Why LinkedIn is a critical business to business blog tool

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LinkedIn is a critical tool for a business to business blog audience.

The target audience is executives and professionals looking to network as compared to an average consumer.
What to do: Establish a company profile, where you will give an overview of your business, and an individual profile, where you provide a short version of your résumé. Make sure to upload a headshot or a business logo, and list your personal or business specialties.

Connect: Make connections with current and past colleagues and schoolmates, and accept those who request you as a contact if you know them or have interacted with them. You can also create or join groups, which allow users who have certain connections — alumni associations or nonprofit boards, for example — to have a central place to connect.
Searching: You can look for people, updates, jobs and companies, among others, and can be done through the search and advanced search function, or http://www.linkedin.com/signal. From there, you can set up alerts to follow a company and see what it is discussing online. Following can be a useful way to determine who you need to connect with when looking to deal with a specific company.

Stay in touch: LinkedIn can also be useful to stay in touch with your network. Sending a quick congratulatory note to connections with new jobs, or to those who just got promoted, can help keep connections strong. You’ll also be able to share links and create events.

Whether your company just started a Twitter feed or already has a thriving social media presence, consider signing up for our Social Madness contest.

It's a national competition organized by American City Business Journals, Inc., the parent of this publication. The challenge will measure the growth of a company’s social media presence during certain time periods as it competes in a bracket-style tournament. Companies will compete against others of similar size and be ranked based on votes on triad.bizjournals.com, LinkedIn connections, Facebook activity and Twitter followers. It only takes a few minutes to sign up, but hurry. The deadline is May 15.