Linkedin is consistently ranked as the favourite social media channel for B2B businesses. However, it can be a confusing website to use, even for active users, so here are a few tips to make the most of the website to increase awareness of your business.

Step 1: Create a Company Page

This is the most important step, if you haven’t created one for your company yet, do it! The Social Media Examiner has created a very useful guide to setting one up here.

Once it’s set up:

• make sure your colleagues have added it to their personal profiles
• upload a suitable header image and logo
• make sure you tag it in your personal updates (typing it in a status should make it automatically come up in the list of suggestions).

Step 2: Join three Linkedin Groups

Linkedin groups are a great way to connect with other professionals, share best practice and promote your activities. Search for groups that are relevant to your business-type or your target clients.

I suggest three as an optimal number – participate in these on a daily basis, making sure you comment on other people’s posts too. You could also create your own group if you find nothing suitable out there!

Step 3: Update your Company Page Every Day

Some Linkedin company pages have zero activity, which is a wasted opportunity. Share content on a regular basis, this can be a mixture of content created by your company and external links.

Use a tool like Buffer to make this automatic and save time. Buffer has a great feature that enables you to check the best times to post, which takes the guesswork out of automatization!

If you are struggling to create content on a regular basis, I recommend requesting a demo from Passle, a content creation platform for professional services firms.

Bonus step: if you are targeting different sets of customers and want a clear voice for each of these, I recommend creating a Showcase Page.

Step 4: Advertise*

Linkedin is fantastic for B2B businesses thanks to its advertising feature which lets you not only target (or exclude) certain companies, but also focus on specific job titles or seniority. It’s incredibly useful when you have a clear target clientele (or are looking to hire someone specific!)

To advertise, click on ‘Business Services’ (it’s just below your email icon), then ‘Advertise’.

I recommend choosing the ‘Sponsor Content’ option if you’ve been uploading relevant content to your company page, and to then go for the pay-per-click option rather than per-impression. You can adjust how much you want to spend per day, as well as how long you want to run it for.

Having used it myself, I can attest that this has worked wonders for brand awareness. You just have to make sure that you choose the right content to share (will it be useful or interesting to the people you are targeting it to?)

 *You need to have a company page to take advantage of this advertising option. So go back to step 1 if you don’t yet.

Step 5: Let others know what you’re doing

Promote your Linkedin company page and its activity, by sharing posts to your personal profile, adding it to your email signature and your business cards. Encourage your colleagues to do the same in order to extend the reach of your company.

Get into the habit of adding all your contacts to Linkedin. There’s a fast way of doing this by adding email contacts in bulk, or even adding an excel/CVS spreadsheet if you are managing an active mailing list elsewhere.

To do this, click on the icon of a person with a + sign at the top, and select your email provider. If you want to upload a list, click on ‘Add Connections’, then select ‘Any email’. You should notice a header ‘More ways to connect’ which gives you the option to ‘Upload contact files’.

Step 6: Check analytics

Linkedin has added analytics fairly recently, make the most of them to check that your content is reaching the right people. If it isn’t, follow step 3, 4 and 5 to remedy the situation!

Step 7: Publish on Linkedin

Linkedin is one of the top content publishing platforms out there, so make the most of it by publishing articles there. To increase your chances of featuring on Pulse, follow Linkedin's editorial calendar!

Bonus tip: after you've posted a great article, tweet it including "tip @LinkedInPulse” and you might get yourself featured by the Linkedin team!

Join our free webinar: 3 simple steps to harness the power of Linkedin here.