Insurance Marketing Guide to LinkedIn

Depending on who you ask, LinkedIn is the Facebook of the business world, an online resume, a hotbed of conversations about pertinent marketing topics, an SEO tool, a networking goldmine, a digital grapevine, or if you’re smart, all of the above.

Because it’s not used as fervently for direct communication with fans, followers and friends like Twitter or the aforementioned Facebook, LinkedIn generally takes a back seat to other social networks when it comes to attention paid. However, even if you don’t plan on whittling away hours conversing on LinkedIn, creating and optimizing a profile can still be a valuable asset for insurance marketing efforts and your personal or professional information shadow.

LinkedIn works best as a B2B communication tool since you are able to target specific niches and even professionals within those niches. Special interest groups, job postings, internal email, business and organizational pages, events, learning centers and a host of other tools exist to foster networking between like-minded individuals, whether they share an interest in business insurance or pig farming consultancy.

A list of some valuable LinkedIn features is included below.

4 Minutes to Optimize a LinkedIn Profile for SEO – Courtesy of Hubspot, quick and easy but a quality source of keyword optimized backlinks, especially if done by the entire office
Applications – Updates from WordPress blogs and Twitter feeds can be directly fed onto a LinkedIn profile showing visitors your recent updates and providing a nice source of backlinks. Just look for the “Add Applications” link when editing your profile (see below).

LinkedIn “Answers” – Whether it’s a policy-related question you can’t answer or an attempt to get the inside scoop on a potential vendor, a large network of insurance professionals are ready and willing to share. You can even push a question out to 200 of your contacts encouraging them to browse over and offer some wisdom.
Groups – Unlike other forums where a few senior moderators set the tone and do the majority of posting and policing, LinkedIn forums are much more social in nature attracting one-time visitors who need quick advice and regular contributors who manage the group’s direction. One Workers Compensation forum has over 4,000 members and provides a real-time view of pertinent issues. Anyone can be a group leader too, it just takes a desire to educate, learn, and nurture and you can even find geo-specific groups that will help with local networking, both business and personal. Beware though, lots of people use it for direct marketing.
Recommendations – Has someone gone above and beyond in helping you? Writing a recommendation is one of the most personal and gratifying ways to show your appreciation.
Employment – Whether seeking or hiring, LinkedIn is a phenomenal resource. Posting jobs costs money, but you have the advantage of reviewing past work, reading recommendations and even finding out other people they’ve worked with before even scheduling an interview.
Custom Company Profile – If you really want to get serious, pay a little extra and go this route, it’s practically like having a second website, albeit much easier to manage. In LinkedIn’s own words:
- Custom Company Profiles enable companies and other organizations to enhance their recruiting branding and create a targeted experience for prospective candidates on LinkedIn. Using Custom Company Profiles, a company can provide a rich, multimedia overview of careers offered, through a variety of modules including recruitment messaging, employee/recruiter spotlights, jobs, polls and videos.

To further education, I highly recommend reading Ten Ways for Small Business to use LinkedIn by Guy Kawasaki on the American Express Open Forums. The post shares a wealth of information on finding the right vendors, monitoring competition, networking and a number of other topics.

While it may not have Farmville or #FollowFridays, LinkedIn is home to over 20 million users with a social network body and a professional development soul which could make it the most productive social media tool in the arsenal. Feel free to connect with me (http://www.linkedin.com/in/nickbrown1) and maybe we can exchange recommendations.

(Special thanks to my twitter pal @AlysonDelPaggio for inspiring this post.)