LinkedIn for Business

for Business
Your guide to getting started

Table of contents
Introduction
03
01 03
06 Why choose LinkedIn? 34
Hire: let the talent economy
propel your business
Getting started begins with you 09
14
Market: build relationships with
the world’s professionals04 20
02 Sell: engage the world’s
decision makers05 28
LinkedIn for Business | 2

01Transforming the
way companies hire,
market and sell
The world of work has changed.
The Internet has transformed how people
communicate, consume information and build
relationships.
As a result of this global phenomenon, the way the
world works is fundamentally changing:
decisions in order to perform in this accelerated
online networking platforms.
professionals consume and share content.
The future of work is in these networks.
McKinsey Global Institute
estimates suggest that by fully
implementing social technologies,
interaction workers—high-skill
knowledge workers, including
managers and professionals—by
20 to 25 per cent.
20% to 25%
through social technologies LinkedIn for Business | 3

01
Enter LinkedIn
There is now a single, global community of
professionals from which a wealth of new
data emerges. LinkedIn is the world’s largest
professional network on the Internet with more
and territories, growing at a rate of about two
new members per second. As you read this,
millions of professionals are adding information
to their proﬁles, sharing important insights and
connecting with each other on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has accomplished this as a result of the
convergence of two key factors:
1. A scalable infrastructure that connects hundreds of
millions of people in milliseconds.
2. The increasing importance of online professional
information and ﬁnding the right experts can transform
not only their careers, but also the trajectory of their
companies. And that’s where LinkedIn is focused:
fundamentally transforming the way the world works.

01
Companies that engage on LinkedIn drive
relationships and superior results.
2x
more likely to
purchase and
recommend1
Company
Followers
4x
Twitter and
Facebook2
B2B
Conversions
50%
more likely to
purchase from
a company
they engage
with on
LinkedIn3
Company
Presence
Relationships count
Relationships matter. They matter online and
ofﬂine. For companies, relationships mean more
For years, LinkedIn has helped professionals
forge mutually beneﬁcial relationships with other
professionals – thereby enabling them to build
new business opportunities.
Your employees are some of your organization’s
information and news to employees, companies
can reduce the friction inherent in traditional
communication channels and subsequently
increase the likelihood that the right messages are
shared with the right audiences at the right time.

01Relationships matter,
so does context
professional network.
games or entertainment.
information that will help them work smarter and
make better decisions.
on networking and searching for new opportunities.
happiness, goals and security.
On a professional network, members build
knowledge to strengthen their identity, making
them more purposeful and goal oriented in their
careers. In this context, people actually expect to
companies and brands that they want to work for
or do business with. In fact, they’re 26 percent
more likely to want to hear from a company in a
in LinkedIn than in other
networks1
2x
of users keep their
professional and personal
networks separate
83%
LinkedIn reached 225M members in 2013 and is
adding approximately 6M new members per month

01
We’re on a Mission
“To connect the world’s
professionals to make
them more productive
and successful.”
an online identity, share insights and be accessible
What does this mean for your business?

01
The functions of hiring, marketing and selling are
crucial to the success of any enterprise, large or
small.
Whether it’s ﬁnding the right talent, securing a
warm introduction to a target customer, engaging
the right professional with the right brand message
or closing the sale, the needs are the same. You
Identify the right person.
Engage them with content that is compelling.
Spur them to action.
LinkedIn is not only fundamentally changing how
companies ﬁnd talent, but also how they market
millions of professionals, and the graph of how
they’re connected to each other, is a critical
Hire
Market
Engage the world’s decision makers
Sell

Getting started begins with you
02

02
LinkedIn counts
Fortune 500 companies
as members
Your employees are
brand ambassadors
increasingly using and relying on LinkedIn. Your
you with significant opportunities to showcase your
brand with potential candidates and customers.
Your employees are conduits who can help your
news and information to the right audiences.
Each time an employee changes their profile or
shares an update, members of their network are
brand messages out to key decision makers and
prospects.
create or complete your own LinkedIn profile.
This sets the stage for your company’s talent
ambassadors to engage on LinkedIn, where they
can showcase your company, products, and brand.

02
A complete LinkedIn
profile establishes
your professional
brand online
Today finding the right people, locating the right
increasingly occurs online. As the world’s most
powerful professional network, LinkedIn is a
insights
qualifications and credentials
with your internal and external business contacts
As a valuable professional resource, LinkedIn:

02
Building a strong
network
Quality is more important than quantity. Your
network is an important part of your professional
connections will yield better results than a broad,
but shallow network of unrelated connections or
distant acquaintances. Keep your network useful
and meaningful by connecting with people you
know and trust.
It’s important to establish rapport with customers
and prospects before sending them connection
requests. Rapport helps frame your connection
requests as natural relationship building rather
than a sales tactic.
on LinkedIn. What is the extent or reach of their
your employees sharing their business insights?
Who are they connected to?
your organization
Connected employees:

02
leadership and
amplify your
your network and extending your company’s
reach. Ensuring your employees keep their
important, but so is the content they share since
engagement with their professional network,
Encourage your employees to talk about exciting
changes in your business, to share industry
sponsor, or attend.
Fostering a sense of community through your
Groups makes strategic business sense. LinkedIn
employees to connect with peers, collaborate with
other professionals, and engage potential customers.
Fostering a sense of community

Hire: let the talent economy
propel your business
03

03
Engage the world’s
best talent
Millions of skilled professionals are on LinkedIn
candidates are too busy changing the world within
their current positions, so engaging with these top
professionals requires a different approach.
LinkedIn can help your recruiting team ﬁnd and
retain the best talent by matching the right person
with the right opportunity. LinkedIn empowers
organizations like yours to do more with less by
unlocking the world’s largest professional network
roles and to help you build a trusted talent brand.
There’s no better way to ﬁnd quality candidates
real time access to powerful data, analytic and
reporting tools to better understand how you
compare to your competitors in your recruiting
efforts.
“It’s not until someone taps a happily
employed top performer on the shoulder
with a stronger opportunity that they lift
their head up from what they’re doing on a
day-to-day basis and consider a change.”
Jim Schnyder

03
Talent is essential to
organizational success
for new opportunities.
With the most powerful search
Recruiter, you can expand searches
beyond your personal connections to
access the entire LinkedIn network.
with powerful ﬁlters that help
you immediately zero in on ideal
candidates.
Expand your reach
– LinkedIn’s trusted messaging
with InMail message templates and
one-to-many InMails. Get higher
response rates than cold calling and
email.
Contact anyone
Build, track, and manage talent you
want to hire now or in the future with
folders, reminders and smart to do
shared projects, searches, proﬁles,
and candidate notes.
Manage your pipeline

03
to best-fit candidates
Help your HR team say goodbye to post and pray
candidate searches. Imagine if your job postings
could do your sourcing for you - with LinkedIn, they
can!
openings online – helping you put the right positions
in front of only the right candidates.
the world’s largest pool of professional talent.
workforce.
represent a whole new talent pool. LinkedIn lets you
LinkedIn profile lets you see their job experience,
skills and career goals.
Let your jobs find the best candidates
Eighty percent of professionals are open to
homepage, an employee profile, or your
careers tab. Automatically target the most
algorithms and profile data.
Get top billing for high-priority jobs
roles with a Sponsored Jobs placement. Bid
for premium placement of your roles and only
Reach the best candidates anywhere
websites and enjoy the same, exact targeting
ability you enjoy on LinkedIn with Jobs For
You Web Ads.


03
that appeals to top
candidates
establish why your company is the best place to work.
for the best and brightest minds on the planet. In this
era of increasing transparency, your talent brand is no
longer just about recruiting.
on more than the quality of your products and
These qualities, while historically falling under
fold, while also putting HR at the center of building
your brand. This is where LinkedIn can help you craft
your approach.
Show off
employee testimonials, and more. Keep
candidates in the loop by encouraging them
to “follow” your company on LinkedIn.
Customize your message
messaging, based on their LinkedIn proﬁles.
audiences.
Showcase your most relevant jobs

“A strong employment brand reduces cost per
hire by up to 50 percent.”
Source (slide 4): http://www.slideshare.net/linkedin-talent-solutions/

03
40,000 new followers. They saw a 100 percent increase
its competitors. Today, Standard’s Talent Brand Index
score is up 24 percent – the highest in Asia.
been credited as the number one external source for
fact, employee referral is the number one source of
107,000+ employees for talent branding.
talent far beyond the candidates in their database.
their reputation, L’Oreal also hired the right people
faster by reaching out to them directly.
LinkedIn has helped Banco Itau completely transform
the way they search and recruit new employees.
One of Brazil’s largest banks, Banco Itau, has used
LinkedIn to reduce time to hire, cut agency costs, and
internalize their recruiting function while building
market intelligence and gaining credibility with hiring
managers.

Market: build relationships with
the world’s professionals
04

04
relationships
LinkedIn builds relationships between brands and
the world’s professionals to make them both more
successful.
From all across today’s increasingly connected
digital landscape, LinkedIn has earned the
genuine trust of global professionals. Your brand
generating awareness, building community,
That’s because your campaigns will resonate more
if they’re targeted to speciﬁc professionals with
published in the professional context. And you can
extend through the social sharing that happens
naturally on LinkedIn, and extend authentic
LinkedIn data to your branded channel.
Brands build relationships by using LinkedIn to
target, publish, and extend:
Target with accuracy to reach a high quality
audience1
in a professional context2
Extend through social sharing and extend quality
trafﬁc and data to a brand’s sites3

04
targeting to reach a
high quality audience
accurate targeting is the foundation of the LinkedIn
social platform.
With LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, you can target
our full suite of products to a global population of the
most influential, educated, and affluent on the web.
LinkedIn enables companies like yours to engage with
professionals in unprecedented ways – by seniority,
functional area, type of company, size of company,
geography, as well as who they know in their network,
LinkedIn’s targeting is accurate because it draws from
by our 225 million members.
In this way, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions helps brand
marketers capture “the personal in the professional”
within the most affluent, influential, and educated
audience on the social web.
median household income
of a LinkedIn member1
$83K
business decision makers
2
5M
the other top 5 social media sites3
2x
a college or graduate degree4
52%
LinkedIn’s premium audience at a glance:

04
We know that content marketing is an important way
for brands to engage with professional audiences.
the people and brands they trust. But what does that
really mean for your business?
Simply stated, content marketing comes down
important to your customers and prospects.
But not all audiences are created equal. With our
seeking content in a professional context, LinkedIn
Sharing among a high quality professional audience
than 1.3 million publishers connected to LinkedIn.
Our members then share this compelling content
through the network.
We help brands and organizations like yours to
your audience. Marketers use our data and content
marketing solutions to publish tailored content and
And they enhance the relationship building with a
combination of paid and organic solutions.
marketers at B2B and
in some form of content
marketing now.1
85%

04
Establish a
company presence
As you build relationships with professionals, a
your company’s home on LinkedIn.
millions of professionals. It’s the one, centralized
source for millions of LinkedIn members will stay
in the loop on your company news, products
opportunities.
Spread the word
Your team can easily post status updates, stay top of mind
and promote career opportunities through your LinkedIn
Status updates empower you to engage directly with
existing customers and prospects. Spread the word
around a hot topic in your industry or share an
Customer recommendations
doing business with you.
Career opportunities can be showcased, along with
company’s culture.
Build meaningful relationships
your page, and create new leads and customers.

04Extend engagement
on and off Linkedin
Brands on LinkedIn don’t simply tell their stories
and brand exposure across the world’s largest
professional network.
designed for social engagement. Once published
experiences work to reach specific audiences
continually endorsed and socialized from brand
You can also extend the quality traffic of LinkedIn
professionals to your own branded sites.
LinkedIn ensures the flow of influential, affluent
and educated professionals to your other
experiences that allow members to sign in to an
app using their LinkedIn login. This enables you to
tailor their experience and it simplifies the need for
them to enter additional data.
Like
Comment
Share


04
Analyze and refine
Success depends on your ability to measure
performance and optimize efforts. LinkedIn’s
analytics tools empower your organization to do
to strengthen your relationships.
Take note: what content drives conversation?
For example, the best way to increase content engagement
and amplification is to experiment with different kinds
of content. Once you understand what works, you can
easily refine your approach. You gain access to statistics
(engagement rate, impressions, likes, shares and comments)
below each status update 24 hours after each post.
Measuring engagement
engagement rate – the ratio of clicks, likes, comments, and
shares to total update impressions. This is an important
metric for understanding how often members take action
on your updates. If you include a link in an update, be sure
Ow.ly. This way you can keep track of total click-throughs.
Measuring amplification
As you post updates, you can see which subjects and
With insights into engagement, you understand how
often members are amplifying your content. For example,
might tell you that many of your followers are interested in

04
campaign on LinkedIn to build
relationships with early adopters and
inﬂuencers with a passion for consumer
its most desired audiences, acquiring
165,000 new followers and boosting
word-of-mouth for its latest products.
follow Samsung Mobile only on LinkedIn
and not on other social platforms.
makers who are highly engaged and
informed with new brand messages,
reaches precise audiences in 15 target
markets and their followers are 2.5x
professional women the best curated
original content as well as resources
on topics that matter most to them.
about business and ﬁnancial topics
It attracted 43,000 highly engaged
months with 30-50 percent returning
other LinkedIn Group.

Sell: engage the world’s
decision makers
05

05
A new generation
of sales success
LinkedIn helps companies increase sales through
relationships and insights. It empowers sales
professionals to find the right person, the best
path in, and the right thing to say.
A typical sales team gets up to 30% of its leads
reps need to fill their own pipeline with high-
quality prospects.
capabilities, enabling sales professionals to
find the best and most efficient path to higher
quality prospects. By instantly and automatically
broadening a sales professional’s network to
increase the number of reachable prospects
exponentially.
information allows reps to know more about prospects
before reaching out.
What do I say?
LinkedIn’s TeamLink helps sales teams find decision
reach higher quality prospects more quickly.
How do I get in?
the right prospect.
Who’s the right person?

05
Identify and engage
the best prospects
Finding the right person is half the battle, and
LinkedIn streamlines that process to make sales
professionals with a fast and easy way to identify
people simultaneously cast a wide net and
pinpoint the right person to talk to.
In addition to searching, sales professionals can
identify new prospects. These insights about
discussion with a potential customer.
LinkedIn members are
purchasing decision-makers
7.9M
3.9M
LinkedIn is fundamentally transforming
the way the world works and the way
companies do business. The stats speak

05
Sales is a team sport
powerful team sport. Through LinkedIn, a sales
networks can help teams reach new people and
open new doors.
hidden connections to ﬁnd the best path to
higher quality prospects more quickly. By instantly
broadening a sales professional’s network to
exponentially increase the number of reachable
team, helping you focus on the best prospects.
“The best reps are not just present in
social media, they position themselves as
networks.”
Sales Executive Council
“The B2B social buyer relies on social
media and online communities during the
purchase process.”
ITSMA
“Effective use of sales intelligence
increases revenue productivity per sales
rep by 17%.”
CSO Insights

05
Scalable social
selling
day for prospecting and networking, but only
scalable social selling programs. With enterprise
program across their company with conﬁdence.
coaching opportunities.
Insights
Sell with social sales intelligence
Discovery
Engagement
Get in touch with decision makers
Everywhere

05
With 400 employees
worldwide, Eloqua
has grown steadily since it was
insights that inform marketing and
by 25% and reduced cycle times by
exceeding their quotas.
“LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the
best tool that our sales team has
for our social and target account
selling initiative.”
Dennis Dresser
its new customer
accurate information about prospects
and shorten sales cycle times.
LinkedIn’s TeamLink also enables
them to expand the power of sales
team connections and helped raise
from 20% to 50%.
“LinkedIn Sales Navigator has
enabled our sales organization to
conduct prospecting faster and
more precisely. The net result is a
higher quality pipeline, which helps
us capture a greater share of our
marketplace.”
Eric Marcy
The industry
standard for legal,
needed to forge deeper connections
with key decision makers and
enhance prospecting and lead
qualification. They selected LinkedIn
lead qualification, profiling, and
integration between LinkedIn and
Salesforce enhances their sales
time access to companies, profiles,
“More than 80 per cent of our
reps found important LinkedIn
information that they would not
have known otherwise because of
LinkedIn’s seamless integration
with Salesforce.”
Bob DeSantis

06
market and sell
LinkedIn has already fundamentally changed how companies ﬁnd talent. As the three
millions of professional proﬁles and the graph of how they are connected to each other
will be a critical tool that helps companies succeed at all of them.
Get started today at www.linkedin.com.

List all jobs on LinkedIn to maximize strong talent brand
Maximize recruiters using LinkedIn to ﬁnd and engage
Hire
06
A checklist to get you started today
Brand, connect and engage your employee’s proﬁles
your community (see the company page guide book)
Build your presence
Amplify
Market
Encourage sales reps to continue to grow their
professional network and build their professional brand
Gather and contribute insights
Sell

06
Want more?
Top tips to establish a rock star proﬁle.
http://learn.linkedin.com/employeeproﬁle/
index.html
,
which includes 5 Steps to engaging followers.
Sales solutions information.
http://sales.linkedin.com
Employer Brand
for the 5 steps to crafting a highly
social talent brand.
10tips.html

So, that’s it! Ready to get started? Great!
Go to www.linkedin.com to begin
your journey today.
And remember – we’re always here to help!

LinkedIn for Business

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