Despite being not quite as big as Facebook, LinkedIn is often a better choice for businesses.

It provides you with an opportunity to connect with professionals and engage with them on a personal level.

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know:

Over 80% of B2B leads generated from social media come from LinkedIn.

That’s pretty incredible.

LinkedIn’s users are much more open to learning about products than Facebook users are, who just want to see pictures of cats.

While LinkedIn is smaller than some other social networks, it’s still pretty huge. It has more than 300 million users and is still growing.

And more importantly, those users are buyers. Businesses are 50% more likely to buy a product if they’ve already engaged on LinkedIn.

When you think about it, people go on LinkedIn for several reasons.  Perhaps it something related to their profession, or they’re looking for ways to further their career, not for products for their personal lives, like a new computer or toaster.

So, if you sell your products directly to consumers, LinkedIn might not be the best fit for you to go the direct approach to sell.  However, it might mean that you could use LinkedIn to build a massive referral engine with strategic partners.

Moreover, if you sell products or services to businesses, LinkedIn provides a massive opportunity to generate more leads.

The goal with LinkedIn should be to open up relationships with people.  And when you build authentic & transparent relationships this helps you generate leads & sales opportunities.

That’s why I’ve dedicated this post specifically to strategies that will help you build the most effective network possible, both in size and quality.