What Your Plumbing Business Can Get Out of LinkedIn

Quick—what does the name "LinkedIn" make you think of?

These days, LinkedIn serves more masters than just accountants and HR (no offense to either profession). LInkedIn works for plumbing businesses, too. Come to it, LinkedIn is a pretty useful tool for anyone looking to do some networking, gather intel on competitors, or do marketing and hiring. As the main social media network of the business world, the site offers a lot of good stuff. Best of all, you can learn about the local marketplace with it.

We've prepared a quick overview of methods plumbing businesses can use to start building their LinkedIn presence and getting the most from this platform. Ready to dive in?

Your Business Or Personal Profile

First, you'll want to decide how you'll use LinkedIn. Basically, this means choosing between a company page and a personal profile (or using a combination of these two things).

• Company Pages let you create a profile for your company, complete with a logo, information about your business, and the ability to post updates and information. Individual LinkedIn users can list you as an employer, so if you have employees, everyone can link themselves directly to your business page. (Keep in mind that you must build a personal profile before you can create a Company Page.)
• Personal Profiles help people use LinkedIn to promote themselves or their personal brand. You can list your experience, knowledge, and other information in a format similar to a resume or CV. Other LinkedIn users can see whatever information you make available publicly on the site.

Whatever you choose to build on the site, make sure you create something you can easily maintain. It takes work and consistency to keep up your online presence. Once you or your business has a presence on LinkedIn, people will start to find you there. You don't want them to find a "ghost town" that you started one day and haven't touched for months.

Best Uses For LinkedIn

The best way to use LinkedIn probably depends on your own biggest goals for networking and marketing right now. Do any of these uses appeal to you?

• Hiring: You can post jobs, review resumes, and communicate with recruiters on LinkedIn. This also makes it a good place to learn more about the hiring market for particular roles. A great deal of work-related discussion happens on the site and in individual groups.
• Networking: With millions of people on LinkedIn, plenty of networking opportunities exist both within your profession and outside of it. The platform helps you meet other plumbers, business owners, marketers, job seekers, and a whole lot more. Every personal LinkedIn profile has Connections, who basically work like friends on Facebook. Your connections consist of the people you know who've agreed to "Connect" with you on the platform. Groups on LinkedIn work like online clubs centered around different interests and goals—search around and you'll find groups associated with different keywords (like "plumbing").
• Marketing: You can approach marketing in several different ways on LinkedIn. For instance, you could post targeted ads that focus on particular demographics, locations, and groups that frequently hire plumbers. (You may need to do a little sleuthing if you don't know who to target with this in your area.) You can also use your LinkedIn profiles to try to rank for specific keywords (like "Tallahassee plumber") both on the site and through search engines.
• Competitor Research: Of course, what better way to use LinkedIn than to gather information about your competitors? Keep tabs on how they use marketing, who they hire, etc. People tend to post a lot of information about their businesses on this site, so it functions as a great place to gather public information about competitors (you can easily learn things like company size). Remember, though! This works both ways. Anything you post doubles as snooping material for your own competitors.
• Special LinkedIn Tools: LinkedIn features different account types and some of these have their own special tools. For instance, Sales Navigator is a tool designed to help salespeople use LinkedIn to generate leads. Sales Navigator gives users additional search and research tools to help them gather intel on potential customers. Not every account type will necessarily prove useful for your business, so read up on the latest features and pricing from LinkedIn itself to determine the best fit for your company.

LinkedIn Strategy

Now that you know the basics, how will you use LinkedIn? You may find that all you need from the site is a basic profile and company page that you keep updated with information about your business. You can also create a calendar of ongoing updates and posts to the site, enabling you to work on building traffic to your website or building inquiries from potential customers.

If you decide to use LinkedIn for marketing, find relevant keywords that tie your business into services with relevant, local needs. For instance, if you want to show up if someone searches LinkedIn or Google for "Tucson Arizona Plumber" then you need to use this phrase in your profile somewhere. Do your own research to determine what to focus on and how to accomplish it.