How to make the most of LinkedIn

There’s been a flurry of news over the last couple of weeks about LinkedIn upgrading its ‘Company Pages’ functionality to help businesses better showcase products and services with more multimedia content and greater levels of interactivity.

The idea is to encourage employees, customers and others to spread word-of-mouth about a company throughout the LinkedIn network to boost sales and interaction level.

Earlier this year, LinkedIn added the ability for members to ‘Follow’ companies on the site as they might follow other users on Twitter or "Like" a brand on Facebook. Some 30 million LinkedIn users are now following over 1 million companies to find out about new job openings or new hires or promotions and other company developments.

To date, LinkedIn seems to have been a forum geared towards job searching. The addition of the ‘Follow’ functionality, plus ‘Groups’, ‘Questions and Answers’ and ‘Twitter’ updates has marked a huge leap forward for the platform to enable people to use it to get professional development tips and use an extended network of their peers as a sounding boarding for initiatives they are planning at work.

I myself have joined a range of alumini groups run by my former universities and places of work as well as a professional networking groups for inhouse PR people, amongst other things. The former has generated a wealth of irrelevant emails. Thankfully with hotmail’s new ‘social updates’ tab I can get rid of these in one clean sweep in my inbox.

However, the very niche ‘specialist groups’ have come into their own. They have created opportunities for me to network with like-minded individuals in similar roles at other companies at live events. 

I find that if you meet someone ‘in the flesh’, even if it's just the once, your ‘working’ or ‘networking’ relationship is far more effective. I now have a forum where I can post questions about tools or suppliers I’m considering using as a PR professional. 

One of my group takes a conscious decision to vet who joins so when we do meet up we can discuss professional issues and opportunities openly without having suppliers with a vested interest pitch a product or service at us. For me this really is invaluable.

I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s recruited or found a job via LinkedIn, but apparently it does happen according to the Wall Street Journal. The top tip from Silicon.com is to create a target list of companies you want to work for and 'Follow' them. You'll then be able to see if they post up details of any vacancies. 


I can certainly see that social media in a B2B world is going to become more important as these platforms develop and mature.

B2B social networking tools come of age

Earlier this year, Cisco published the results of social networking survey of 100 companies in 20 countries. The researchers looked at which tools are being used, which areas of business are adopting them and how they’re putting them to use, and some of the challenges that are arising.

They found that social networking tools are not just being used by marketing and communications professionals to engage with the customer or end user, but also to collaborate more effectively internally and with business partners.

Nick Earle, senior vice president, Cisco Services, observes that:

"The rise of the connected consumer is driving a market shift in the enterprise, creating "people-powered business" where social networking tools and collaborative technologies are the propeller of the next-generation of productivity and bringing about a fundamentally different leadership model."

The study’s well worth a read.

LinkedIn springs to mind as the most effective social network in the business world today. The network effect encourages people to join a site that has the most members and LinkedIn seems to have no real competition here.

LinkedIn Groups has helped the service move beyond being just a place to find a contact in a specific organisation and introduced the social element that had been missing. A lot of people are using the platform to get advice from their extended network on business questions, manage invites to industry events and search for jobs.

Beyond this, Yammer is becoming increasingly popular as an enterprise social networking tool. Once you have created an account by registering an official email account, featuring company’s domain name any person joining with the same email domain name will be entered into the main group by default. It provides a single platform for microblogging, direct messaging, file sharing, tagging content and creating a fully searchable knowledge base.

Collaboration software has been around for a decade or more but with social networking tools it will become much easier to problem solve, knowledge share as well as increasing productivity and innovation.

Why are social networks important in the B2B world?

A wide range of communication channels are used by business-to-business companies to get customers excited about their products and services and keep them coming back for more. But how effective are these?

Sometimes your key messages can get lost in the sea of meetings, phone calls, emails as well as online and offline media that your customers are exposed to on a day-to-day basis.

Social networking tools can help to bring structure and order to this wealth of information.

Developing a reputation as a thought leader
Social networking tools, like blogs or wikis, can help create and consolidate a B2B company’s position as a thought leader. Providing you have relevant and credible insights in their sector and present these in a clear and compelling way, companies can make themselves a “go to” source of information.

Helping customers help themselves 
A community where people can search, browse and post answers online to questions about products or services they’re thinking of buying or business problems they are facing makes perfect sense. It can help to reduce sales and support costs as well as improve customer satisfaction ratings.

Providing instantaneous answers
Companies can use social networking to create a databank of answers to customers’ common queries. However, they should make it equally easy to send someone a tweet or instant message and get their response right away from the company’s sales and service support professionals.

Innovating for and with your customers
A B2B social community can be a fantastic resource to track people attitudes to emerging business trends, collate feedback on your products and services or even collaborate with customers on future ones via a virtual user community.

Building stronger relationships with your customers
Online social networking should be used to complement and enhance offline networking. Online polls can be used to determine the relative importance of a range of business issues or product features and functions. The results could be discussed at user community events or participants could even be invited to get involved in product or service pilots.

Lowering your costs and achieving global reach
Social networks connect people at low cost and have global reach. By reducing sales, marketing and support costs, companies can deliver better value to customers and improve their gross margins.

Attracting and retaining talented employees
Social networking can help your company attract the attention of talented prospective employees. It provides an opportunity to make people aware of vacancies and give candidates a sense of your company culture.

This blog will investigate each of these key benefits in turn, identifying new research, case studies and best practice examples in the blogosphere. It would be great to hear your thoughts and experiences.