How to Optimise Your Company LinkedIn Page

Have you given much thought to your Company’s LinkedIn Page?

Or has it been an afterthought, behind your website, blog, SEO strategy, personal LinkedIn profile, and company social media accounts? Is it time to check in and make some improvements?

A recent survey of 2,701 LinkedIn members showed that LinkedIn members are consuming and sharing professional content in record amounts, with LinkedIn being the go-to source for professional content.

Survey results showed that 91% of LinkedIn members are using LinkedIn weekly for professionally relevant content, compared to 64% for online news sites, 29% for Twitter, and 27% for Facebook.

Optimising your Company’s LinkedIn Page is a great way to increase brand awareness, connect with a more targeted and engaged audience. Here are some pointers to help you optimise your page.

Put Some Thought Into Your Company Profile

This is your chance to tell the world your company’s story!

Here’s how to do it:

Provide a well-written, high-level overview of your company and what it does – you have 2000 characters to work with so be detailed.
Align the branding of your Company Page to your existing brand. Use a high-resolution and correctly sized company logo, and upload a relevant company banner.
Ensure that your company’s profile is complete, filling in the all of the details including the size of your company, it’s specialties, a link to your company’s website, the date of establishment, memberships to relevant industry groups, and so on.

Incorporate Keywords

LinkedIn has its own search engine, and it’s being used by more and more people every day. These people are searching for companies just like yours.

As on your website, by including keywords into your Company Page you will boost SEO, improve the likelihood of the page being seen on LinkedIn, and increase the chances of it being by picked up via external search engines such as Google.

Showcase Your Business

LinkedIn describes Showcase Pages as “extensions of your Company Page, designed for spotlighting a brand, business unit, or initiative”.

Create Showcase Pages for different sections of your business, tailoring messages to their specific audience.

Share Updates Regularly

You can share updates and information on your Company Page just like you do on other social networks. This doesn’t have to be a cumbersome process, as it can easily be added to whatever social media management tool your company currently uses.

When sharing updates on your Company’s Page, make sure the content is high quality, authentic, relevant and brief. Suggestions for content are:

Promotions and campaigns
Announcements,
Company / industry news
Tips and Tricks
Best Practice advice, and
The latest posts from your company’s blog.

By doing this, you can establish your company as a leader in your industry or niche, ahead of your competitors who haven’t figured this stuff out yet.

Use Sponsored Updates

Sponsored Updates extend the reach of your company’s updates, allowing you to send targeted messages to your audience, raising brand awareness, generating quality leads, and building deeper relationships with your audience.

Check out LinkedIn’s guide, Inspiring Your Audience with Content – How to Drive Thought Leadership Goals Using LinkedIn Sponsored Updates.

Your Employees Are Your Company’s Biggest Advocates

Encourage your employees to list your company as their employer in their personal LinkedIn profile. This will link back to your Company’s Page, showing them as employees.

You may need to get their manager to sit with them, or sit with them yourself, in order to walk them through the process. Taking that one step further, they may not even have a LinkedIn profile, so you or their manager may need to talk to the person about the benefits of having a profile (you can’t force them), and step them through setting up a good personal profile.

This can be a great exercise to capture team and employee profiles to build an employee skills matrix.

Use Targeted Follow Ads to Attract the Audience You Want to Reach

LinkedIn’s Follow Ads are shown throughout LinkedIn and can be targeted to members in specific industries, companies, and countries. As more members follow your company, the Follow Ads spread through their networks as an update, motivating others to follow too.

Who Are Your Page Administrators?

As with any social media account, it’s critical that the right people be provided with administrative access. These people need to be:

Clear on the marketing strategy and key messages to be conveyed,
Are kept up to date on activity within the company, and
Are trusted with your Company’s communications.

This role generally falls to your Communications or Social Media Manager, but we highly recommend providing access to at least one other person. This is a sensible contingency plan for two reasons:

If a backup is needed at anytime (leave coverage or unforeseen circumstances), and
In case someone leaves the company and someone else needs to jump in quickly to access the page.

Advertise Your Career Vacancies

More and more professionals are turning to LinkedIn to hire and be hired.

Use the careers tab to advertise vacant positions within your company. As a company, you need a paid subscription to be able to do this, but this functionality can really help you get your vacancy in front of a growing LinkedIn audience, and the right people for the job.

You can use this feature in conjunction with LinkedIn’s “post a job” feature.

Add Featured Groups

You’re able to add up to three “featured groups” when editing your company page. It’s a good idea to add important industry groups here for a few reasons:

Show your company’s areas of interest and expertise
Build credibility and trust with prospects viewing your company page
Promote groups that you own and/or manage

To add a featured group you need to be an admin of the company page you’re editing as well as a member of the group you want to feature.

Don’t Just Create It And Forget About It

So many company pages get created but end up sitting dormant. If you create a page for your company, make sure you keep it active by posting frequent quality content (even if it’s just sharing somebody else’s industry-relevant content), and remembering to engage with people who follow, leave comments and share your content. This leads us to…

Keep Your Company Page Up To Date

If there are any changes, such as a change in your companies vision or strategy, than update the overview section! You want people to get the right idea about your company, not the wrong one.

By implementing most or all of the above, your company will see more leads, recommendations and referrals. If you need some inspiration for your Company’s LinkedIn Page, check out the Best LinkedIn Company Pages for 2013.