our staff and clients to not only create a Linked profile, but to nurture their established connections. We recommend utilizing software like Dux Soup that allows users to create, organize, and update Linkedin contact records. Reaching out to their connections on a regular basis(once[1] /twice a month), offers to do lunch if they live in the same city, and always extending offers of assistance in any initiatives that your connections may be working on. These steps and activities have shown incredible outcomes for us and our clients.

From a sales and marketing standpoint, Linkedin has been a very effective platform for email marketing and lead acquisition. Our sales team have used tools like Dux Soup and Hubspot to gain greater insight about prospective leads prior to the beginning of the initial outreach campaign. Linkedin allows us to have more precise campaign targeting that may not be otherwise possible on other platforms. The use of Linkedin to generate sales opportunities has worked very well for our clients and their businesses.

Linkedin has done a very good job of establishing its brand's reputation as a source for credible information, articles, and users. Our firm uses Linkedin to post blog articles that help to establish us as an industry thought leader and influencer. Writing industry articles are very effective at establishing and building a brand's reputation and has enormous ROI.

Linkedin's popularity has grown to almost 300 million users worldwide, almost one account for every American, weekly usage rates of 0-2hrs, an average user age group of 25-34, and a member's annual income of 60% making $100k+. These are very attractive customer personas for any business, which is why we strongly feel that Linkedin is an invaluable resource for business.