If you want to attract more clients this year now is the time to start learning how to leverage LinkedIn to help you build a greater platform and market your business. Check out these recent statistics from BrightCove. As 2015 ended, 94 percent of organizations are using LinkedIn to distribute B2B content. This is more than Twitter, Facebook or YouTube. Of these businesses, 51 percent use LinkedIn for paid advertising as well. Furthermore, 63 percent of B2B marketers say LinkedIn is effective, compared to 55 percent for Twitter and just 30 percent for Facebook.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn remains the top social media recruitment tool, used by 87 percent of recruiters this year, compared to 55 percent who use Facebook, according to Jobvite. Some of the new tools LinkedIn has added has increased its value for both marketers and recruiters as well. With all that being said, here are a three ways your business can leverage LinkedIn’s latest tools:

1. Leverage Content Publishing on LinkedIn

I meet very few business owners who love to prospect and solicit for customers. That’s why I love LinkedIn’s content publishing because it’s such a great tool to help you quickly build your thought leadership on your area of expertise. When you have a reputation as the go to expert, you can have new clients chasing you, instead of you chasing prospects.

Since launching its content marketing platform last year, LinkedIn has made several moves to enhance the power of its publishing capabilities. This May, LinkedIn released analytics tools that let you track your views and analyze the demographics of your audience, using breakdowns by industry, job title, location and traffic source.

Following up in June, LinkedIn rolled out its “LinkedIn Pulse” app. The app delivers personalized and professionally oriented news feeds to audiences on their mobile devices, including both organic Pulse content and external content that is filtered by industry and following preferences.

Then in September, LinkedIn extended the use of its Elevate feature to all enterprises with more than 2,000 employees. Each of your employees typically has 10 times as many connections as your company has followers, so Elevate leverages this by suggesting content to users that your employees can then share with their followers on LinkedIn and across Facebook and Twitter.

Here are a few tips you can implement today to make the most of LinkedIn’s content publishing platform:

• Review your current Pulse feed to get a feel for market trends.
• Hone in on specific topics in your area of expertise where you can contribute valuable content.
• Craft your titles carefully, using good SEO and copywriting principles. Titles offering how­-to information or lists perform best.
• Add visuals to grab attention.
• Publish your content on a schedule that matches the weekly rhythms of your target audience. Thursdays generally get the most views whereas you should avoid Monday mornings.

2. Consider Advertising on LinkedIn.

The big LinkedIn advertising trend of 2015 is the rise of the company’s Sponsored Updates service, which lets advertisers place blog posts on users’ home pages. During the first quarter of the year, LinkedIn advertising grew to $119 million, a 38 percent increase over the previous year’s period, reports AdAge. Forty percent of this came from Sponsored Updates, doubling the previous year’s share. In the third quarter, this trend continued with LinkedIn reporting that Sponsored Updates now constitutes 50 percent of its advertising revenue.

Using Sponsored Updates in conjunction with content publishing can maximize the outreach of your LinkedIn campaigns. Another helpful new LinkedIn advertising tool is Lead Accelerator, which lets you identify where a user is in the buying cycle and match your content accordingly.LinkedIn Network Display lets you use cookies to deliver ads to LinkedIn users while they’re on other sites.

3. Scale Your Business with LinkedIn Recruiting.

Whether you already have a few employees or you’re a solopreneur growing your business to the next level will always involve growing your team. Even if you only start with one part time team member you can use LinkedIn to help you find the best qualified candidates. It’s a great way to filter and shortlist your recruits.

LinkedIn recruiting efforts will continue to shift toward users of mobile devices, such as the Apple iPhone 6s, as recruiters seek to attract younger workers. According to Jobvite’s 2015 Job Seeker Nation Study, 47 percent of millennials now use mobile for their job search. By the first quarter of this year, 50 percent of unique visitors were accessing LinkedIn from mobile devices. By the third quarter, mobile users accounted for 55 percent of all LinkedIn traffic.LinkedIn offers a wide range of recruitment tools for enterprises. The most essential is Recruiter, which lets you match job profiles to candidates and contact prospects using InMail.

If you want to learn How to Attract More Clients Using LinkedIn I invite you to join me for a free webinar training. Click here to register.

QUESTION: What is one thing you would like to know how to do on LinkedIn? Please share your comments and questions below.

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