Part 2-5 Ways eBay Sellers Can Use LinkedIn For Business- By OBVA Virtual Assistants LinkedIn is a social network for professionals who are interested in promoting themselves or/and their companies. Developed specifically for business, you don’t run the risk of blurring your professional life with your private one. LinkedIn offers an amazing opportunity to generate new leads — you can find, be introduced to, and collaborate with qualified professionals who can help you accomplish your goals and grow your business. LinkedIn has announced that it has finally reached a major milestone: 100 million users and counting. Check the following presentation with detailed statistics on Linkedin user-base 2011. LinkedIn has great tools for connecting you to customers, prospects, and industry thought leaders alike, and many marketers are under-utilizing its functionality due to simple lack of awareness — joining LinkedIn is simple, but turning it into a powerful networking tool takes a bit of know-how. OBVA Social Media Virtual Assistants have done some research on how LinkedIn can be used for online business like eBay and Amazon. Following are the tips : 1.
Broadcast your best listings on Linkedin
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Enhance your store’s web presence
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Establish yourself as your product expert
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Use linkedin polls to get more data while choosing products to sell
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Use linkedin For Market Research
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1. Broadcast Your Best Listings On Linkedin: You can add your customers on Linkedin to start with. With Linkedin, you can provide your connections with the latest news and offerings from your store. Every time you post a new listing, your connections will get an alert. Whether it is a new product or service offering, positive press, a recent award, Linkedin helps you stay on the radar of a wide circle of prospective customers and existing customers. If you have a presence on other social media platforms, make sure you use the same photo avatar to allow people to identify you, and recognize this as another reputation of your brand or store. Using your store logo is a good idea. Just be careful not to share each and every listing if you have lot of listings on your store. Rather, publish a few attractive listings on LinkedIn. You can also target audience by participating in different groups. For example, if you have a listing for a home office computer/laptop, you can write the listing effectively and then publish on groups related to small business, home business, work from home moms, etc. If you over publish too many listings, you may get blocked. So make sure you share your best listings at regular intervals to people who might be interested in your product.
2. Enhance Your Store’s Web Presence: When people do a Google search on your brand name or your store, your Linkedin profile is likely to be one of the first results to show up at page 1. To get benefit from Linkedin SEO capabilities, it is important that your profile is complete, so that search results give you a good customer base. People looking forward to buy expensive stuff on LinkedIn will trust you better if you have some good recommendations on your LinkedIn profile. Profile filling of your store seems to be time consuming, but if you have the opportunity to fill out fields of information about yourself, brand, company, business, products, or services then this information on LinkedIn will give help you for SEO for sure. www. obvainc.com
If your store is being researched, a positive LinkedIn profile can go a long way towards nailing down new sales. When deciding on content to fill out content fields on your listing, think of the key words that your store which could be used to find when someone performs a search. Use those keywords in the content you write your listings regarding to it. And then you can publish the best of the listings on LinkedIn profile and groups.
3. Establish Yourself As Product Expert: One of the most useful of all LinkedIn tools is the “Answers” tool. Anyone on LinkedIn has the ability to post a question on any topic. As an expert in your field, you can demonstrate your expertise by answering the appropriate questions. Linked in provides forums based on topics, where individuals can post questions or answer questions that are posted. Providing insight or expertise online to help out someone in your industry goes a long way towards establishing yourself as an expert in that field. Make sure you fill out responses concisely and utilize any extra space to include links to your store, blog, website or other links that can support your answer. For example, a store that sells beauty products can participate actively on reviews of beauty products and also answer beauty related questions where people are seeking help. Other more relevant example can be a store selling softwares for assisting virtual businesses can participate actively in the groups of small business owners and other entrepreneurs when they come up with some questions related to use of softwares. Such contribution will certainly help you get recognition as a know all person in your industry.
4. Use Linkedin Polls To Get More Data While Choosing Products To Sell: LinkedIn Polls allow you to easily find answers to your business and market research questions. How do your potential customers respond to your question? Do 25-year-olds answer differently from 45-year-olds? Do men and women answer differently? Ask your question, and Linkedin will distribute it to your connections and millions of other professionals on Linkedin. Share your Poll through Facebook or Twitter integrations, or embed the voting module on your store. For example, a store selling health supplements for more active days can post a poll asking, “Which brand of health supplement do you prefer the most?” People who answered a ABC www. obvainc.com
company can be emailed with the listing URL along with some offer, when you sell it the next time.
5. Use Linkedin For Market Research: Start using Linkedin product pages for competitive intelligence purposes . LinkedIn company pages, a somewhat new feature, enables business to showcase their products. Thanks to this new enhancement, you can hit two birds with one stone. On one hand, you can spy on your competition and you can even figure out what’s hot and what’s not. (For example, If the same new product was featured on different pages, then it’s hot and you may want to jump in!) Use Linkedin Polls/Group Surveys to Measure Consumer Habits/Niche Trends . Linkedin Polls allow you to conduct targeted market research. By targeted, you can address a certain niche market based on age range, gender, location, demography, educational level and so forth. You may combine as many of these criteria as you wish. For example, you may create a poll that measures the internet shopping habits of women (ages 25 to 40) who live in LA. In addition, you may start/join a Linkedin group in your targeted market and conduct surveys or share promotions…etc. LinkedIn is looking to get brands more involved with the site’s users through the launch of a suite of features designed to give them a stronger presence on the business social network. According to an a post in Mashable “LinkedIn Gives Brands a Platform to Promote Themselves”. If you are a brand with a store on eBay or Amazon, you can certainly use the branding tools for better exposure and sales. If you are a small business store owner, you can use Linkedin for better reach, credibility and data. If you are worried that you do not have enough time to participate actively on Linkedin, contact us. We would love to help you make your eBay store more Linkedin with your potential customers . As per our promise, we are constantly working on creating useful information on how eBay and Amazon store owners can use Social Media for their business. The upcoming post is “Part 3- 5 Effective Ways To Promote Your Business Using Twitter”. You may like to grab our RSS feeds now so that you don’t miss this one.
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