5 Tips to Use LinkedIn for Lead Generation

In the war of social media, LinkedIn is truly a world apart with its over 175 million registered users. Founded in 2002, LinkedIn has been always a professional networking platform with presence in 200 countries and available in 17 different languages for people that use this social site to get job opportunities or business contacts. Although its audience and social model is different from Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn is actually fighting the third place in popularity with Google Plus, and has left far behind the once popular MySpace.

Keeping these figures in mind it is easy to understand why LinkedIn is actually a viral market for lead generation. Opposite to its main two competitors Facebook and Twitter, these social networking sites are not aimed towards teenagers, or people seeking to meet with class mates, old time friends or family members, but specifically with professionals in different business fields. Market research on site performance as lead generator returned a 2.75% conversion rate.

You can also take advantage of the lead generation potential to make your business a success in no time. Depending on your niche or target audience, you can build specific channels to obtain leads for business to business exchange or promoting your products and services among professionals that meet your profile criteria. Even if you are a professional seeking for potential employers, lead generation will help you reach your goal quicker.

Starting with LinkedIn with lead generation in mind implies the development of an optimized profile. Fill in your profile entirely, but using SEO techniques such as including relevant keywords pertaining to your activities or area of expertise, bold headlines, and use bullet points to list your abilities, or how your company troubleshoots problems. If you are business owners, encourage your employees to have a LinkedIn profile and instruct them in how to optimize it in order to generate leads.

Once your profile is complete and updated, analyze the possibility to include calls to action in different sections. This is probably the oldest tip to generate a sale in marketing, but works the same when it comes to lead generation. You can list what are you good at and end your qualifications with a simple “call me now” to generate leads.

Another good tip is joining as many groups as you can to start building your network connections. By this simple action you are opening the door to new leads every day, but that is not all. LinkedIn answers are a complementary place where you can hang out to help others. This way, you can showcase your experience, building up an authority aura that also generate leads, even without needing to use a call to action.

Do not just sit down and wait for incoming leads, go and get them yourself. Although all the above tips are useful to generate leads, you can also get a good conversion rate by searching yourself profiles of prospective clients or businesses you would like to use for your business. Go find them, connect to them and let them discover what your offer is as soon as they accept the connection.

Advertising is probably the most obvious tip to generate leads, but many people do not pay too much attention to the full potential of LinkedIn Direct Ads. These ads are similar to Google AdWords, a PPC system where you select your target audience, keyword inclusion or exclusion, and the amount you are willing to pay per click. The advantage of using this system is that you are not limited to sending traffic to your LinkedIn profile or company page, but you can redirect the traffic directly to your website, sales copy or anywhere else.

Put into practice one all of these five tips and you will see how easy it is generate leads and get the conversion rate that you expect.