http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/23454/The-Ultimate-Cheat-Sheet-for-Mastering-LinkedIn.aspx
How to Use LinkedIn for Business & Marketing

23) Optimize your Company Page.

The design of Company Pages has changed a lot over the years. Make sure yours is set up correctly and optimized for the newest layout, featuring a compelling and high-quality banner image (see examples of awesome LinkedIn Company Page banner images here). We've published an entire free ebook about how to optimize your page for the latest design, so check it out. You can also view some examples of fantastic LinkedIn Company Pages here. Here's how HubSpot's Company Page looks ... 

hubspot-linkedin-company-page

Keep in mind that as of April 2014, LinkedIn no longer supports the Products & Services tab on Company Pages. This means you'll want to set up and take advantage of LinkedIn's new Showcase Pages instead, which leads us to our next tip ...

24) Create targeted Showcase Pages.

Showcase Pages are niche pages that branch off your main LinkedIn Company Page. They allow you to promote specific products or cater to your individual marketing personas, providing a more personalized experience for your Company Page visitors. LinkedIn users can also follow specific Showcase Pages without having to follow a company's main page or its other Showcase Pages, allowing your business to tailor the page closely to the audience specific to the page.

To create a Showcase Page, click the Edit dropdown at the top right of your Company Page and choose Create a Showcase Page. For more information about creating Showcase Pages, check out our beginner's guide.

create-linkedin-showcase-page

25) Post Company Status Updates (and target them!).

Make the most of your LinkedIn Company Page by publishing Company Status Updates for all your page followers to see. This will give LinkedIn users even more reason to follow your Company Page, thus growing your LinkedIn reach. To learn how to enable LinkedIn Company Status Updates, read this postThen learn how to create successful LinkedIn status updates in this blog post.

Been using Company Status Updates for a while? Why not step it up a notch and leverage the power of segmentation with LinkedIn's targeting options, which enable you to target your status updates to the Network Updates feed for specific users. Page admins can target their updates by criteria like company size, industry, job function, seniority, geography, or by including/excluding company employees.

targeted-linkedin-status-updates

26) Use Pulse to keep track of industry news.

Pulse is an awesome section of LinkedIn where you can discover popular articles and trending content tailored to your interests. Browse through the Your News tab to see what people you follow are publishing, or the Top Posts tab to monitor the most popular content on Pulse in general.

Use the Discover tab to find and follow specific influencer contributors, publishers, or topic-related channels to stay on top of news and stories in your industry. You can alsosign up for daily or weekly email summary notifications of Pulse news (found in theUpdates and News section of your Email Frequency settings), or instant notifications when influencers you're following post something new.

27) Check out LinkedIn's Content Marketing Score & Trending Content resources. 

If you're a LinkedIn Marketing Solutions customer, you can learn how impactful your organic and paid LinkedIn content is with the Content Marketing Score and Trending Content resources. Your Content Marketing Score measures user engagement with your Sponsored Updates, Company Pages, LinkedIn Groups, employee updates, and Influencer posts (when applicable). It then provides recommendations for how you can improve your score, and thus the effectiveness of your LinkedIn content.

You also can get a sense of which types of content are most popular on LinkedIn in your industry with LinkedIn's Trending Content resource. It highlights the most popular content being shared on LinkedIn for various audiences and topic segments. Monitor this to understand what content your company should be creating and sharing on LinkedIn to generate the most engagement.

To learn more about these resources, Marketing Solutions customers can contact their LinkedIn account executives.

28) Use LinkedIn to generate leads.

In an internal study of HubSpot's customer base, we found that traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate (2.74%) of the top social networks, almost 3 times higher (277%) than both Twitter (.69%) and Facebook (.77%).So yes -- LinkedIn can help you generate leads. To get the most out of LinkedIn for lead generation, promote and share links to your blog posts and landing pages in your Company Status Updates, where appropriate in LinkedIn Groups, on your Showcase Pages, and in calls-to-action placed in posts you publish via LinkedIn's publishing platform, Pulse (see tip #33 coming up).

29) Experiment with LinkedIn Ads and Sponsored Updates.

If you're looking to complement your organic LinkedIn marketing efforts with some paid advertising, LinkedIn Ads aren't a bad choice to consider. One of the biggest benefits of LinkedIn Ads? The targeting options! LinkedIn’s PPC ads let you target specific job titles, job functions, industries, or company size, to name a few -- you know, the people who are more likely to want/need what you sell.

If you want to get started with LinkedIn's advertising platform, here's a simple guide to setting up your first LinkedIn ad campaign. To learn specifically how to use LinkedIn's newest form of advertising -- Sponsored Updates -- check out our free guide to succeeding with Sponsored Updates

30) Use Group Statistics for better targeting and marketing.

Another little LinkedIn gem that not a lot of users or marketers are aware of is the fact that you can access statistics for any LinkedIn Group -- even groups you're not a direct member of. To access the Group Statistics for a specific LinkedIn Group, click on the group, then click the gear icon in the group's top navigation. Next, click Group statisticsin the About section.

linkedin-group-stats

Not only do LinkedIn Group Statistics tell you how many members are in a group or how active those members are; they also provide other key insights about the group's members such as their location, seniority, function, and industry. Use this data to analyze the makeup of a group before you decide to join, identify which LinkedIn Groups you should target in your LinkedIn Ads (see tip #29), help guide you in the best ways to segment your Showcase Pages (see tip #24), or gather insights about your buyer personas to help you do better marketing outside of LinkedIn.

31) Create your own industry LinkedIn Group (or subgroups), and join other relevant groups.

Or you could just create a LinkedIn Group (as well as subgroups if you're so inclined) of your very own, like HubSpot did with our popular Inbound Marketers Group. Create a group based on a relevant industry-related topic, and become a LinkedIn Group administrator. You can then use this group to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, grow a community of advocates, generate new marketing content ideas, and even generate new leads! You should also consider joining (and getting executives from your business to join) other relevant groups and participating in discussions to exhibit thought leadership in your industry.

32) Email your LinkedIn Group.

"Generate new leads from that group, you say?" That's right! One of the perks of managing a LinkedIn Group is the fact that you can literally email the members of your group -- up to once per week. These emails take the form of LinkedIn Announcements, which are messages sent directly to the email inboxes of group members (if they've enabled messages from groups in their settings).

This is a prime opportunity for generating leads from LinkedIn, particularly if you've built up a robust group of users. In fact, at HubSpot, our best performing LinkedIn lead gen days are usually the days on which we've sent a LinkedIn Announcement. Here's how to get the most out of your LinkedIn Group emails.

33) Experiment with publishing content on Pulse (LinkedIn's publishing platform).

You no longer have to be a LinkedIn Influencer to publish new articles to LinkedIn Pulse. Publishing is now available to all users, ever since a February 2014 feature announcement. Experiment with how this feature can support your marketing goals by creating content for the platform and promoting it via your Company Page. For example, you could experiment with syndicating content from your business blog to LinkedIn Pulse and using it to promote subscription to your full blog.

To publish an article on Pulse, click the pencil icon in the update composer on your LinkedIn homepage, and start writing! And if you're looking for some inspiration, check out some of the most popular LinkedIn Pulse articles ever published here.

create-linkedin-pulse-post

publish-on-pulse

34) Recruit new talent.

Looking to fill a position or two on your marketing team -- or anywhere else within your company, for that matter? Then be sure to build out the Careers section of your Company Page, which you can use to promote your available job openings. For more robust customization options for your Careers section, you can also purchase a Silver or Gold Careers package, which allows you to add a large, clickable cover image that can be transformed into a call-to-action. This image can direct users to a specific job, a list of jobs and opportunities located on your website, or examples of your company’s culture. The Silver or Gold packages also enables dynamic, customizable modules (that display different version of the page based on viewers' LinkedIn profiles), analytics about who is viewing the page, direct links to recruiters, video content, etc. 

The look and feel of your Careers page depends on what information and images you choose to include, such as a list of jobs, people at your company, a summary section for your careers, what employees are saying about working at your company, and recent updates. Furthermore, if you're actively recruiting candidates with specific skills and expertise, don't forget about LinkedIn's Advanced Search feature (see tip #20 above).

35) Use LinkedIn for sales prospecting and social selling.

LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for sales professionals, too! Some of the LinkedIn features we've already touched upon in this cheat sheet -- e.g. Saved Searches (tip #8), LinkedIn Groups (tip #19 and #31), Skills (tip #11), introduction requests (tip #13), etc. -- can also be great tools for sales prospecting and social selling. Check out this blog post on our Sales Blog to learn more about how to use LinkedIn for social selling. (And subscribe to our Sales Blog for more great social selling content here.)

36) Add the Company Follow and LinkedIn share buttons to your website/content.

Promote your company's LinkedIn presence and help grow the reach of your Company Page by adding the Company Follow button to your website. Furthermore, consider adding the LinkedIn Share button to your various content assets like blog posts, emails, and landing pages to extend the reach of your content to LinkedIn users. To learn how to build and use these buttons and more, check out our cheat sheet for creating social media buttons.

37) Analyze your LinkedIn marketing performance with the Analytics tab on your Company Page.

So ... how are your LinkedIn marketing efforts faring? Use the Analytics Tab for Company Pages to evaluate the performance of your Company Page. This tab offers data about the effectiveness of your page's status updates, engagement, and reach, as well as information about your page's followers -- demographics, where they came from, how your following has grown over time, how your data compares to other companies, etc.

Access your page's analytics by clicking the Analytics tab in the top navigation of your Company Page. For even more analytics about how your LinkedIn marketing efforts are helping you generate traffic, leads, and customers, you'll need a closed-loop marketing analytics tool like HubSpot.

Want to see how HubSpot uses LinkedIn? Follow our LinkedIn page here.

Editor's Note: This post has been updated to reflect the latest LinkedIn features as of March 2015.

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/23454/The-Ultimate-Cheat-Sheet-for-Mastering-LinkedIn.aspx