Our Social Media Marketing course explains how to use LinkedIn to market a business and how to create interesting and engaging content.

Using LinkedIn to market a business

Because LinkedIn is strictly for business users, it is an ideal platform for business networking and building relationships with influencers.

As with Facebook, you start with a personal Profile in your own name, but, in contrast with Facebook, this is about you as an employer, employee or self-employed person. Your hobbies and friends are not part of this unless they are part of your business.

Also in the same way as Facebook, you can have a linked Company Page, where you can post information and business updates.

How to write a business post for LinkedIn

This post highlights the top 10 LinkedIn Company Pages, as voted by LinkedIn members and chosen by LinkedIn because of their:

“… thought-provoking content and eye-catching imagery that showcases the best of their brands to their respective audiences on LinkedIn. These companies don’t just deliver compelling content, though. They encourage engagement by interacting with their visitors and followers on LinkedIn.”

As with Facebook, readers can Like, Comment and Share posts.

The articles on their websites are in depth, but every word counts, and they use lots of strong meaningful headings to make it easy for readers to scan.

The basics of writing for LinkedIn specifically are:

  1. Choose two or three topics that you want to become known for.
  2. Use these themes to guide everything you post, share and like.
  3. Do not direct sell on LinkedIn. This is a complete no-no. Rather, build people’s trust in you. If they like you, they will hunt down what you are offering.
  4. Write short posts of 20 to 30 words long. Your posts should be enticing in that they contain a strong image that tells the story, and your words should make people want to find out more, which they can do by following your link.
  5. Your articles should be longer – about 300-500 words. Articles give more in-depth information to your readers, so should be well crafted and clear, with no filler. Break the text up with information-rich sub-headers. Use bold and italics, if it helps. Use images throughout, to make the text easy to read and to add interest.

See our social media marketing course