How to use LinkedIn for digital public relations

Go and visit LinkedIn. Search for a business and you will find that if a company is serious about exposure, digital public relations as well as popularity, they will be present on this platform. This includes:

• Professional people seeking new employment positions,
• Those other people who already have positions but would like to have a business profile which everyone can see.

LinkedIn is an effective tool when it comes to you personally, or for business exposure.

With new social networks constantly sprouting up, LinkedIn is a platform which often gets underutilised or is put on the back burner. However, the truth is that LinkedIn can be extremely powerful in terms of digital public relations. This is especially when you’re aware of all the platform’s hidden features which don’t get nearly as much attention as they deserve.

The features that LinkedIn provides

LinkedIn also offers additional opportunities as well. You can:

• Be a member of groups,
• Leave recommendations for other LinkedIn members, and
• Get recommendations.

You will have the ability to make connections with very popular businesses and people which allows your popularity to grow as a result. It is possible for you to communicate with a variety of individuals and make influential friends from all over the globe. LinkedIn provides opportunities, which are different from any other social network. This is one of the main reasons why it has become extremely popular.

The largest professional network on the Internet

LinkedIn functions as the world’s largest professional network on the Internet and has more than 313 million members in over 200 countries as well as territories. Professionals are signing up to sign up to LinkedIn at a rate of more than two new members every second.

There are more than 39 million students as well as recent university graduates who are on LinkedIn and they are LinkedIn’s fastest-growing demographic. The business-to-business social media platform counts executives from all 2013 Fortune 500 businesses as members. It corporate talent solutions are utilised by 94 of the Fortune 100 companies. In addition, there are more than 1.5 million unique publishers who are actively using the LinkedIn Share button on their websites, as part of their digital public relations strategy, to send content onto the LinkedIn platform.

What is a LinkedIn company page?

A surprising fact about LinkedIn is that only 57% of companies have a company LinkedIn page. With the lack of quantity, a simple company page is the best opportunity to stand out in the crowd. This page will develop into the centrepoint of all activity. You can share:

• Status updates, as well as
• Pictures and videos.

You can do this while gaining an insight into the page’s analytics and following.

Connecting with the right people on LinkedIn

When people think of PR, most would conjure up images of a person’s smart phone filled with the who’s who of celebrities and top media contacts. LinkedIn has the best media contacts at the tip of your fingers and they are only a connection request away. Make sure your clients connect to journalists, especially ones that work in niche publications. This could expose the journalists to your client’s content, sparking an idea for their next piece.

Post unused content

Most business owners and PR professionals have at least one media release or article that didn’t get the pick-up they were hoping for. Use LinkedIn to post appropriate press releases or articles to the company page to ensure the message gets out there. You can also sponsor the posts from a company page to target journalists or stakeholders.

Humanise your brand

People buy into other people, not products. Your best fans are your employees, and on average their following is ten times higher than a company page. Get these staff members to spread the word, whether it is through reposting an article the company was featured in or having them write and post content themselves.

Optimise the anchor text for the blog or website links on your LinkedIn profile

Rather than making use of the default anchor text links in the websites list in your LinkedIn profile’s contact Info section, modify the anchor text in order to make those links more appealing to individuals who view your profile.

So if you would like to increase clicks on the website links you display there, change the anchor text of those links to something more attention-grabbing than the standard options LinkedIn provides.

Answer Questions and Influence People

People across many industries make use of the LinkedIn Answers feature to share their knowledge or carry out their own research. It works like this:

• A LinkedIn user makes an enquiry in categories such as start-ups, taxes, marketing or Digital Public Relations.
• A Digital PR pro can then encourage her clients to respond to questions knowledgeably that pertain to their specific fields.
• Alternatively, if the Digital PR pro is searching for a job or new clients, she can offer her own expertise in PR and, in addition, perhaps land a new, lucrative contact.

Either way, responding to questions on LinkedIn gets a Digital PR pro or her client – as well as their expert knowledge – in front of a captive audience and so increasing their cachet as an experts.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Want to find out how to become a Digital PR expert? If you do then check out our Digital PR Course. For more information, please follow this link.