If you are not familiar with LinkedIn, it is the number one social network for professionals. Like Facebook, people connect with others they know, yet unlike Facebook, they skip the party and baby pictures and focus on business relationships. Your “connections” represent the growth of your network. LinkedIn excels in driving corporate traffic towards businesses. It is so effective, 93% of marketers rate LinkedIn as effective for generating leads, and 65% of businesses report acquiring leads through LinkedIn.

Your first step, as with any form of social media, is to develop a powerful and creative profile. Your picture and position will convey your first impression even before you have the opportunity to respond to any message, a group message, or an invite to connect. When it comes to the description field, you may feel tempted to skip it. However, you have this 1,000-character space to describe your company and plant relevant keywords. The search feature allows customers to be connected with potential businesses by inputting relevant keywords like they might in Google.

In the background section of your profile, you have 2,000 characters to expound upon the details of your company. Instead of using fancy, business terms, stick to layman’s terms the average customer can understand. Be clear about the benefits your company can offer the customer.

The interests section is the perfect location to add as many relevant keywords as possible. LinkedIn allows you 1,000 characters for linking to relevant interests, such as exercise, fitness, marathons, and SEO keywords.

If you select keywords efficiently you have a better chance of customers running across your profile. Believe it or not LinkedIn draws in more traffic overall than Google+ and Bing, so it is imperative you ensure customers are being drawn towards you instead of the competition. Here are the best ways to make sure this happens for your business.

Advanced Search

You will find LinkedIn’s advanced search feature next to the “smart search” feature. This feature is available to all LinkedIn members regardless of whether they hold a free account or a premium one. After clicking the link, the following search items will appear:

• Keyword
• First name
• Last name
• Title or personal title
• Company
• School
• Location

In order to use the advanced search effectively, you need to have your market pinpoint targeted. By this stage you should know your potential consumer well. When you understand your customer, it is easy to fill in given search fields by asking the following questions:

• What keywords are your potential customers likely to be searching regularly? What are they looking for?
• Who are they? What are their business titles?
• Where would they work?
• What kind of education would they have?
• Where would they live?

Boolean Search

Even with a targeted advanced search, you will not always get as accurate of a result as you hope. To refine deeper utilize the Boolean search option. The Boolean search uses “modifiers” to help you find the targeted results you desire. For example:

• + and “” to hold phrases together (“Chief Financial Officer”/Chief+Financial+Officer)
• OR when you’re when your not sure of the correct title or keyword (trainer OR coach)
• AND to definitely include a search term or phrase (trainer AND coach)
• NOT to exclude a search term of phrase (NOT marketing)

+ “”

Using the + and quotation marks are key to achieving the targeted results you desire. If you are doing a search for a Chief Financial Officer, but you omit the + sign between Chief, financial, and officer, or you do not use quotation marks, your results will be overrun with results such as “chief”, “financial”, and “officers.” You may return search results of police officers when that is nowhere near your intended scope.

OR

If you have a couple of selections, but are unsure of the exact term you need to use, using “or” is the easiest way to accomplish this. Maybe you are looking to hire an accountant. However, accountants can go by various names from accountants, financial officers, chief financial officers, financial analysts etc. In order to make sure you receive hits from all applicable positions, utilize the OR search feature by choosing accountant OR “chief financial officers” OR “financial analysts” OR “financial officers”. This ensures no one in your scope gets left behind.

AND

The AND keyword is for further clarification within your audience or niche. If you were looking to hire a CFO OR accountant OR “financial officer” OR “chief financial officers” OR “financial analysts” AND you wanted to only return results from the information systems industry, you would simply add AND “information systems” AND computers AND “information technology” to the end of your search.

NOT

Out of the entire list of search terms, NOT may be the most helpful in the long run. Your search list may return a long list of employees with the competition. If you are not interested in this sector of people, simply add NOT to the search terms. You might add NOT Apple.

About Grey Umbrella Marketing

Grey Umbrella Marketing is an Internet marketing company that helps their clients achieve first page rankings for specific keywords with their webpages, blogs, and videos to increase sales. But utilizing social media, video marketing, content marketing, and website design to help our clients acquire customers, retain customers, and increase purchase frequency, Grey Umbrella Marketing is a leading Atlanta marketing, SEO, and eCommerce team. Visit their website at gumarketing.com or call (470) 428-1436 today!