Online Marketing Integration
Throughout this book, I’ve mentioned a wide variety of ways that you can integrate your LinkedIn efforts with your overall online marketing efforts. For example, in Chapters 6 and 10, you learn about a number of tools, applications, and plugins that you can use to spread your content and broaden your online exposure. If you haven’t read those chapters, read them now, and then add the suggestions included in this chapter to make your online marketing integration efforts even more powerful.
Your goal should be to surround your audience with opportunities to connect with you, learn from and about you, and build relationships with you on the online destinations that they prefer. However, you can’t be everywhere all the time, so you should choose a single online destination to act as your central hub. Your LinkedIn profile and activities could be that central hub where all roads lead to.
Social Sharing Buttons and Links
In Chapters 6 and 10, you learned about the various LinkedIn plugins that make it easy for you to share your LinkedIn profile and Company Page on your website and blog. You also learned about plugins that enable visitors to your website and blog to share your content and recommend it on LinkedIn with the click of a button. These plugins are incredibly useful and should absolutely be used.
LinkedIn also offers a Sharing Bookmarklet that makes it easy for you to share on LinkedIn any content you stumble upon across the web. You can get the Sharing Bookmarklet by clicking the Sharing Bookmarklet tab shown in Figure 12.1 to open the Easily Share from Anywhere page shown in Figure 12.7.
If you use Firefox as your web browser, just click and drag the Share on LinkedIn button to your browser toolbar, or click the Change Browser link at the bottom of the page to choose a different web browser and follow the installation instructions provided. Once the bookmarklet is added to your toolbar, you can click the Share on LinkedIn button at any time. You can add a comment, choose who you want to share the link and comment with from your LinkedIn network, and publish the comment to your activity updates on LinkedIn.
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By sharing content published by other people, you acknowledge that you like what they’ve done and get on their radar screens. This gives you opportunities to expand your network and connect with interesting people. You never know where new connections can take you!
In addition to the social plugins discussed in Chapters 6 and 10, there are many free social media icons available online that you can add to your website or blog to encourage people to connect with you on LinkedIn. Social media icons are images that lead directly to a social profile or page. An example of a blog with social media icons is shown in Figure 12.8. When visitors click on those icons, they are taken directly to the owner’s profiles where they can connect with them.
Figure 12.8: Social media icons offer unobtrusive invitations to connect with a person or company on social sites.
You can find social media icons through a simple online search. Two excellent resources to find a wide variety of social media icons are About.com Blogging (weblogs.about.com/od/Social-Media-Icons/Social-Media-Icons.htm) and Wpmods.com (wpmods.com/ultimate-social-media-icon-list/).
Many social media icons are offered in sets, so you can get matching icons for your LinkedIn profile, Twitter profile, Facebook profile, and more. They might come in different sizes and colors, or you can change the sizes to make them fit into your website or blog design. Whether you want to find social media icons shaped like panda bears or bottle caps, you can probably find it for free online!
Cross-Promotion Opportunities
There is rarely a bad time to look for cross-promotional opportunities. Every day, I see more television commercials and table cards at restaurants with links to social media profiles and pages for brands and companies. What might seem like a strange place to draw attention to your LinkedIn profile, page, or group today might be common practice tomorrow.
Pursue the cross-promotion opportunities already mentioned in this chapter as well as in Chapters 6 and 10. Draw attention to your LinkedIn activities on your website, blog, email signature, other online profiles, business card, marketing materials, ads, résumé, invoices, and so on. Let your audience decide if they want to connect with you on LinkedIn or not. The key is to give them the option.