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10 ways to use Linkedin for PR

Posted by Danny Whatmough on 23rd November 2009

Last week, I attended a PRCA event on Linkedin where the speaker was Cristina Hoole – European PR and Marketing Director at the business social network.

For the regular users of Linkedin, there wasn’t really anything new to report, but it did get me thinking about ways in which Linkedin could be used to improve a company’s (or an individual’s) PR efforts. Here are my top ten tips:

  1. Make sure your spokespeople has a unique URL – this is easy to configure in your Linkedin control panel and will give you a search-engine-friendly URL – e.g. http://uk.linkedin.com/in/dannywhatmough
  2. SEO your spokesperson and company profiles – make sure that your spokespeople appear in internal and external searches by including lots of relevant keywords in their Linkedin titles, biogs and the rest of their profile
  3. Set up your company profile – you can now have company profiles in Linkedin just as you can individual ones. Point 2 still applies here – make sure the page is properly optimised
  4. Create a group for your company or industry groupLinkedin groups allow users to connect and chat with each other on a whole range of themes. This is a great way to start chatting to customers, prospects or partners
  5. Make sure you list all your events – Linkedin events was a feature that I hadn’t come across before Cristina mentioned it. It is free to add events you might be running (or attending) and will even flag up events that other users in your network have found interesting or are going along to
  6. Run a pollLinkedin polls can be targeted to particular demographic splits or interest groups. The service does have a cost attached, but could be a great way to get relatively cheap industry insights or even get research for a PR campaign
  7. Monitor questions and answer any that relate to your businessLinkedin Answers is a way for anyone on Linkedin to ask questions of the entire community. Monitoring these questions on a regular basis and answering any that apply to your business or sector will help you build up recognition and respect
  8. Join groups in your industry or sector and give involved in the discussion – as well as setting up a group for your business or sector, you should also join and monitor other relevant groups that are in existance. Join in the conversation if and when it makes sense
  9. Connect with journalists and influencers – If you’ve recently met a journalist, analyst or even a blogger, make sure you connect to them on Linkedin. This will keep you front of mind and might mean that they will come to you first the next time they need a comment or interview. Better still, they’ll have all your contact details!
  10. Update your status – Having built up a following on Linkedin, make sure you keep your connections updated with your latest goings on by updating your status. You can now link status updates to Twitter (and vice versa), but bear in mind that Linkedin isn’t primarily a micro-blogging platform, so you’ll probably want to go easy and not overload your connection’s streams with continuous updates

Linkedin is often ignored by many in PR, but there are lots of really beneficial ways to use the service. Let me know if you can think of any I’ve missed and don’t forget to connect!

picture credit

Danny Whatmough