LinkedIn is the premier social networking site for business. That makes it important to business owners of all sizes, whether you’re generating leads, locating new talent, or following industry news. It is also a great way to market your product or service, whether you want to build your brand or sell products to other firms. Mistakes could hurt your brand or undermine your marketing efforts. Here are 5 LinkedIn marketing mistakes you should avoid at all costs.

LinkedIn Icon Line Connection of Circuit Board

Not Having a Professional Profile

Your LinkedIn profile should be polished, professional and optimised. It isn’t enough to simply set up a LinkedIn account. You should include a customised banner, not just import your logo and use it as a profile picture. The profile picture itself should be at least 250×250 pixels and present the same image you’d want to portray at a business conference. Optimise the LinkedIn profile by filling in the summary, experience, recommendations, and skills, whether it is a personal or business profile. Remember that this is search engine optimisation for both LinkedIn and the internet at large.

Not Having Clear Goals

Having a LinkedIn profile is essential to be seen on LinkedIn by potential customers, clients, and employees. However, you need clear goals as to what you’ll do beyond being present. Consider setting goals regarding your LinkedIn profile. It may be connecting with five industry leaders every week, posting content daily, or reaching out to at least one promising recruit within a day of posting a new job opening. Have a strategy for your time on LinkedIn. Know how every action enhances your brand or moves you closer to other business goals.

Consider using a LinkedIn marketing agency. LinkedIn marketing services like Linkfluencer, for instance, could help you find the best connections to make in order to expand the reach of your content. Or they could create a plan to turn content views into paying customers.

Failing to Follow the Audience’s Expectations

One variation of this mistake is sharing content that’s not of interest to your audience. Your business should prioritise content that is of interest to other businesses, such as how your product solves their problems. However, you should share the content of general interest with the public such as hiring events, charitable efforts in the community and information about industry seminars.

A personal LinkedIn profile should align with your expertise. You might share links to articles you’ve written, but you can mix this with news related to your industry. However, you’ll lose credibility and your followers if you’re a technical subject matter expert posting cake recipes and political diatribes. That’s not why they connect with you, much less follow you.

Being Purely Promotional

Avoid too many purely promotional posts. A good rule of thumb is the 80-20 rule; 20 percent of your posts can be promotional, while 80 percent should provide value or insight for your customers. Furthermore, you don’t want to post too often, since you’ll overwhelm your audience. Aim for two to ten posts a day, with just a few being about you.

Undermining Your Own Efforts

There are several ways this can happen. One is hijacking your own post. This occurs when you end up in an unrelated conversation thread on your own post. Stick to the topic of your article or LinkedIn update. If you have several different discussion topics, have a separate post for each of them. Another would be using unrelated images or hashtags since the conversation they’ll trigger is typically unrelated to the content.

LinkedIn is one of the best marketing tools businesses have at their disposal. Avoid major mistakes like these, and you’ll see significant returns on the time you invest in the site.