Most of us are on LinkedIn. Although many see LinkedIn as a professional social media network, few knows its full potential when it comes to generating leads and business referral.

Here’s a quick summary of a workshop conducted by RHT Digital and Media on Linkedin best practices. We see this as a good foundation for anyone interested to leverage social media for business.

Here are 8 quick ways to get you started:

• Prepare your 30-second elevator pitch. This is basically a quick response to anyone who will ask you what you do. Your answer has to be fast and concise and more importantly from the perspective of a customer. No one likes chest thumping so keep that to a minimum.

  A good example looks like this: “We specialize in content marketing for tech and food industry. We have been particularly successful with ABC company and others that are concerned about the increasing cost of advertising and the fatigue level of consumers. We have been able to boost brand awareness, engagement and lead conversion by as much as xx% by building trust with consumers through value-added content.”

  This doesn’t take too long to write and is immensely powerful for your brand.

• Build connections. It is a network afterall. LinkedIn “People you may know” list a great way to build that network. Spend a few minutes each day to look through and connect with people in your industry. Also don’t forget to add people you meet each day to your LinkedIn network. Put your LinkedIn address on your name card, flash it on a slide during your presentation and before you know it, you will have a sizable network to work with.
• Build your lead list. Spend some time each day to dig deeper into your connections. Are there contacts you don’t know personally but would like to meet? Write down a list of these potential introductions and figure out who can introduce you to them. Also try asking for recommendations outside of LinkedIn through phone calls or emails. People typically respond faster and you will also get a chance to catch up with your existing contacts, which brings us to the next point.
• Don’t forget your existing connections. Spend another couple of minutes to look up existing contacts, business partners, prospects and discover their company pages. You should follow and monitor any updates.
• Stay active, stay top of mind. Nothing does that better than posting an update or publishing an article. The former takes just a few minutes each day while the latter helps to establish your subject matter expertise. Whatever you post, make sure it is of value to your customers or audience. There are other social media network out there for you to express your creative appreciations but LinkedIn should be strictly professional.
• Join discussions. There are groups of users on LinkedIn with similar interests and from similar industries. Join them and start to contribute actively to discussions. Here is link to LinkedIn group directory (https://www.linkedin.com/directory/groups/)
• Celebrate with others. It can be a work anniversary or a birthday, LinkedIn makes it easy to know each other’s milestones. It doesn’t take too much time to just say a few congratulatory words or better yet, share it with others in your network and add an “@” reply to acknowledge the person. While you are at it, consider writing recommendations for people you have worked with. Nothing says thank you quite as well as a thoughtful testimonial of their work.

• Be consistent. This looks deceptively simple but requires a lot of commitment from the daily grind to get this right. You don’t have to be super aggressive but do make sure you have a well thought out workflow and calendar of things you want to share with your network. Keep it up and like any other relationships, it will flourish into something quite spectacular.

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