Your LinkedIn page isn’t the same as your other social media profiles. Although LinkedIn is a fantastic way to connect with prospective clients, it’s also important to use LinkedIn to maintain professional relationships, boost your business and build authority for your brand. In many ways, your LinkedIn should act as an extension of your website.

When you use your LinkedIn page appropriately, you can create long lasting relationships with clients, business partners, your community and others. Relating your company’s LinkedIn page back to your company website can bring many benefits for your business.

But what are the benefits that a strong LinkedIn page can create? Let’s look at a few great LinkedIn profiles, how they enhance the company’s website and what you can do to improve your own professional online image.

Attract New Talent

If you’re sharing job openings on your website, this is great for the people who know to look. However, because most job searchers aren’t going to browse company websites looking for an open position, you could be missing out on some highly qualified talent. To attract the best employees, post your job where they’re already looking.

LinkedIn provides excellent tools to both job searchers and companies looking to hire. Target is just one example of a company that posts their job listings on LinkedIn, although there are many.

Target uses their LinkedIn page to attract better quality candidates for their open positions and even provides important insights to those looking, such as the languages people at the company speak and what employees care about.

Share Your Blog Posts

When you post a new blog, you need to let your target audience know it is available. While other social media profiles allow you to share links back to your website so someone can read a blog, many may not be interested in clicking away from their timeline. This means you may be missing connecting with a potential customer or client.

On LinkedIn, they provide you with an opportunity to share blog posts and articles right in the website, such as Marketo does. As another place to share content, Marketo can attract new potential customers interested in learning about the brand but not committed enough to head to the website. This is great for making a first impression and building brand awareness.

Create a Professional President Profile

Customers, clients and business partners all want to know who is behind the companies they work with. However, it isn’t always easy to get into the personal and professional details on a website. This can make it difficult to allow customers and partners to get to know your business leaders.

However, LinkedIn provides a terrific opportunity for company presidents and CEOs to establish authority for themselves. If we look at President of Mericle Commercial Real Estate Service Robert Mericle’s LinkedIn page, we see he is about to establish himself as a leader in his industry while supplementing the authority of his company. Through sharing his own expertise, articles and information, customers and clients know more about him and have more trust.

Add News Updates

Your website is the perfect place to share information about your company’s achievements and growth. However, there are certain times when creating a new blog post or press release isn’t necessary. Small achievements, company anniversaries or events and other small details may be important, but you may not need a whole new website page.

Your LinkedIn profile will allow you to add recent updates in the form of posts, like Viacom does. These updates alert your community of news without much of a hassle, so you’re able to keep your audience informed quickly and easily. Viacom uses their updates to let their community know of everything from a recent blog post to details about their upcoming projects.

Show Off Your Testimonials

Putting testimonials on your website is a great idea. But for anyone to see those testimonials and reviews, they need to have enough faith in you to come to your website. If they don’t want to click through to a new page, you may not be able to show how highly qualified you are for their business.

This is another problem that LinkedIn can solve. Because LinkedIn allows you to put testimonials on your page, you can show off the great things someone has said about you as a professional or about your business within the social media site, such as Jason Curry, Founder and Head Growth Marketer at Hammersmith, does. As an easy place to collect testimonials, your LinkedIn page can help you build authority with target audience members.

LinkedIn is one of the most important social media profiles for any company or business professional. While it allows you to connect with target audience members, job prospects and even business partners, LinkedIn’s networking tools go above and beyond any other social media platform. However, to get the most benefit, you need to use it to supplement your website.

Your website will still be the place you educate your community, close sales and make lasting connections. But, with so many different competitors going after your audience’s attention, you need to accommodate them and their needs. Placing your content where they already are, such as on LinkedIn, is the way to do this.

Author

Lexie Lu is a designer and writer. She loves researching trends in the web and graphic design industry. She writes weekly on Design Roast and can be followed on Twitter @lexieludesigner.