I have long championed LinkedIn as a way to communicate with prospects or check in with customers. It can be an ace up your sleeve as well as a powerful research tool that can map out entire industries. With more than 600 million users, it drives more traffic to B2B blogs and sites than any other social media platform, yet hardly gets the same recognition as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
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If you aren’t already using LinkedIn (or perhaps not using it enough), here are three reasons you should make it a key tool in your sales arsenal:
- It offers a large pool for lead generation. As long as you know what you have to offer to a particular lead and know their role within their organization, you can use LinkedIn as a means to find and approach them. Remember to make your messages friendly and purposeful, though. You don’t want to sound robotic.
- It’s specifically relevant to business. LinkedIn isn’t just a place to promote yourself. It can be a curated feed pertaining to particular industries and what your peers and competitors are doing. It also gives you the options of contacting them via an InMail message, using their contact info for email, or calling them directly.
- LinkedIn isn’t as toxic as other alternatives. This is a social media platform with more transparency regarding what is tolerated or not tolerated from its users. It has the additional benefit of being an online forum that doesn’t drag you down, sticking to the nature of business rather than the political and the personal.
