LinkedIn goes the extra mile for small businesses and freelancers

LinkedIn aims to give small businesses and freelancers more chances to do business with the new "services" feature.
9 August 2019

The new “services” feature can help freelancers and small businesses get more clients. Source: Shutterstock

To small business owners and gig workers in the United States, LinkedIn has recently rolled out a new feature that allows them to promote their services on their LinkedIn profile.

By showcasing “services” on personal LinkedIn profiles, business owners will show up whenever someone decides to search on LinkedIn. The exposure will help gain more visibility and create more opportunities.

Currently, the service is limited to premium users in the US, but the company is expected to roll the feature out to free users running small businesses and participating in the gig economy later this year.

New opportunities coming via InMails

According to LinkedIn’s blog post, small businesses make up to 99.7 percent of the employer firms in the US, of which, more than 10 million are on LinkedIn’s network.

Freelancers, on the other hand, are rising in numbers, and are predicted to make up to 50 percent of the American workforce by 2020.

Based on our research, small businesses heavily rely on word of mouth to bring in new customers. That being said, we recognize that this traditional marketing strategy is changing and small businesses can, and should, take advantage of the new digital “word of mouth” conversation.” LinkedIn Group Project Manager Vidya Chandra said in a blog post.

Social media has been the go-to tool for SMEs and freelancers for all these years. As noted by a recent study, 73 percent of small businesses in the US invest in social media to spread the message about their brand and work.

Hootsuite recently said that 320 million companies have LinkedIn accounts – accounting for up to 80 percent of social media B2B lead generation.

Freelancers, on the other hand, actively look for jobs on LinkedIn, noting that 37 percent of employees look for potential candidates on LinkedIn – coinciding with Hootsuite’s study which showed 3 million jobs in the US are posted on LinkedIn.

With this new feature, LinkedIn aims to provide more exposure, and by extension, more opportunities for small businesses and freelancers alike.

“This is a great way to quickly indicate to members that you are open for business,” Chandra said in her blogpost. 

Optimizing LinkedIn for your business

Activating this service is easy. Users must subscribe to a premium account and check their profile page (either on mobile or desktop) to see if the feature is enabled.

If it is, they will see a checkbox under their profile photo or headline that explains how to showcase the services they offer to prospective customers.

Chandra advises users to be as detailed as possible so members who view this section can clearly identify the kind of services being offered.

If the feature works as planned, it’ll be a boon to small businesses and gig workers users across the US (and possibly the world) bringing them qualified leads and new opportunities quickly and effortlessly. All they have to do right now is update their LinkedIn profiles.