LinkedIn Best Practices for Your Company Page

Almost all of you reading this would have a personal profile on LinkedIn.com – easily the world’s biggest business networking site.

However, only few of you on LinkedIn have company pages to manage. So, either you would be in Marketing/ Social Media team of your company or would have your own startup.

I have been handling Marketing & Communication for a multinational company in recruitment since last 5 years and have had some decent success on LinkedIn w.r.t getting followers. For the page of Elixir Consulting, I have enhanced the follower base fromĀ  less than 1000 to over 14,000 over a period of 4 years. So, given the irregular effort gone into that, I consider myself an expert on this for the purpose of mentioning some best practices to manage a company page.
The objective is to increase the number of followers & enhance engagement, ultimately leading to higher sales leads and/or establishment of brand equity and brand recall.

Note: These tips are primarily for LI pages who have not bought branding services of LinkedIn. There you get many more options. I’ll share tips on those options later.

First, lets discuss Basic Hygiene – design of your page:

  1. Visible Logo: The logo that you put in the square thumbnail should have big enough size so as to be visible. If your logo is very long vertically or horizontally, it is likely to show up very small, given that LI automatically creates extra white space around it. You can choose to highlight a smaller part of your logo which can be the right representative of your brand and looks complete.
    Trust me, on some pages, that logo thumbnail looks further smaller and will be almost illegible.
  2. Background Image: A background image is a great way to advertise a lot of things about your company. You could put great images of your products, your culture, your staff, quotation by your leadership, festive wishes, any remarkable achievements of company etc. Don’t miss this. You can keep changing this.
  3. Company Name: Write your company name with all initials in capitals. You can avoid ‘Pvt. Ltd.’/ ‘SpA’. Do not write in all caps – does not look wise.
  4. Description: Write a nice description of the organisation. You can copy it from your website, but do take care to remove words that might be irrelevant on Social Media / LinkedIn.
    Mention your email id for people to be able to contact you, as there is no column for that on LI company page.
  5. Company URL: Do not miss to mention the company website URL to get some eyeballs there.
  6. Other Important Details: Correctly mention the other important details such as Company Type, Co. Size, Industry, Operating Status and Year Founded.
  7. Admins: Be careful about who you make an administrator as all administrators have equal powers (at least in free company page version), and any admin can remove any other admin.
  8. Company Specialties: You can mention your company’s products / services here. These showcase your core offering.
  9. Featured Groups: I highly recommend starting a relevant industry group where you discuss about your industry news/ issues etc. However, if nothing such exists, you can mention any prominent industry group, though that is akin to giving away traffic.
  10. Company Location: Giving your address is a great way to enhance credentials especially if you are a startup. Do not miss this.

Promoting your page through posts:

  1. Be Regular: First thing, whatever you post, be regular. You can post twice every day.
  2. Posts:
    1. Images: People like to see information more than read information. So, either use an original image or develop an image from text and post it with or without text. This is extremely simple to do in Powerpoint. (I have developed an extremely good design expertise in last 5 years on Powerpoint; see my Design Portfolio here.)
      For most of the images, try to have the company logo somewhere in that image, so that even when the image is shared/ copied, your logo keeps representing you.
    2. Contextual Motivational Quotes: Its a good idea to use a company related image and put up a related motivational quote in a single image. You need to take care that it does not look out-of-context or over-the-top, or plain cheesy.
    3. Company News: Any celebrations, awards, events, announcements, press release give you a good reason to post these on LinkedIn and tell the world about yourself.
    4. Current Issues: You can choose to comment (within prescribed limits) on current news/ issues. Its better if these are relevant to your industry. Any comments should not show any affinity to a political / religious group or any other group, or else it would look like you have vested interests/ motives.
    5. Non-company posts: Occasionally, do share non-company posts also to make sure your followers don’t accuse your company of narcissism (though it is your company page and you have every right to feel so). It might just show broad-mindedness of the company – acknowledging presence of the world.
    6. Company Blog: If you maintain a company blog, its imperative that the posts from the blog are shared on LI.
    7. Announcements: All senior level joinings are a great opportunity to introduce them to the outside stakeholders. It helps you in employee engagement also.
    8. Jobs: Even if you have not subscribed to LinkedIn Jobs’ services, but if you put job postings on Job Portals or elsewhere, its a good idea to put those job links as posts on LI.
      Brownie points, if you use relevant customised images here.
    9. Quiz: Quiz has always been the best way to engage people. On LinkedIn, this becomes tricky as cannot ask just any questions. Context matters.
      A secret tip here: Create simple 1/2/3 word crossword / jumbled puzzle on Powerpoint, where the words can relate to names of your products/ services. Give an easy hint and ask people to guess.
      You’ll be amazed at the number of responses you get, if you make the post at a good time.
      You shoot two birds with one arrow – Engagement, plus Brand Recall.
    10. Replying to Comments: Its a no-brainer that all comments should be replied to, whether they are queries, suggestions, requests, views, or negative PR. And of course, these should be highly respectful and should never look like an attack, even if the person has made inflammatory comments. Whole world is watching your response.
      If it is leading to negative PR, ask the person her contact details and assure them of rightful action. If someone is making irrelevant comments constantly without considering your replies, you may think of deleting their comments or removing them. However, do mention any reason if you think you should give justification to others following that post, for removing the comments or the person.
      Not taking any corrective action might lead to a PR crisis for you.
  3. Analytics: Using LI Analytics, observe the trend of Likes/ Comments on your posts. Gradually, you’ll get to know which posts are doing best. You can make important announcements at that time/ day.

Outside Promotion of LI page:

  1. Email Marketing:Use email marketing to announce to all stakeholders that you are on LinkedIn, asking them to ‘Follow’ you. You can use the pretext of some news, giving a snippet in the mail and asking them to follow/ read the rest on LinkedIn page. In that case, make sure that the particular news is ‘pinned to the top’.
    It is Okay to remind people once every 3 months about your LI presence, as stakeholders keep changing, and people keep forgetting.
  2. Ask employees: Ask all employees to follow their company’s page on LI. You can give some in-kind incentive/ bait for this.
  3. Employees’ profile: Very often employees are not seen mentioning their company / right company in their personal profile. Guide them / handhold them for this. It’ll help you. The more number of employees are shown there, the better looks the company page.
    (Sorry, but you cannot do anything about employees who have exited, if you are concerned about that. They are anyways adding to your strength.)

I’ll share tips on creating a Professional Profile to create your personal brand on LinkedIn some other time in another post. Till then, use these and be your company’s #MarketingSuperhero. View My LinkedIn profile

Cheers
Your Marketing Superhero:
Bit.ly/nimesh
(See, that’s another way to to customize your short URL for easy recall and lesser screen real estate consumed)

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