Whether you're a small business owner who looks after marketing yourself or you manage the marketing team within your company, knowing how to utilize LinkedIn for business and marketing is key to optimizing your B2B platform.
LinkedIn provides an opportunity to reach a professional audience, acquire new leads and contacts, rank higher to get more eyeballs on your page and promote your business.
This guide will provide you with the tools you need to get your company's LinkedIn presence started or optimize it for your business goals.
How to Set Up a Company Page
In order to join the business conversations that matter, you'll need to start by setting up a Company Page.
Visibility is the backbone of marketing, the first step to having your business be seen is to create a page that teaches others about your brand, products, services, and job opportunities with your company.
As this Company Page will be the central facet of how you use LinkedIn for business, it is crucial to understand how your Company Page will be structured and function.
Not just anyone can set up a Company Page, before you do there are a few prerequisites you'll need to meet to ensure LinkedIn that you are a genuine company.
They are:
- Your personal LinkedIn profile must be older than 7 days, you will not be permitted to set up a Company Page with a brand new personal profile
- Your personal information must match the information on your Company Page (for example your first and last name must be the same)
- Your personal profile strength must be listed as “Intermediate” or “All Star,” this strength is based on how complete your profile is—you can check your profile strength at any time on your profile homepage
- The Company Page must have a company email domain unique to your company
Tip: Remember, you can only have one live Company Page up at a time—if you are revamping or updating your company's LinkedIn presence you will either need to update an existing page or delete the existing page and rebuild your new company page from the beginning.
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Info You'll Need on Your LinkedIn Company Profile
The key to optimizing your LinkedIn Company Page is to fill out all fields with the necessary information—this makes it more searchable.
1. Complete all the Page details.
Sure, this first tip might seem like a no-brainer but it's one worth repeating. According to LinkedIn, fully completed LinkedIn company Pages get 30% more views.
That is a third more eye on your brand, and a third more potential connection than if you left a detail or two out. The more details you provide, the easier your company will be to discover.
Take the time to completely fill out every Company Page detail, those that are not required may end up being essential in the long run.
2. Add important Page admins.
Running your company's LinkedIn page can be a daunting task, especially if you are already running their other social media accounts. Adding other Page administrators is a great tool for sharing that workload, here are the four key types of Page admins:
- Designated Admin access allows employees to edit your page, add additional admins, and post updates
- Sponsored Content Poster access allows employees to share and sponsor updates
- Lead Gen Forms Manager access allows employees to download leads from Campaign Manager
- Pipeline Builder Admin access allows employers to create and edit Pipeline Builder landing pages
3. Keep your images up-to-date.
Your cover photo and page logo are the first images your page visitors will see, they visually introduce potential connections to your brand. Ensure your marketing efforts are cohesive by keeping these images up-to-date so they match your website and all other digital marketing materials.
Not only will this cohesion boost your brand awareness across the board, but will help new customers and employees familiarize themselves with you on LinkedIn.
4. Determine your Page's purpose.
Will your LinkedIn Page primarily serve as a source of industry news, a place to share company culture, or an educational resource for those growing in your field? Whatever the goal or primary purpose may be, develop a persona and key demographic to which to tailor your content.
Tip: Use LinkedIn's Content Suggestion tool to discover trending topics and help generate relevant content for your audience to engage with.
5. Share content and engage with your followers.
Creating your Company Page is just the first step in using LinkedIn for Business. You don't create a company Twitter account just to look at memes, you use it to share original content and engage with your followers—your LinkedIn Company Page should be used for the same reasons.
There is a range of posts that you can publish on your company page—product and service updates, job openings, news that involves your brand, and behind-the-scenes content that introduces your connections to employee life.
Your Company Page is also a great place to repost your previously published blog posts.
Optimizing your Rank for LinkedIn Searches
Like any other website or social network, LinkedIn Company Pages rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). Google processes an estimated 3.5 billion searches each day, so to boost your SEO make sure your Company Page includes these key things:
A fully completed profile
Make sure to include relevant career information for potential job candidates and include a strong about section including things like company mission, values, and what you offer.
A keyword-rich profile
Use your existing keyword research from blogging efforts to ensure that anyone searching for your industry can find your page.
A variety of backlinks
Include your website URL on your company page, include links to places like your careers page in your page posts, and encourage followers to share your posts that include links.
Original and relevant posts and articles
Share thought leadership posts from LinkedIn or Medium from company executives at a cadence that matches with audience engagement.
Participation in Groups
Look up industry-specific groups, professional development groups, and local groups to your area and participate, providing helpful information, discussion, and resources.
Images
Add high-quality photos to your page showcasing your product, company culture, and mission. Make sure to have an updated logo and cover image.
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Posting Original Content on LinkedIn
How to create content exclusively for your LinkedIn audience using LinkedIn's Publishing Platform
When it comes to posting original content on your LinkedIn Company Page, you may be wondering what benefits it has over the blogging you're already doing on your company website. In terms of publishing, LinkedIn has evolved massively.
While the ability to publish long-form posts was once reserved for LinkedIn Influencers, now that ability is available to the masses. Take advantage of this tool, when you think of LinkedIn as a publishing platform you are opening your company up to a wider, more engaged audience.
1. Click “Write an Article” near the top of your homepage. This takes you to the publishing tool.
Alternatively, you can scroll down the page as you read an article on LinkedIn. You'll see the Write an article button appear next to Like, Comment, and Share in the top bar, below the LinkedIn navigation bar.
2. Click “Headline” to type the headline of your article.
If you're unable to click into the Headline field, you may have a browser extension that is blocking this functionality. The two extensions that we know cause this issue are Lazarus and Grammarly. This can be resolved by disabling these extensions and refreshing the editor.
3. Click “Write here” to type the content of your article.
You can add images and other rich media to your article for visual impact.
4. Click the Publish button in the top right of the page.
You won't have the option to preview your content prior to publishing. Your article draft shows you how the published version will look. You can share your article draft with others prior to publishing.
5. In the pop-up window that appears, click “Publish” to send your post out to the world or click “Cancel” to continue editing your article.
Once your article is published, you can edit or delete it at any time.
What to Post
When it comes to the specifics of what content to share with your connections on your Company Page, let the 4-1-1 rule be your guide. It goes like this: for every one original piece of content you share about your brand, share one update from another source, and four reposted pieces of content published by others.
By following this rule you are fueling your Company Page with fresh content, but not creating original content from scratch every day. Instead, by repurposing blog posts, ebooks, webinars, etc. from other sources you can be strategic about your posting habits instead of off-the-cuff or burning out by trying to write new content every day.
Types of Content to Post + Best Practices
Images
LinkedIn recommends adding an image to your posts and has found that several high-quality images perform best for organizations.
Video
Live video gets 24x more engagement than other types of posts. Get creative and enable your sales team to start a dialogue with potential customers from their personal page, then share their posts.
Articles
Use LinkedIn's Content Suggestions tool to find the trending topics in your industry or among your audience.
Page status updates without links
Publish PDFs or PowerPoints to share educational, informative content with your audience.
Job postings
Include relevant hashtags and publish job postings to industry groups.
Establishing a Posting Cadence
Posting on LinkedIn is an art form. In order to foster meaningful, consistent engagement from your connections we suggest posting on your Company Page at least once a day.
In order to establish a posting cadence, start with a week of posting at different times to see when you are the most likely to attract engagement—if you consistently receive the most likes, comments, and reposts when you publish original content in the morning then you know to consistently post in the morning moving forward.
Each audience is different, from their degree of engagement to the hour they consume content. Experimenting with your publishing schedule is critical to establishing a recognizable and effective posting cadence.
Tip: Intermittently re-share your own best performing content so any new connections who missed it the first time around will get another chance to see and engage with it.
Use Showcase Pages
Showcase Pages are niche pages that branch off your main LinkedIn Company Page. They provide a more personalized experience for your connections by allowing you to promote individual products at a time or cater to specific marketing personas.
Additionally, LinkedIn users can follow product-specific Showcase Pages without following the main Company Page. Think of them like choose-your-own-adventure marketing, you can tailor each page to audience specifics without altering your Company Page or advertise singular events on their own.
There are a few main differences between Company and Showcase Pages:
- Showcase pages have a larger hero image.
- Showcase pages have a two-column layout for content posts, as opposed to the single-column blog post layout of Company Pages
- Unlike Company Pages, there is no Career Tab at the top of Showcase Pages
- All Showcase Pages link directly back to the Company Page– so all additional pages are centralized around your main page
- Individual Employee profile pages cannot be directly associated with Showcase Pages
Showcase pages for a company can be created by going to the company page. On the top right under Admin tools, you should see the option of Create a Showcase Page.
These showcase pages are very useful to highlight products, services or business units. If there are more than 10 showcase pages for a company, it is suggested to keep them in a category.
Showcase pages are one of the under-rated features of LinkedIn. Utilize them well to reach a wider audience in your niche.
Final Words
LinkedIn is the social network that is understated by many SME's. It is usually looked at as another social media network by many companies.
When you put your focus on LinkedIn and optimize the company pages well, it can result in good traffic and leads to your website. But the company owners or social media executives need to learn how to use LinkedIn well.
We tried to put all the basic and beginner friendly LinkedIn guide in this post. These are the best practices that can help business owners grow their company marketing aspect on LinkedIn.
With the right strategy and tips given in this post, you should be able to start using LinkedIn for business in no time.
Share this post if you find it helpful and comment below your thoughts.
Linkedin is a good platform for B2B sales and marketing. This is a nice guide to get introduced to Linkedin and promote your business.
Linkedin is also a good platform to gain good backlinks. If your content is good and shared in good numbers, it can generate your website backlinks. This will effect the SEO rankings of the website too.