LinkedIn has become a virtual corporate networking event where individuals visit, communicate with each other, exchange views, and information with different connections. All the features in LinkedIn are specialized and have been built focused on career grooming.
LinkedIn is a connectivity powerhouse, and with the click of a button, you can do many things. More and more, companies and individuals look at LinkedIn profiles to get feedback, inspiration, ideas, constructive criticism, and recommendations that help make better decisions.
But, there is a big difference between having an account in LinkedIn and using it effectively. Starting from the basic to advanced features of this business network has been designed in such a way that you can present yourself or your brand in a better way to a potential client.
Why LinkedIn Is Important For Business?
Let’s see some real reasons why LinkedIn needs to be a part of your business strategies.
Reason No-1: Grow your brand’s reach: Wide range of quality customer and supplier base are going to become the most critical factors for achieving mega-growth across all types of business. LinkedIn’s advanced search option is a great tool to reach and connect through brand awareness with potential customers, as well as likeminded users and suppliers, regardless of the size of your organization.
Reason No-2: Attracting and involve top talent: Hiring and sorting top skills and putting them together in a team that perfectly matches the venture’s objectives and values are much harder. However, LinkedIn Talent Solutions is useful to find a candidate that perfectly fits the position. The source to get qualified referrals is the reason why LinkedIn has been one of the recruiters’ favorite tools.
Reason No-3: Promote Your Business: A study showed at least half of the customers are likely to buy company products if they interact through the company’s LinkedIn page. By advertising on this platform, companies will make more connections, and it’ll help to spread awareness to more traffic, and allows you to fine-tuning the targets. Creating an insightful company profile, leveraging group experience, and adopting content marketing strategies are popular ways to improve a brand’s presence and building online authority- rewarding when it all comes together.
Reason No-4: Generate leads for your website: Creating and publishing rich content, optimizing profile, and targeting the key decision-makers help the business to open the doors for delivering potential clients to your external website, engaging them and turning them into customers. This effort eventually will increase the chance of ranking high on search- more visibility means more business.
Like business, LinkedIn offers plenty of opportunities for individuals who are seeking new career start or promoting themselves to top-levels or for the corporate house to promote themselves through establishing connections and building relationships.
So, the potentiality is there for both individuals and companies. And, there should not be any reason for not including this ready-made audience building platform in your social marketing effort.
Importance of LinkedIn in Career?
Here, we’ve compiled some bold reasons for using LinkedIn in a career as an influencer.
- It has become a NEW standard for job seekers: A serious candidate must know what’s happening around and considering this fact, LinkedIn has a direct co-relation with career. With the growing popularity of LinkedIn, not having a LinkedIn profile is the biggest scary career risk you are taking. In this circumstance, if you don’t have an account here on LinkedIn, the recruiter might completely disregard your application.
- It helps the recruiter to track you down: First impression matter. Searching for a candidate’s profile online has become a trend, and smart recruiters are not different from them. Not all but in most cases, if you have a perfectly optimized LinkedIn profile, you will be found on top of Google’s SERPs if the employer performs a search with your name. You might have other social media account like Facebook or twitter, but recruiters prefer LinkedIn on top of them.
- It helps to showcase your credibility: LinkedIn has a long list of sections where you put your information to showcase who you are professional. So unless you make your profile shine with the information it needed to demonstrate your credibility than other candidates, there is less or no chance of getting a call for the interview. It won’t matter how the right set of skills and a great personality you have if you can’t get a call.
When you took part in the discussions or post your views, beliefs, and critics on this virtual networking site, it showcases your area of expertise. It helps to know you better than it is sometimes impossible to judge you based on reading your resume. It helps you to build your personal brand and helps the interviewers to make a better decision.
- LinkedIn is dynamic: Though it’s true, people tend to update their CV from time to time, but it’s a robotic version of yourself. Whereas LinkedIn is dynamic and a full-bodied personal branding tool that helps you to tell your career-story interestingly. Let’s take a side-by-side example of about SEO specialist’s resume and LinkedIn
Resume: Created successful online marketing strategies and campaigns to cross-sell products that helped to grow sales by 20%
In LinkedIn: When I was asked to lead and direct the sales team after two months of my joining, my previous experience as East Region Sales Director of a renowned healthcare company allowed me to guide with immediate results. And the outcomes were like cross-sell opportunities within the customer base by applying consultative selling techniques and adopting integrated acquisition systems.
You can clearly see that in a resume you write short & sweet types description, whereas in the summary of a LinkedIn profile is written like a conversation that gives the selector a sense of who you really are without being limited by the strict etiquette that resumes must follow and how you become fit for the position.
- It can help with massive and powerful networking: LinkedIn is your chance to show yourself as a standout candidate through your endorsements- a great way to recognize your 1st-degree connections. Your connection establishment efforts let you build a series of relationships with people who you know professionally- it might be your existing and old colleagues, peers, and bosses. They can endorse your skills, and in today’s digital-centric world, reviews are essential. The powers that got the highest number of endorsements will show on top of the list, while the lowest voted skills will be shown at the bottom. While it’s also true that aka quantity isn’t too essential, but quality attested from the right people that matter.
The opportunity is endless. When you build a relationship with your old peers, and if he/she is now moved into influential positions inside the company, this might be a chance for you to get a break if they have vacancies. If you have a good connection with him/her, eventually he/she might manage you a position in other companies as well by using his/her links. After all, interviewers don’t tend to hire detached people.
- LinkedIn groups help to extend your professional reach: LinkedIn groups have become a top-rated resource on Career Rocketeer. These virtual groups can be beneficial for the job-seekers, where people with similar interests can post and hold conversations around topics, and extend your reach beyond your connections. When you’re hunting jobs, active groups dedicated to your specific fields are a great place to learn about what’s going on in your professional world and your fellow group members can become your future employers.
By joining groups related to your industry and participating in it can help you become a thought leader – a person experts in their field, credible advisors, and someone who motivates and inspires people to take action towards a common purpose.
- Benefits for your employer: When you participate in LinkedIn and gives “like” and “share” status updates, you virtually put your employer on the map through your connections and your employer becomes visible to other companies. It’s a perfect example when you emerge as your recruiter’s brand ambassador. The more you convert to active, your company’s page gets more viewers and followers. Thus, it helps ranking high in LinkedIn search results. And this is good for sales and marketing strategies including recruiting, and reputation management techniques. When you bring benefits to your employers, they will bring you some in returns.
- LinkedIn Job Seeker Premium account worth it: LinkedIn is an excellent free service that all know but is available to upgrade into $29.99/month Job Seeker Premium Accounts. With this particular subscription
- Firstly, you and your profile will be bumped up when you apply for jobs through LinkedIn. Displaying at the top of recruiters’ applicant lists will make way for you to get some attention from the hiring manager.
- Secondly, see who looked at your profile in the last 90 days. This metric helps you to make valuable connections and help you track your progress.
- Third, this membership allows you to send three InMail direct messages to recruiters per month. These LinkedIn users can be anyone, regardless of whether you’re connected. It’s pretty useful when you don’t have any contacts in common, but still, you want to reach them out by any means.
- Fourth, you can see how your profile compares to other job seekers when applying for jobs. These statistics can help you understand the need for upgrading your profile and the chance of your win. In the paid version, you can read the full profile of people outside your network, which can be a real gem when you are about to meet the recruiter on the day of the interview.
- The last but not the least is unlocking the premium badge. This golden badge shows that you’re serious about using LinkedIn to build connections.
- There are some other benefits as exclusive subscription gives premium profile settings, salary insights, save favorites, and get access to LinkedIn’s online video courses.
The bottom line is- hiring authorities are more active on LinkedIn than ever before that made LinkedIn #1 job search tool. But if you aren’t coming up in your recruiters’ search, LinkedIn will just become a place to post your resume, nothing else. So, be sure to optimize your profile smartly like a savvy job seeker do so that it can leverage your job searching effort.