Let's face it - LinkedIn is just a little bit dull.
It hasn't had any Hollywood movies made about it; celebrities don't use it to share their, 140 character long, pearls of wisdom with their legions of followers and its owners aren't worth a Gazillion dollars at the age of twelve and a half.
Linkedin is a little like our favourite accountant, steadfast, reliable, sober and just a little frumpy in the fashion stakes.
LinkedIn started its days as a professional networking service. I suspect many people still think that's what it remains, a place to host your online resume where you and your close friends recommend each other and headhunters can ply their trade.
If that's the case you owe yourselves another look, LinkedIn is evolving rapidly to become THE single best social media tool for B2B Marketers. There are over 100 million professionals on LinkedIn and its growing fast. Better than that, used properly LinkedIn can be a genuine, effective part of your lead generation and nurturing activities, but more of that later. 
Facebook is about reach, opening your arms to the masses as far and wide as possible, LinkedIn is about focus.
Its members talk about serious professional issues, and some of its groups have in excess of 40,000 members. Some groups are large enough to become vertical market social networks in their own right. Equally some groups are deliberately small and hard to join unless you can prove you have expertise that will benefit the membership. There are geographical sub groups of large global groups so physically close members can network and share their thoughts on issues that are affecting them.
Even better most groups self moderate and self promotion is viewed as boring and poor form and will be ignored. Interesting questions and thoughts will be promoted by many of the group posting their thoughts and answers to the question being posed. Group admins can promote the best debates as "questions of the week." This is why it works, social media is about creating communities of interest. Communities, whether online or offline in the local school hall, only work if there is active participation, if one or two people have to do all the work...or have to run around making the cucumber sandwiches, the community will soon fail.
So how should you approach your lead generation and nurturing strategy on LinkedIn. First things first, LinkedIn needs to be a part (and only a part of) your inbound marketing strategy. That is to say, the way in which you attract interested buyers to your site.
Once you have clarity around who your target audience is, it's important to spend some time doing some research on LinkedIn and find out which groups they belong to. Join those groups, watch the questions being posted, and see who and how people are responding. Start small, pick two or three groups only. Start participating in debates. Provide your opinion, add something new to the debate, don't simply say "great point Bob". Whatever you do avoid promoting yourself or your company's products. Talk instead about the issues facing the group. Choose a whitepaper or eBook you have and provide a link to its registration page. This is a great way to drive traffic to a landing page on your site where you can exchange their contact details for your valuable content, or get them to subscribe to your blog. Hey presto you have a lead!
If you genuinely can't find a group that seems to represent your target audience or the debate is too US centric, (a relatively common complaint,) you might consider starting your own group, or a local country or state version of a global group. This is hard work though, unless you are well known brand within your sector, and must be adequately resourced internally.
LinkedIn also has a powerful companies section where you can search for all people who work for a company who have a LinkedIn account, this is a great way to search for contacts in target firms, especially useful for salespeople and lead development reps. A good mid funnel nurturing tactic.
The Answer Questions section is also a good hunting ground for firms with problems that you are in the business of solving.
A final point and one not to be underestimated is that if you post regularly to open groups you will receive some off page SEO "juice" which will help with your Google ranking.
There are many ways to use LinkedIn to get company found in the social media sphere, it requires some planning, some research and a commitment to continue engaging with your selected communities. As with all inbound marketing, providing powerful, valuable content to your target buyers is really the secret. LinkedIn provides a perfect distribution mechanism for B2B Marketers