Steps To Maximize Your Company On LinkedIn

LinkedIn is not only a great solution for personal networking, but it also provides ample opportunities for your business. LinkedIn can provide your business with the tools to become a recognized thought-leader, achieve brand awareness, drive new leads and organically increase SEO for your website. We have outlined the following key steps to help take advantage of these free tools.

Listing Your Business – Brand Awareness

1. Overview
   The first step to creating brand awareness for your business on LinkedIn is to create a company page. The first section you will encounter is the Overview section of the company page. Please be thorough in completing the overview section and include as much information as applicable to your business. Include your company locations, business description, company specialties, blog feed, Twitter handle, and company industry. Not only will a robust profile help users understand your business offerings immediately, but the information you provide will also make it easier for users to find your business. Be sure to add keyword-rich text within the text areas. This is a great opportunity to include target keyword phrases within the company page to help improve your website SEO. Lastly, don’t forget to upload a business logo to brand your company page.
2. Products & Services
   After you have completed the Overview section of your company page, the next step is creating the Products & Services section of your company page. The Products & Services section allows you to build a more robust description of your business offerings. We highly recommend adding a Products or Services section to fully complete your business page. First, choose whether you are going to list Products or Services. After you have made this decision, the next step is to decide whether you need to create multiple variations of the Products/Services section. Multiple variations are especially helpful for companies that offer different products or services for custom audiences (i.e. different countries or demographics). For most companies the default version will suit all customer segments.In the second step, you need to create an overview of your products and services. We recommended creating a description different than the one you listed in the Overview section. In the third step, you have the option to create three banner images for your company. We recommend creating banners to showcase your business offerings, upcoming events, resources, or promotional items. An added bonus of the banners is that you can include links to your website for each of the three banners. Go ahead and publish these changes and then let’s move onto adding the products or services. You have now completed the overview for the Products or Services section of your company page.The next step is adding each of your products or services. You will see an Admin tools button in the upper right-hand page of your Products or Services section. Choose to add a product or service from the drop-down. We recommend including as much information as you can for each of your products or services. There are some basic fields to complete for each listing such as an image, features, category, description and a link to the product or service on your website. There are bonus fields to make each product or service listing more robust, such as a link to your product or service on YouTube, the contact information of a specific employee at your business, and a special promotion for each product or service. It’s ok if you don’t have all of this information when you first create the listing but we recommend setting an objective to create these materials over time to update each listing.After creating a listing for each of your products or services, the last step for this section is going back to the overview Products/Services page. Click on Admin tools from the upper-right corner and choose edit. Scroll down to the fourth step to choose a featured product/service. Simply add a title to the text box and choose your product or service from the first drop down. This will place the featured item below your banners and above the other products/services.
3. Careers
   The third section of your company page, Careers, is for posting open jobs. LinkedIn provides a detailed explanation on how to post a job on your company page – simply click on the Careers tab for all the specifics.
4. Analytics
   Analytics is the last section of your company page that we will cover. Here you will find easy to understand reports on the performance of your company page. The following are a few details you will find:
   1. Page views by section and the number of unique visitors. Not only does this report provide information regarding your page performance but it also provides information on how your page compares to similar companies.
   2. Members visits by industry, function, and company. Reporting on the job functions of visitors to your company page may help you learn more about your target audience. We recommended taking a minute to review the member visits by company to take a peek at which companies have looked at your page.
   3. Number of members following your company page – the more active you and your employees are on LinkedIn the more members should follow your company page. Be sure to include a link from your website to your company page to help drive more traffic.
   4. Products & Services performance. From this report you can see what people have clicked on the most under Product & Services: promotional banners, more information, special promotional links, etc.

Now that you have completed your company page we recommend asking your employees to include a link to your company page from their personal profiles. They do this by adding the company as their current employer.

In the next couple of weeks, we will release a new blog post with steps to using your LinkedIn company page to become a thought-leader in your industry, drive new leads, and create SEO for your website.