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“LinkedIn?...You mean the job-posting site?”
If that was your initial thought when you read the headline, you wouldn’t be wrong, but you would be outdated in your thoughts about LinkedIn.
The platform has grown tremendously from its days of just being the place to go to look for jobs. It’s become the leading platform for professionals to connect, share, learn, get business and still get jobs in a more refined process.
The best part is that here in TT, it is finally starting to grow, with a current user base of over 460,000 profiles in 2022, which is up from 413,000 in 2021.
In this article, I want to give you my strategies of how I have used LinkedIn to generate leads, sales and connect to industry leaders in other countries and I have also reached out to one of the top LinkedIn coach and expert in the Caribbean, Jarrod Best-Mitchell, to give us his three tips on how LinkedIn can help grow your business.
Right off the bat, there has been no platform that has been able to grow my career and business more than LinkedIn. The biggest reason for that is it is the only platform that all of the decision-makers for almost any company you want to work with are on.
When I first started my tech blog Droid Island, I would create content educating the Caribbean region about smartphones and how to use them, tackling a lot of the issues I saw in the industry specific to the Caribbean.
I would have made a list of all of the companies in my industry that I wanted to work with or ones that served the same audience like me. I would search them up on LinkedIn, look at all their employees and begin adding everybody who was in a decision-making spot.
That way, once I created the content, the decision-makers would see it and they would either reach out to me to discuss, or I would reach out to them with the content I found most helpful to them.
This allowed me to start the relationships through which I have landed all of my business deals to date. This has been a big gamechanger for my business.
Now, I reached out to Best-Mitchell and asked him to give me his three ways that LinkedIn can help grow your business. Here is what he said.
1. LinkedIn has over 800 million users worldwide, which means you are opening up your business to a much larger market, and LinkedIn adoption has grown here in TT every year.
2. Only one-five per cent of people create LinkedIn content that educates their audience. By moving away from ads and creating educational content in your niche, you can position yourself and your company as the best choice.
3. Since the decision-makers of companies are on the platform, you can influence the buying process. Over 60 per cent of people do research online before reaching out to a company; you could be the person answering all their questions and helping achieve results through your content.
Best-Mitchell says, “LinkedIn is a powerful platform and one that is underestimated by companies in the Caribbean, and this is c
