LinkedIn is a platform for businesses and individuals to enhance their social community and business network. Having your business observed through LinkedIn can provide you with increased online visibility, creating a wider and meaningful network, providing job opportunities, and generating quality content for your company.

How is LinkedIn used for businesses?

• Finding new leads
• Sharing connections
• Connecting with like-minded people in business
• Create a plausible network
• Build credibility
• Sell products and services
• Ascertain competition
• Build interest and trust
• Advertising jobs
• Creates a platform for people in the industry to connect, share and advocate your business

LinkedIn allows you to share your business page and promote your services and products to the 30 million other companies and 690 million individuals who also use LinkedIn as a network platform.

Businesses can use LinkedIn for marketing purposes, sharing quality content about their company and its values as well as products and services available through the business. Quality content is a huge part of boosting and growing a business and having a platform, such as LinkedIn can provide you with a base to share your services.

But LinkedIn is much more valuable to a business’s growth if its employees are strong advocates for the company.

Why Businesses Need Employee Advocacy

Employee Advocacy is where the employees of a business, promote the business. The employees of the organisation they work for, show their support by writing and speaking in favor of their company. It’s common knowledge that positive reviews bring positive results.

To have employees as public advocates for your business on a business platform such as LinkedIn could bring helpful exposure to your business. Small and large businesses alike benefit from employee advocacy.

Social media performance is one of the key aspects to measuring the success of your business. With positive employee advocacy, you bring awareness to your brand, services, and products and boost customer and possible employee interaction.

Are you looking for new employees for a growing business? Post the available positions online through LinkedIn and allow your employees to advocate for your business to increase your overall network and company profile.

What Employee Advocacy Can Bring to Your Business

Employees and the community are the backbone of a business, this is true with 123 Internet Group – our #dreamteam are engaged with business decisions, vision and the future growth at every step.

Without employees, your business won’t run efficiently. Say you have a small business with 10 employees who all decide to call in sick on the same day. You alone cannot run all of their scheduled meetings and complete all of their daily tasks. More than half of the day’s events would need to be cancelled and the productive hours for the day would not be sufficient to justify keeping the business open for the day.

Just as employees are the network of people in your company that generate sales, leads and productive techniques to help your business stay afloat. If an employee were to speak poorly about your company, it could lose you potential business!

Happy employees can magnify your brand presence by confidently writing and talking about their positive work experience within the company. Speaking about positive experiences and leaving good reviews for the company can bring in potential customers and future employees because employee and customer satisfaction is genuinely important to people.

If you’re what’s called “An employer of choice”, employees will leave great feedback, promote the company to their social network and amplify your brand presence and reputation.

One of the best ways to promote your business to potential customers is to share the vision and your team via a corporate video. Use this to tell YOUR story, explaining why YOU are different from your competitors and how you can help them!

Grow your Business Through LinkedIn

LinkedIn is used in over 200 countries and is great for reaching out through the business to reach a company’s marketing potential.

Businesses need professional content and more so, employee advocacy in order to grow their business via LinkedIn. That’s why you can set up an employee engagement program.

What is an employee engagement program?

If employees are engaged in the mission of the organisation, they are more likely to be productive and effective at performing their role within the business. This includes sharing their experiences with their network of people, that could bring your company new customers and sales.

An employee engagement program might include:

• Allowing employees the opportunity to learn and grow
• Recognising employee’s hard work. For example, through employee of the month benefits
• Job satisfaction surveys
• Provide benefits and incentives for employee advocacy on social media platforms
• Train and educate staff on how to use social media platforms
• Provide employee team-bonding afternoons
• Set up weekly staff meetings to communicate and concerns from all parties and to provide solutions as well as encouraging results
• Set up an advocacy program

Engaging your staff is a way of ensuring their loyalty to your company and to sharing confidence in their commitment to the business as well as your commitment to ensuring good working conditions for your staff.

One of the steps 123 Internet Group has taken to engage with it’s team is to offer some LinkedIn training and support, helping them update their own profiles with the latest branding, offer new up to date headshot photos and show them how to update their custom LinkedIn profile URL. Remember, making the platform fun and engaging is the key priority for engagement!

Here’s some of our best team social profiles:

Laura – “Boss Lady” – https://www.linkedin.com/in/bosslady/

Hannah “Social Queen” – https://www.linkedin.com/in/socialqueen/

Libby “Media Magician” – https://www.linkedin.com/in/mediamagician123/

Ryan “The Marketing Maestro” – https://www.linkedin.com/in/themarketingmaestro/

Beau “Social Princess” – https://www.linkedin.com/in/socialprincess/

James “Design Stud Muffin” – https://www.linkedin.com/in/designstudmuffin/

Lizzie “The Creative Queen” – https://www.linkedin.com/in/thecreativequeen/

Ellie “Social Butterfly” – https://www.linkedin.com/in/social-butterfly/

Thomas “Web Prophet” – https://www.linkedin.com/in/webprophet/

Joe “Web Dev Wizard” – https://www.linkedin.com/in/webdevwizard/

With the updated profiles and higher engagement, creating and sharing company posts now helps to drive the business forward and share our centralised messages.

Make it easy for employees to want to advocate for your business. If the incentives and the advocacy program is clear, it makes it easier for staff to want to advocate for you. The incentives should be something that either relates to the employees needs and wants while essentially guaranteeing the companies growth.

Why is LinkedIn Important to a Business?

LinkedIn and Employee Advocacy can support a business in numerous ways. Small business or large, your company depends on growth and satisfaction. When an employee or customer has a good experience with a company, if shared on a platform like LinkedIn, your company’s exposure is limitless.

Having a presence on LinkedIn is beneficial to your business because:

• LinkedIn is used in over 200 countries
• 30 millions businesses have a LinkedIn profile
• 690 million individuals use LinkedIn as a social networking platform
• Social networking is a form of marketing
• Can enhance customer sales and social media productivity
• Creates brand understanding through the right advertising
• Educate and improve potential clients and customers of your brands credibility
• View your competitors and gain an understanding of their credibility

Create a LinkedIn marketing strategy to establish your business goals with your employees. Get your employees involved in connecting with you to share positive feedback and reviews on your LinkedIn profile as well as their own to improve your online business performance through social media and enhance your social media marketing.

Conclusion

If positive business exposure is important to you and your company, you might consider social media platforms like LinkedIn and employee advocacy. Ensure constructive employee advocacy by setting up an employee engagement program that involves your employees and how it can best benefit them as well as the business. Using LinkedIn can grow your company’s online presence which in turn can improve your overall business performance sales and profit.

If you want to review your own LinkedIn profile, why not take our online score card today?