LinkedIn is known as a great social media for growing your professional network or looking for new employees, but you can also leverage it for your retail optical store. All it takes is a little out-of-the-box thinking on your part and you can easily add another online resource for your patients.
Create Your LinkedIn Business Page
Before you can do anything, you'll need to setup your business's LinkedIn business page. To do this, you'll first need a personal LinkedIn account. Also , you're only able to create a business page on desktop. This means you're currently unable to do so on the app.
Once you have your page setup, you should encourage employees to list their employment with their personal LinkedIn pages and interact with posts/comments on the page. It is recommended that you make at least one trusted employee as another super admin, giving him or her full control over the page along with assigning or removing page roles of other admins on your page. The admin role can be given to employees. This allows them to create posts and interact with posts as the company.
From here, you can share job postings, status updates, and much more to your network. You'll also have access to the new "Showcase Page" feature which we'll dive into more in a later blog post.
Growing Your LinkedIn Page
There are several ways you can grow your page. Consider adding a direct link on your website with verbiage encouraging patients to follow your business on LinkedIn. This will also give your company's website a backlink to help your SEO.
Unlike some other platforms, LinkedIn only allows for 100 direct invites total from page super admins or admins to follow your company page. This resets on the 1st of every new month and means you'll need to consider who you're sending an invite to as opposed to spamming every connection in your network from the start which LinkedIn says is not a best practice for growth.
You can also include a link to your page in your email signature and share your company page on other social media platforms. The more you share your page, the more likely you are to gain followers. Don't be afraid to ask patients and colleagues to follow. This is one of the easiest ways to grow your page at no cost to you.
Another great example to grow your page is by sharing high value content. Here at IcareLabs, our Resource Center is one of the largest free online resources for sales aids, layout charts, and more. By sharing this content on our personal and company pages on a regular basis, it helps increase our traffic and branding with ECPs.
Collaborating With Your LinkedIn Page
Now that you have some followers, consider leveraging your LinkedIn network to collaborate with posts and promotions. The great thing about social media is the ease of access you can gain with brands and companies across the world! Work with local companies and large corporations alike to help build your own brand awareness to patients.
There are a number of ways your page can implement these strategies. Let's take a look at a recent post by Kodak Lens: 
I've highlighted the "share" section at the bottom of the post. Pressing this will give you the option to share this article directly to your personal page or to your company page along with audience options. Generally speaking, you should leave the audience to "anyone" when sharing to your company page. This allows anyone who visits the page to browse your shared articles.
Sharing article from trusted brands offered by your practice is an easy way to piggyback on the much larger marketing budgets often utilized by larger brands. This helps them with brand/product exposure while also helping promote your business.
As you grow your network and page, you'll inevitably run into other LinkedIn users that have a large presence on the site. Typically speaking, they share high quality original content to their page and are known as Thought Leaders. One great example of a leading Thought Leader on LinkedIn in the optometry field is Dr. Daryl Glover. Visiting his page shows you he has a large amount of followers, consistently posts/shares high quality content, and is very active with engaging on other LinkedIn members' posts.
You don't have to limit yourself to Thought Leaders and larger brand names either. Reach out to other business members in your area to inquire about cross promotion. Maybe the dentist across the street would be interested in a patient referral program between your offices? Or perhaps a regional frame vendor would be interested in helping promote their latest offerings in exchange for a discounted rate to feature them on your showroom floor?
The sky's the limit once your business gets active on LinkedIn! If you write blogs for your company website or guest blog articles on other websites, your company's page is another great avenue for sharing that information.
We are looking into LinkedIn ads and other campaign features here at IcareLabs. As I learn more about those features we will of course post an updated blog so you can learn even more.
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