What Your Local Business Needs To Know About LinkedIn
Online marketing is growing in popularity among local business owners who are looking for a fast, effective, and inexpensive way to advertise. For many, social media sites are the perfect place to meet new contacts, build up working relationships, and market themselves and their company.
LinkedIn is one of the most useful social networks available on the internet. The business focused site is a meeting place for over 150 million professionals worldwide, and it offers a huge range of marketing opportunities – even for local business and professionals.
Why LinkedIn?
Unlike friend-based social networks like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn is used mainly amongst business professionals. By offering a variety of tools, the site can help you to stay in touch with colleagues, gain inside connections, reach out to customers, and get advice from market leaders. LinkedIn not only provides you with extra online visibility and a place to network, it is also a valuable source of SEO friendly links.
LinkedIn was launched in 2003, and as of March 2012 is became the world’s largest professional network. Though the site has been around for a long time, it has recently seen a sudden surge of popularity. In June 2011 it had over 30 million unique visitors, which was up 63% from the year before. Part of this increase is down to the growing number of people accessing the site via smartphone devices.