Part 2 – LinkedIn for Small Business Owners – 6 Ways to Improve Your Business Performance Using LinkedIn

This is the second in a two-part exploration by Joseph Archibald, of how LinkedIn can be used in order to improve your business’ performance.  The first part can be located here:
6 Ways to Improve Your Business Performance Using LinkedIn


Get Mobile

The amount of visitors who frequent LinkedIn using a mobile device currently amounts to some 22% and that number, as you’d expect, is growing.  As such, LinkedIn have developed their mobile applications to enhance the “networking on-the-go” user experience.

If you use an iPhone, iPad, or iPod, and have not yet downloaded the appropriate LinkedIn app, then you’d be well served by doing so in order to capitalize in what LinkedIn have to offer.  Please visit this URL for more information about the LinkedIn app on iTunes.

The LinkedIn Android app is over on Google play.

New Blog Posts Shared on With Your Groups

In order to encourage visitors to your blog from the social media networks in general, it surely makes good sense to share your blog posts via the networks you use.

With LinkedIn, you can manually post the appropriate URL of your blog post to your LinkedIn account and by so doing, if you have included images on your post, you can pull an image at the same time. For auto posting of blog posts, please see the next point.

It’s wise to post these links at high-traffic times. For example, between 7am and 10am and between 5pm and 9pm EST on weekdays has shown to be beneficial. This is not an exact science however, and experimentation is to be encouraged.

You can choose to post either a part of your blog post or the full post to your LinkedIn Groups too, but do ensure that the post is relevant to the group and the content is appropriate for the target audience. Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback from the group.

And while you’re at it, if you regularly participate in group discussions, feel free to include links to any blog posts that are discussion-focused. The same can be achieved when replying to questions in LinkedIn Answers as well as when posting comments on updates for your connections.

Auto-add Your Blog Posts to Your LinkedIn Profile
Pulling your blog’s posts over to your LinkedIn profile can also be carried out automatically. In order to achieve this, you’ll need to install the pertinent LinkedIn app.  See the image below.  I’ve included the appropriate URL for you to install the app just below the image.

The LinkedIn Share Button
There’s a whole lot of blogs that do not utilize the LinkedIn Share Button as a part of their social sharing tools (I best check to ensure my own blog’s LinkedIn Button is enabled . You can either retrieve a button via the LinkedIn website go here for that:, or you can use a WordPress.org plugin which incorporates a button within its arsenal.

A couple of good WordPress plugins that I use on my websites are the following:

TF Social Share
Social Media Widget

The former acts like a standard WordPress plugin – just install it and activate it and arrange the settings to suit your requirements. The latter however, as the name suggests, is used as a sidebar widget. Again, you need to arrange the settings to suit your prerequisites.