Promoting B2B Media On LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals worldwide.  It provides people with the opportunity to share knowledge, promote their credentials and keep in touch. At RightSite, it is providing us with free tool for increasing our referral traffic by more than 50% in a one month period. If you have a job and you haven’t checked out LinkedIn yet, then don’t think about leaving that job to start your own business.

At RightSite, most of our referrals (traffic to our site from sites other than search engines) now come from LinkedIn.  This is a tremendous source of traffic and it’s all free. If you are starting your own business, or you’re interested in promoting the one that you work for, then here are a few tips.

The easiest people to reach in LinkedIn are members of your own network.  If you are an entrepreneur or marketing professional then you should have a good-sized network.  If you don’t have at least 100 folks in your LinkedIn network, then consider a career in Library Science.

Beyond your own network (who probably know about what you’re doing already) there are a lot of other tools available for letting people know what you’re doing and driving traffic to your site.

General Pointers

• Join as many groups as possible that are related to the industry that your B2B covers, your media (such as the Internet, B2B trade media, etc), the locations that you focus on, or investment/business in your area.
• Be sure to include a link to your site in every post
• Be helpful – don’t just use LinkedIn to pimp yourself or you will build up annoyance rather than goodwill.  Give people information they can use, or give them the opportunity to promote their knowledge both on LinkedIn and on your site. If you provide a real service, then you will get real results from LinkedIn’s users.
• Try to make your posts on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursdays.  You will get more response when your input is fresh, and users are much less likely to use LinkedIn on busy Mondays or Fridays.

Groups

• LinkedIn has thousands of groups for diferent professions. Find groups related to the media industry or related to the industry that your B2B covers
• Join as many groups as possible, and be an active, helpful participant
• If your contributions make it onto your group’s email digests, then it will be pushed out to all the group’s members.  If you join the right groups, that can mean reaching thousands of professionals every week for free.

Discussions

Discussions is a section available in LinkedIn’s Groups section

• Use Discussions to get advice on sourcing an outside consultant or service
• Use Discussions for finding experts eager to contribute content to your site

News

News is a section available in LinkedIn’s Groups section

• Use the news section to share your editorial content with professionals who may be interested in such information.  Be sure to post each story on relevant groups only.

Answers

Answers is available to interact only with people in your direct network.

• Use Answers for technical questions that you can’t solve yourself, or to source vendors

What are you working on now?

• Use the “What are you working on now?” tool to make small announcements that will let people know about your progress on an interesting project, or to solicit help on finding staff, a computer supplier, or other routine items.

Later I promise to give a few tips on using Xing, Plaxo/Pulse, Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and about 50 others, but this is all I have time for today. Look forward to seeing you next time on Mingtiandi, and happy Easter.