4 Life-Changing Tools To Become A LinkedIn Expert

Small businesses, but also many start-ups often struggle with the lack of budget for their marketing and communication. Those areas are nevertheless very important in order to run a business smoothly. Also, the lack of skills in these fields is sometimes problematic. However, nowadays, they are many tools and websites that can be extremely useful to help build an online presence, whether it’s on LinkedIn or on other social media platforms. Let’s talk about a few ones that I guarantee are truly life changing as they will simplify your work in so many ways.

Canva
Canva is a graphic design platform that I absolutely love. It helps to create so many amazing and diverse content for social media, but also for presentations, flyers, posters, cards, logos, videos, you name it. It’s not only useful for LinkedIn, but for many other platforms as well. It’s really user-friendly and unlike other design software such as Photoshop, you don’t need to be an expert to create professional looking material. You can start from scratch or pick pre-made layouts and change whatever you would like on them. You can also upload your own pictures or pick from the photo data base available on Canva. The options are endless.

There’s a free and a pay version, but the free one is more than enough to create beautiful and professional designs for your social media posts. For companies that lack graphic design skills or money to ask professionals to create their graphic materials, that’s your solution, and believe me, a great one.

Lumen5
Nowadays, videos are becoming more and more used and important on social media. Experts even predict that it’s going to be the next huge thing, becoming more important than pictures. So, you definitely need to consider this format for your content whether it’s on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook.

The first thing that probably comes to your mind right now is: “Nice, but creating videos is time consuming and you need special skills to create professional looking ones.” Well, not anymore. Many platforms can help you to create videos, for instance Canva. As mentioned earlier, it’s super simple to use it. But still, with Canva, you can easily loose a lot of time creating the content. So, if you’re looking for a faster way to produce videos, I suggest trying Lumen5.

This platform uses artificial intelligence to storyboard your ideas, fit your content into the layout, as well as find the music and the visuals that would go well with the content. You can also customize the video so that it fits with the identity of your brand.

As I had never used this last tool until now, I wanted to check it out by myself to be sure it’s helpful and user-friendly. And yes, it definitely is. It took me about 30 minutes to create a video, and I guess that’s only because I’m a starter with Lumen5. There are some really helpful little videos that will guide you while creating your first one so that you’re not lost. And once you did your first video, I’m sure the next ones will be created a lot faster. I let you check here the results of the video I did:

https://youtu.be/pepaL0L7eSQ

SlideShare
If you would like to post professional presentations, infographics and other types of documents on LinkedIn, then you should consider SlideShare. Belonging to LinkedIn, this website allow you to put these kind of content online whether their format is a pdf, ppt, doc, xls, odt and so on. Once you uploaded them on SlideShare, you can then share them on LinkedIn with your audience. And people can also download the files on their own desktop.

During a past professional experience, I used the platform. When we were hosting webinars, I used to upload the presentation that belonged with it on SlideShare. That was a great way for the webinars attendees or all the ones that couldn’t attend them live to have written information about what had been said. And it helped me to see how many people were actually interested in the presentation as I could see how many times the slides had been viewed.

Bitly.com
Bitly.com allows you to customize the url links you share online. It’s pretty useful whenever you have a long url, as you can then shorten your link. But that’s not the only reason why Bitly.com is helpful. It also helps to track your statistics as well as other social media KPIs so that you can measure how successful your online marketing strategies are. Not only will you know how many people clicked on the Bitly link you shared, but you will also learn where those people are living and where they are coming from online (meaning on which website they clicked on your Bitly link). That way, you’ll see if those people are fitting with your target audience and thus know if you should adapt your strategy or keep going as it is. And another great thing about Bitly.com: it’s totally free. So, to get a basic overview on how well your LinkedIn strategy is working, Bitly may be really useful.

Have you personally already used one of these tools and platforms? What is your opinion on them? Do you know any great website that are helpful for LinkedIn, but also for other social media platforms? Let me know in the comments below, I’ll be happy to read your thoughts.

You liked reading this article and would be interested to know more about LinkedIn for business? Have a look at my previous blog posts listed below:

• 6 Reasons Why You Should Use LinkedIn for Your Small Business
• Everything You Need to Know About LinkedIn Posts
• 10 Free Ways to Gain Visibility on LinkedIn
• Best Practices of Small Companies and Startups on LinkedIn
• Pros and Cons of Using LinkedIn Paid Ads for Small Companies and Start-ups

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Have a great day and take care!