Photo Credit: Jamie Quinn who likes to make fun of how well I shred in Rock Band

Most think of LinkedIn as a way to promote yourself, but actually it’s a flexible tool that also allows you to promote your brand or company too. In this Double LP set (ahem – two post series), I’ll show how you can use LinkedIn “apps” and “sections” to do just that.

So Let’s Rock it! First up, LinkedIn Apps…

LinkedIn Applications

Apps are a powerful way to connect your content and engage with your fans. LinkedIn provides applications that plug-in directly to your profile. I’m focusing on how these apps can help you:

1. Stay social with your fans
2. Show off your best content
3. Aggregate your full collection of content.

Social Outreach

Social Outreach is simply making a purposeful human connection with your audience. LinkedIn provides two apps that foster social connections:

• Polls (LinkedIn) – Conduct regular (monthly/weekly) polls to judge audience sentiment, get feedback on recent changes or gauge interest in new features.  You’re giving everyone a chance to vote and shape new ideas.  Still not sure what kind of polls to conduct? Look at the news headlines and make a connection to your products/services.  Once the poll is created anyone can include it in their LinkedIn profile.
• Events (LinkedIn) – Going on tour? Is your company sponsoring a seminar? Let those visiting your LinkedIn profile know about it!  Add the Events app to your profile and add or create in events. See who else is attending the events and start connecting!

Content Outpost

Content Outposts are the bread crumbs that lead prospects to you – you know like the flyers you put up around town just before your next gig.  LinkedIn provides several ways to include these outposts into your profile.

• Portfolio Display (Behance) – Great way for creatives and artists to show off their portfolio.
• Slideshare Presentations (Slideshare) – I suggest doing more summarized presentations on Slideshare with the call to action of driving viewers to your website or microsite for the full content.  Depending on the value of the content, there is a potential to use this as a lead generator.
• Google Presentation (Google) – Similar to, but probably less popular than (?), Slideshare.

Content Aggregator

If your company has content on social networks, LinkedIn provides an easy way to aggregate that content into your individual profile.  Remember, we’re using individual profiles to represent the brand.  These apps are a great way to present your thought leadership (thought leadership is kind of like your guitar solo – it’s what you do better than anybody else), so let’s get to it:

• Tweets (LinkedIn) – If your company has a twitter account you can pull that content into your LinkedIn profile.
• WordPress (WordPress) – If your company is using a WordPress blog this is your go to app.  It allows you granular controls over which posts are visible in your LinkedIn profile.
• Blog Link (SixApart) – like the WordPress app, but also supports Moveable Type, Blogger, LiveJournal, etc.

[warning]And if you think you want to out try The Reffs on Rock Band, let me know.  My 8 year old is a mad woman on the skins and my 10 year old can belt out a tune -  with feeling[/warning].