[LinkedIn Success Guide] UNIT 1: WHAT IS LINKEDIN ALL ABOUT?

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[LinkedIn Success Guide] UNIT 1: WHAT IS LINKEDIN ALL ABOUT?

Note: You can read the full guide and resources in the carousel above ☝️

Like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and a dozen others, LinkedIn is a social network. And like other social network, it's owned by a big tech company: Microsoft.

LinkedIn allows people to join it for free and to create a social profile. Whereas other social networks are mostly designed as billboards for people’s interests, hobbies, everyday moments and thoughts, LinkedIn is designed to highlight career related information.
LinkedIn profiles emphasize information such as professional or labor skills, employment history and education. Also, unlike common social networking sites, social contacts are not called followers or friends, but “connections”, as to establish a professional tone to interactions made by people on the platform.
These connections allow members to connect with people with whom they have worked, gone to school with, or with people that they know on a professional level, whether online or offline.
The big advantage that LinkedIn offers to its regular users is that it allows them to be discovered by companies looking for employees thanks to the massive amount of data that LinkedIn users provide the platform with, including job titles, geographical locations, skillsets, industry information and much more.
On a purely practical level, this means that users looking for new career options as well as for ways to expand their professional reach can use LinkedIn as a great platform to boost their efforts because it is a powerful way to connect with employers as well as with other people that might help them to learn a lot more about their own career path.
And much like on Facebook, users can customize their LinkedIn accounts so they are served only the best career related info, including personalized job listings. Also, a LinkedIn profile is currently valued like a well-crafted resume, and lots of people have had success in using the platform to find their dream jobs!
LinkedIn can also be used as a great educational resource, as lots of famous business people have LinkedIn profiles that any user can follow to find helpful tips from the most seasoned of professionals from around the world.
So now you know that LinkedIn is a great platform to kick start a professional career and to find the perfect job without ever leaving your house, but what if you are already running your own company? How can LinkedIn help you grow your business? We are glad you asked, because we are going to give you the answer now! 

What can LinkedIn do for your Business?

Ok, so it is obvious by now that LinkedIn represents a major shift in what the social media revolution offered to the public because it showed people that it was completely possible to create a social marketing platform that could be as user friendly as it was serious.

Not only because it got away with the “trivial” nature of every other social media platform and allowed people to use their social profiles as online resumes for free, because it also allowed companies to establish an online presence that didn’t have anything to do with entertaining their social audience.

And you can thank this to the fact that, perhaps inadvertently, LinkedIn slowly became a sort of data rich environment, a place containing the type of information about the modern job market that companies would have paid millions to just peek at.

1. You can use LinkedIn to hire the best talent on the net

LinkedIn is a great place for job seekers to find their dream job precisely because it is also a great place for businesses and companies of all sizes to attract the best talent and to recruit the best employees from the world’s largest talent pool.

Businesses can access recruiting tools that will allow them to post jobs to target the right candidates for the job offered, to find and source active as well as passive talent and to seize the collection of skills offered by these talents to further build their brands.

2. You can use LinkedIn as a marketing platform

And best of all, as a marketing platform to reach the largest professional audience in the world. You can easily reach the best fit for your business so you can further develop your brand, increase your visibility and make new business connections possible.

Marketing options on LinkedIn are pretty varied, and they include powerful promotional tools such as sponsored content that can reach people on any device, dynamic ads to market to professionals on the go, and display ads for those doing their job at the office, among others.

3. You can use LinkedIn to Sell

LinkedIn can increase your commercial potential by providing you with a platform that is designed to drive social selling efforts with real-time sales intelligence. And what this means is that LinkedIn is backing an entire platform with non-intrusive sales solutions.

4. You can use LinkedIn as a learning platform

LinkedIn is a professionally oriented platform, which makes education its second nature. As such, you can use LinkedIn to keep your team’s skillset up to date with current educational and developmental trends.

The workplace learning tools offered by LinkedIn will help your team to develop two of the most valued skills in the current and future industries: people management and soft skills, which include creativity and communication.

LinkedIn learning tools will also help your company to close the gap between soft and technical skills, which will help your company to become a business of the future! With over 10,000 online training and development courses available, LinkedIn is the perfect platform for ongoing professional development.

5. What else can your business benefit from by being on LinkedIn?

You can create shareable content that can help you connect with a wide professional audience. You can create content with the potential to add value to people’s professional lives, which can easily create engagement and foster a following for your company on the platform.

LinkedIn offers you multiple ways to feed information to its members by allowing you to post content using slide shares for business presentations, blog posts, infographics, webinars, podcasts and videos. You will just have to choose which ones are the best fits for your audience.

+ LinkedIn will not hinder your efforts to provide your audience with relevant content, and you will be able to post as many times as your content allows you to. In fact, LinkedIn encourages businesses to release quality content as much as possible!

+ You can use your company profile to drive more sales for products and services that your company develops. You will just have to tell your potential customers about their benefits!

+ You can use your business profile to differentiate yourself from your competition. Sharing news and information about your company culture on a regular basis can easily help you to establish a company persona.

+ Your employees can use their LinkedIn profiles to enhance your company’s visibility, as engaged and satisfied employees are a great way to communicate healthy social proof! 

Read more: You can read the full guide and resources in the carousel above ☝️