As much as it may resemble one, your LinkedIn profile is not just a digital resume.
The profile may include your name, your title, your company and your contact information, but it’s much more than an online business card, too.
Your LinkedIn profile is really a way to find, develop and maintain long-term business relationships – with your peers, future employers and strategic business partners.
The power of LinkedIn is easy to forget because of its unique focus as a social media platform.
There are plenty of companies that use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok to connect with their customers. They can turn to these social media services to build their brand, sell their products directly or offer a service and support channel.
Unlike LinkedIn, these consumer-oriented social media platforms represent the place where we live a lot of our digital lives. It’s where we post everything from vacation photos to the latest funny memes.
LinkedIn’s focus on the professional sphere calls for different kinds of content, and a different kind of interaction. The kind of conversations that are ideally geared towards business-to-business (B2B) professionals.
Outside of LinkedIn, the most traditional ways of finding partners was pretty limited. You might encounter a person or organization at an industry conference, for instance. Sometimes a potential partner might be quoted in a trade publication or blog. You might even stumble across a worthy B2B partner in a YouTube video or on-demand webinar.
LinkedIn’s advantages include the fact it is a digitally native experience, where you’re not constrained by the beginning and end of an industry conference. You’re also likely to see links to those articles or webinars in your LinkedIn feed.
Even better, though, LinkedIn gives you a way to proactively attract and cultivate contacts that may turn into partnerships. If you’re a marketer who isn’t already active here, now is a great time to start. There is certainly no shortage of avenues to try:
Showcase your value through storytelling
The initials in B2B may stand for “business,” but partnerships are really about working with people. This includes people you admire, people you respect and people who demonstrate credibility and authenticity.
You can convey all these qualities through an effective LinkedIn post. Over time, the platform has expanded the available character count significantly. Rather than being confined to a single paragraph like Twitter, LinkedIn can accommodate the equivalent of a small blog post.
This is an opportunity for you (or your designated subject matter expert) to bring direct value to the LinkedIn community. Don’t just talk about your products and services. Go beyond bragging about your latest hire or customer win.
Tell a story about how you recovered from a business failure. Share your lessons learned from a difficult project. Recount the way you and your peers in another organization achieved joint success through collaboration.
Post like this consistently and before long, you may find partners reaching out to you directly.
Join and amplify an existing conversation
The one thing that LinkedIn shares with all other social media platforms is that it works best when you treat it as a dialogue with others, rather than a megaphone to blast out your thoughts.
Devote at least as much time as you spend creating content for LinkedIn posts to reading and responding to the posts of other people. LinkedIn comments tend to be comprehensive, thoughtful and less prone to “trolls” than more consumer-oriented channels.
In fact, you might find threads within comments that become lively discussions where your ideas will be valued. It’s not unlike joining an in-person professional networking event. There will be some people you know, and some you don’t. And the people that you don’t know, might become your next partner.
Ask for recommendations and referrals
Imagine if, instead of having an event where you pitch venture capitalists or other investors for a round of funding, you were able to take the stage and ask for partners to help accelerate your growth. LinkedIn offers a surprisingly effective digital version of just such a stage.
Scroll through your feed and you might find any number of posts that are simply members asking their network to name good people to hire, companies to work with or other pointed questions.
Some people will respond in the comments by simply tagging the name of the people they recommend. Others might reach out through InMail (or regular email) to provide a private referral. You can specify if you’d prefer recommendations to be offered in a specific way, and if you’re okay with your network sharing your request with the wider LinkedIn community.
Showcase existing partnerships on your company page
You’re not limited to your own LinkedIn profile to find your next B2B partner. Most brands now have company pages on LinkedIn, where they can share updates and even post their vacant positions.
Company pages can also be a venue to celebrate the anniversary of your existing B2B partnerships, or to announce how an existing partnership has led to mutual success.
Doing this will tell other potential B2B partners two things: whether or not you’re already working with one of their competitors, and that you treat your partners well.
Conclusion
While any of these techniques could identify your next B2B partnership, remember that in this context LinkedIn is almost like a dating app.
You may find what looks like a match, but you still need to meet up directly. You have to see how the conversation goes. Moving forward will have to be based on a clear understanding of what you’re both looking for and the values you share.
LinkedIn is more like a first step in building B2B partnerships, in other words. But much like the secret to providing the best customer experiences, LinkedIn is all about meeting those potential partners where they are.
