“LinkedIn?… You mean the job posting site?” If that was your initial thought when you read the headline, you wouldn’t be wrong but you would be outdated in your thoughts about LinkedIn.

The platform has grown tremendously from its days of just being the place to go to look for jobs. It’s become the number one platform for professionals to connect, share, learn, get business and still get jobs in a more refined process.

The best part is that here in Jamaica, it is finally starting to grow with a current user base of over 460 thousand profiles in 2022, which is up from 413 thousand in 2021.

In this article, I want to give you my strategies of how I have used LinkedIn to generate leads, sales and connect to industry leaders in other countries and I have also reached out to one of the top LinkedIn coach & experts in the Caribbean, Jarrod Best-Mitchell, to give us his three tips on how LinkedIn can help grow your business.

Right off the bat, there has been no platform that has been able to grow my career and business more than LinkedIn. The biggest reason for that is, it is the only platform that all of the decision-makers for almost any company you want to work with are on.

When I first started my tech blog Droid Island, I would create content educating the Caribbean region about their smartphones, and how to use them, tackling a lot of the issues I saw in the industry-specific to the Caribbean.

I would have made a list of all of the companies in my industry that I wanted to work with or ones that served the same audience like me, I would search them up on LinkedIn, look at all of their employees and begin adding everybody who was in a decision-making spot.

That way, once I created the content, the decision-makers would see it and they would either reach out to me to discuss or I would reach out to them with the content I found most helpful to them.

This allowed me to start the relationship in which I have landed all of my business deals to date. This has been a big game-changer for my business.

Now, I reached out to Jarrod Best-Mitchell and asked him to give me his three ways that LinkedIn can help grow your business. Here is what said.

1) LinkedIn has over 800 million users worldwide, which means you are opening up your business to a much larger market and LinkedIn adoption has grown in Jamaica every year.

2) Only 1-5 per cent of people create LinkedIn content that educates their audience. By moving away from ads and creating educational content in your niche, you can position yourself and your company as the best choice.

3) Since the decision-makers of companies are on the platform, you can influence the buying process. Over 60 per cent of people do research online before reaching out to a company, you could be the person answering all of their questions and helping achieve results through your content.

Best-Mitchell says, “LinkedIn is a powerful platform and one that is underestimated by companies in the Caribbean and this is coming from someone who gets 90 per cent of their business from inbound traffic on this platform. You want to spend time in 2023 learning and using LinkedIn.”

You can reach out to Jarrod Best-Mitchell for help in building your LinkedIn presence at Jarrodbestmitchell.com or on LinkedIn.

Now with LinkedIn doubling down on content with their new analytics and tools in Creator Mode, the writing is on the wall, they have joined the content race.

They want businesses and individuals who are looking to land their next job or promotion, to start creating content in their niche.

It’s also one of the top platforms to start focusing on building your personal brand.

The platform is the largest B2B social platform in the world and is a great platform to land B2C clients as well.

LinkedIn Learning has also been a great place to learn new skills and earn certificates that you can use to build your profile. If you have been on the fence about LinkedIn, hopefully, this article will help give some motivation to get serious on the platform. Trust me when I say, ALL of the deals I have struck to boost my business came from LinkedIn.

It continues to be the best place for those serious about growing their business, primed with all the decision-makers and people with money looking to do business with you.

Keron Rose is a digital trategist that helps entrepreneurs build their digital presence. Check out KeronRose.com to learn more or the Digipreneur FM podcast on Apple Podcast/Spotify/Google Podcast.