5 Best Practices When Creating a LinkedIn Company Page
LinkedIn currently has about 660 million users on their site, according to their about page. It remains the most popular “professional networking” site that students, employers, and professionals use to share information, build work relationships, and find jobs. Just like the other popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, a company’s LinkedIn page is likely to show up in search results for their branded terms.
Because of the potential user and search engine exposure, it’s important for organizations to have a complete LinkedIn company page that lives up to its potential. Not doing so can be detrimental by making the company look unprofessional or outdated because of incorrect or missing information on its page.
Updated Information
Make sure to fill out the important company information, such as phone number and website URL correctly. If this information ever does change, make it a priority to update all social media profiles, including LinkedIn. The same goes for aspects of the page that you might overlook, such as an updated logo, mission statement, or other information that occasionally changes as a company evolves or changes course.
Even mundane information, such as company size, may influence how your company shows up in search results. If a potential client or employee is looking for companies of a specific size and yours isn’t entered correctly, it may result in your company not being shown for results that could have caused some users to reach out to you.
There’s also a map and address section. This helps users find where you are located and again, can affect what searches LinkedIn decides to include your company in if the searches have geographic parameters.
Fill out All Available Page Fields
Another missed opportunity is not filling out all the available fields and features that LinkedIn profiles have to offer. This includes your career pages where you include job listings, your “about” section where you promote your top offerings, and the boxes that appear on the sides of the page, like featured groups.
LinkedIn wants companies to fill out their page information. They even have a progress tracker that entices organization page managers to continue to add page features, promising more features to be unlocked as the page continues to be completed.
In the above screenshot, the hashtag section is a relatively new feature that LinkedIn has been pushing for pages for a while. When you fill out your hashtags, you gain the ability to then like, reshare, and comment on hashtag conversations:
There is also a featured groups section where you can add your own groups or industry groups that you’re involved in. This could help drive more members to your own groups if you’re trying to grow them. Oftentimes, users may not know about a group until they are shown the group as a suggestion.
Make sure that you are utilizing these types of fields by going through all the available options in your pages. Don’t hesitate to fill out something short and then come back to it later when you have more time to fully enter the information. Having something short and quick is much more insightful to users than not having anything at all!
Consider Showcase Pages
There used to be a section of LinkedIn company pages that let companies add a “portfolio” but these have been replaced by showcase pages. Showcase pages are like “baby” company pages. They have much of the same shared information and features but are considered sub-pages of a central company page.
These could be pages for unique brands under a central business or used for an ongoing marketing strategy or outreach initiative. LinkedIn doesn’t want these pages being used as platforms for temporary marketing campaign pages.
A showcase page has many of the same features as a traditional page, except for the following:
- Cannot associate a personal profile with a showcase page (e.g. make someone the manager of it using their own profile)
- Post job listings under showcase pages
- Career feature pages
You can share posts and sponsored content from showcase pages and not have them shared from the central company page.
Employees
Make sure that employees are adding your correct company page as their current employer on their own LinkedIn profiles. When users click on your company name in the profile, they are taken to your page. From there, LinkedIn shows the user how many people they know work at that company and then lets them go to a page that shows all current employees who have that company listed as their employer:
This has benefits for multiple parties:
- Potential employees can see if they know anyone who works there
- Clients and job candidates can see the type of roles people have at the company
- Interested parties wanting to contact someone at your company for various reasons can find the best person to reach.
Whether it’s for recruiting, sales, or vendor relationships, asking employees to properly list your company on LinkedIn can help gain exposure and lead to better relationships with others.
Another interesting feature that is great for larger companies is the ability to share posts your page has posted with your employees:
LinkedIn lets you do this once every seven days. This could be a good way to get employees more engaged on LinkedIn and remind them to be sharing posts on their own personal profiles. It may also help employees see more of the public news and information the company is sharing if there isn’t a monthly newsletter or intranet that is sharing the information internally.
Regular Posts
Just like profiles, LinkedIn pages can post links to articles, videos, and other types of content. It’s recommended to be regularly sharing content as often as you can. Big social media scheduling platforms like DrumUp or Hootsuite can link to your company’s LinkedIn page so you can schedule updates in advance and have them go out on a regular basis.
While there isn’t a set minimum or maximum number of posts for pages (this can vary by industry), ideally at least once a week is great. Otherwise, anything older than a week is labeled by LinkedIn as “3w,” “6w” etc above the post so users will think your page is outdated and not providing enough information since nothing has been posted in a while.
If you are having trouble coming up with things to post, one of the relatively new features of LinkedIn pages is a “Content Suggestions” tab, where LinkedIn offers content for your page to share.
It includes the “engagement rate” percentage for each suggested post, which is the ratio of the number of people that engaged with the post in some way, such as liking, clicking on, or commenting on the post. You can also filter by what content is popular amongst all LinkedIn members, page followers, or your company’s employees. Content is suggested by topic or industry, and you can add industries to search (LinkedIn automatically already suggests some for you).
This is a great way to not only find posts to share on LinkedIn but to get an idea of what is popular engagement wise across the entire user base or just your followers.
Final Thoughts
LinkedIn company pages have a variety of different features and fields that companies can take advantage of. LinkedIn wants your business to get found on their platform, so you and the users searching for your services will continue to use it. Make your page as relevant, updated, and informative as possible so users will easily be able to find you and use your offerings.
LinkedIn has continued to be the main professional social networking platform, so no matter what industry your business is in, it’s important to stay active and ready to connect with employees, clients, and potential hires.