6 Steps To Using LinkedIn To Develop Productive And Profitable Business Relationships

If you are a professional in financial services, you may be using LinkedIn as part of your networking and business development plan. Investors are active in social media with research in the US undertaken by LinkedIn in 2013 identifying that investors use social media to keep up to date with financial trends and to help them financial decisions.

Research in the US undertaken by LinkedIn in 2012 identified that investors research information about their financial decisions on LinkedIn.

I recently had the opportunity to deliver a workshop for women who are in the Pensions industry about how to use LinkedIn to develop productive and profitable relationships and you can find a summary of the areas I covered below. The workshop was focused on individuals using LinkedIn and therefore we did not go into details of using LinkedIn Company Pages.

1. Define your PURPOSE for using LinkedIn – As with all networks you join, identify your goals and objectives so that you can manage and prioritise how you will engage on LinkedIn and who you will look to connect with.

Your reputation and personal brand is impacted by your online presence. Increasingly people search for us as individuals not just the organisation we work for. LinkedIn is a great platform to use if you have a limited online profile as you can customise what information from your profile is accessible in search results.

If you are in career transition, LinkedIn is a great platform to keep up to speed with news about organisations and the their current vacancies by following Company Pages and participating in Groups.

2. Refer to your company social media and compliance POLICIES – It is especially important if you are in the financial services sector that to ensure that you comply with industry regulations and your company social media policy.

3. Review Your LinkedIn PRIVACY Settings – As with any other social network you join , take the time to review and refine your privacy settings to help you manage the security and online visibility of your data

4.Create a compelling LinkedIn PROFILE – Refine your profile ensuring that you use a professional image not a logo; add the key words that you want to be found for and enhance your profile adding multimedia.

In addition, you can edit your profile URL so that you have a shorter link to promote your profile. You can also add a link to a relevant page on your company website including a call to action to help you attract more traffic to your website.

Enhance your profile with multimedia, for example YouTube videos and SlideShare presentations or documents to your profile – consider how you could use this functionality to attract new business.

5. Take the time to actively PARTICIPATE in LinkedIn – Invite people to join you on LinkedIn using personalised invitations. Keep connected and share relevant updates. Identify LinkedIn Groups to join to support your professional goals.

Build your visibility using Groups and when you join a Group, take the time to review the guidelines posted by the moderator before you start to post updates. You can reply publically or privately to discussion topics. And of course you can consider creating your own Group.

6. Integrate and PROMOTE your profile – Dependent on your company policy, cross promote your LinkedIn profile on your business cards, email footer, your website and social networks.

i also recommended that the delegates in the workshop consider claiming their place in cyberspace – you may want to invest in purchasing your own domain name that you can use throughout your professional life. If you are not ready to develop a personal website you could point your personal domain name to your LinkedIn profile or to a social hub such as About.me.

I hope you found these tips of assistance and of course you can contact me if you have questions about how to make the most of your LinkedIn presence of to learn about the in-house LinkedIn workshops I customise for professional services and financial services clients.

What have you found helps you nurture business relationships on LinkedIn?

You can find the slides from my presentation here.

Six steps to using LinkedIn to develop productive and profitable relationships from Krishna De