Free for SME's: Business Networking through LinkedIn

The IndiaMART Knowledge Services team introduces how MSME's can leverage the power of freely available tools and services on the WWW, to their advantage.

Tool: Linkedin
Service type: Free and paid

How could it benefit business: overview

1. Global professional networking
2. Generating business leads
3. Reducing cost of recruitment/ talent acquisition

What exactly is Linkedin?

Simply speaking, Linkedin is one of the most powerful 'professional networking' online platform globally. People from all across the globe are free to create their professional profiles on this social network and are also free to network and connect with others.

Is Linkedin free?

There are many features on LinkedIn which are free and many others which are paid. The most basic one's which consist of creating a 'professional profile', creating your company's corporate profile, connecting with people are all free.

If you wish to advertise for jobs, send in-mails (to connect with people who wish to be introduced only through In-mails), Advertise (buying ad-space) on Linkedin, these are some of the features which are paid.

How should I go about using Linkedin?

Linkedin can prove to be highly beneficial for your business. Before you go ahead leveraging this network, the first thing you must be very clear about, is your business objectives, for which you are proposing to go online.

Let us help you arrive on some objectives, which you can achieve through Linkedin:

1. Reduce down cost of talent acquisition
2. Connect with global partners in your business domain: creating new alliances
3. Generating business leads
4. Keeping yourself updated about events in your business domain
5. Marketing your business

Let us now help you navigate through Linkedin and get you active online!

Login to your Linkedin profile (the screen will be as shown below)

Once you are logged in, your home screen will look like the following:

The top menu on the 'Home Screen' is the navigation menu, which provides you with all the options for navigating across features available to you.

The center of the screen, which essentially is divided into three columns, is the 'News Feed'. This consists of all the activities being done by 'your contacts' on Linkedin. Example, if me and you are connected on Linkedin and I like an update done by one of my contacts, it will show in your News Feed, that 'I have Liked this update' and if you find it relevant, you can comment/ liked the same.

How does this help your business?

The News Feed is free information flow. At times you may bounce across a new blog post/ a new presentation or something which is of interest to your business and if you find it. You are free to connect with the source of the information. Which means, if its a blog, you can click on the link, read the same and contact the author to benefit your business.

How else can it help me?: lets say if you happen to bounce across an update on your News Feed, which was done by someone relevant to your business in the US. You don't necessarily happen to know that person, but you think he/ she might be a good business connect. All you need to do is click on his/ her profile name and send a 'Connecting Request'. Hence effectively it took you only a few seconds, to get connected to someone in the US, relevant to your business, while sitting right here in your country.

Okay, I find this interesting! How can I effectively use it to market my business?

The key ways that you can use Linkedin to market your business are:

1. Create a powerful profile:
1. Ensure your 'profile summary' has all keywords relevant to describe what business you are in
2. Ask for recommendations: the more the better
2. Groups
1. There are many groups existing on Linkedin. They are both global and local in nature and have members who are interested in a "focused topic" which is relevant to their line of profession. Eg: if you want to network with global entrepreneurs, the following groups (attached screenshot) may interest you! And hence you may connect with these people and explore business opportunities. These groups are not "marketing tools", but they can help you propagate your message to the relevant segment
3. Answers
1. One of the powerful most features on Linkedin is the Q&A: (refer to the screenshot below). On the top menu, under "More" drop menu, the first option is called "Answers". You are free to pose questions on anything you would like to find answers on. The questions you ask, are propagated not only to the Linkedin members you are directly connected to, but also to many people globally who are till your 3rd degree network and are relevant to the domain to which the question pertains.
1. To each question you might find multiple people globally answering. These are the relevant people that you must network with. Many of them might be your next business leads/ partners/ alliances OR at times direct consumers!

Groups on Linkedin

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Question and Answers on Linkedin

Great, but reducing cost of talent acquisition?

While you can leverage the power of groups to propagate the Job openings you have in your company. You might also want to use the "paid" jobs feature which will help you propagate your job openings to the relevant target audience on Linkedin.

This actually helps you reach out to the relevant target audience (your future prospective hires), while not being dependant as a business on recruitment consultants.

Keeping yourself updated about events in your business domain:

Doubtless to say one of the best way to network with the relevant people globally in your network are events. Exchanging business cards at evens has always been the first connect creating step for any sales/ marketer. Linkedin has a dedicated "events" section, which is in the form of "User generated information". Companies and event organizers update their upcoming evens on Linkedin which are open to public.

You can easily search for the one's relevant to you and attend the same. What also is of extreme importance here is the fact that you can also see those people who are on Linkedin and are also coming to the event. Hence your pre-event networking starts right here, online!! (to access events, see the screen-capture below)

The information has been sourced from 'Free for SMEs' report issued by IAMAI (Internet and Mobile Association of India) in collaboration with IndiaMART.com.
To know more drop in a comment to this post and our team of experts will get in touch!