Most of the businesses we help have grown initially through word of mouth and referrals. They’re great at what they do, and that’s driven new business. Now, they want to up the ante. If they’re a B2B business our first question is usually around LinkedIn, because this business focused social media platform is number one when it comes to amplifying the natural referral process, growing connections and boosting lead generation.
LinkedIn – Why you need a Company Page
If you are starting with a bare bones Personal Profile Page, then it’s time to up your game. For LinkedIn to deliver increased brand awareness and lead generation in 2020 you need a detailed Company Page.
A Company Page helps you showcase your business and your brand. It’s the ideal platform from which to establish industry expertise, educate potential clients on services, and demonstrate excellence. Interesting and engaging status updates can help establish your business as a leader within your industry and enable you to outshine larger competitors.
We’re big fans of Hootsuite and agree with their recent insights around the importance of completing Company Pages. According to their recent recommendations, completed pages generally receive twice as many visitors than those with incomplete pages and businesses that post regularly generally gain followers six times faster than those that don’t.
It’s social media, so it’s free, right?
Before we show you how to create, and start using, your LinkedIn Company Page we wanted to deal with this costly marketing myth – that social media is free.
Yes, setting up a Company Page is free. But don’t let that lull you into thinking social media is free marketing. The time and energy you, your team, or the PR agency you work with costs. To avoid investment wastage, start with a simple LinkedIn marketing plan covering these three key areas; the audience your business needs to connect with; the kind of content they’ll be interested in seeing; and how you’ll measure success.
Once you have a plan in place you can move onto creating your LinkedIn Company page – and you’ll be glad to learn it’s a pretty straight forward process. Follow these steps (or, if you’re strapped for time you could always let us do it for you) …
Get Started – Our Step by Step Guide
- Create a LinkedIn Personal Page under your own name (not the company name).
- Add your company. Go to the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions portal for creating Company Pages and click the blue ‘Create a Company Page’ button.
- Enter your company name and choose the unique URL that people will use to find your business on LinkedIn. It’s worth taking a moment or two to consider this, as you can’t change this URL later. Check the box stating that you have the right to act on behalf of your company, then you can click ‘create page’.
- Complete your page details. LinkedIn will create the shell, you should then fill in the details.
- Add a cover image and logo. The image should be 1536 x 768 pixels, and your logo a 300 x 300 pixel square.
- Create a company description. 2,000 words describing your company and sets you apart. The first 156 characters are the most important, as this section appears in the Google preview of your Company Page.
- Specify specialities. Beneath your company description you can add up to 20 company specialties. Think of these as tags or keywords that will help people find your business. If you’re not sure what to include take a moment to see what words other businesses in your industry have listed.
- Fill in your company details. This includes your business website URL, industry, company size, and company type (public, non-profit, educational, and so on), and enter the year your company was founded. You’ll also need to include a location for your business.
- If you belong to some LinkedIn Groups that you’d like to feature on your Company Page enter them now, if you don’t then feel free to leave this section blank, for now.
- Publish your page. Click the ‘publish’ button and your Company Page will become live.
- Check you are happy with it. Click the ‘go to member view’ button in the top right of the page to see how your page looks to everyone else.
- Manage your page and make changes. You can now log in to your Personal Page and access your Company Page from a link on the left of the page. Just click ‘manage page’ to make any edits or updates necessary.
- Add administrators. If you’ve colleagues, team members, or a PR agency who you’d like to delegate responsibilities to then you’ll need to add them as page administrators. To add them click the ‘me’ icon at the top of your LinkedIn Page, then choose your company page under the Manage section. Click Admin tools at the top right, then select Page admins. Add your team members by name. They must already me connected with your Personal Page before you can add them.
Extra Tips
To boost the reach of your new Company Page you should now encourage employees to connect, (using a brand-new LinkedIn feature) invite personal connections to follow your Company Page, and start publishing valuable, consistent content.
- Encourage employees to connect
Your first resource to growing the reach of your page are employees, collaborators, consultants and colleagues. Ask employees to add their position at your company to their LinkedIn profile (your new Company Page will be linked) this enables you to tap into their network of 1st degree connections and builds a strong team linked to your company.
- Invite personal connections to follow your Company
Great news! LinkedIn has finally released an update that allows page admins to invite their own personal contacts to follow their Company Page.
If you have team members who are highly connected on LinkedIn, with sizeable Personal Page follower numbers, then it’s time to recruit them for this process.
- Add all team members with Personal Page followers as admins (you can remove them again once this process is complete)
- Ask them to login to LinkedIn on a Desktop then navigate from their Personal Page to your Company page which should appear in the left column of their screen. Select ‘admin tools’ and choose ‘invite connections. They can now personally invite up to fifty of their connections each day, until all their connections have been invited. They can use the search bar at the top if they want to cherry pick invitations.
- Personal followers will receive an invite to follow the Company Page, if they accept, they’ll become a follower.
- It’s a worthwhile exercise to revisit this process every quarter to ensure new personal followers are invited to follow the Company Page.
*Note, this feature is hot off the press. If you are unable to see ‘invite connections’ from the ‘admin tools’ drop down then revisit things in a few days. You may be later in the LinkedIn roll-uot process.
- Publish valuable content
The best way to grow the organic following for your Company Page is to share your work, demonstrate your company’s values, and build a community. Post updates as regularly as possible, perhaps two or three times a week (LinkedIn recommends once per weekday for optimum results).
These posts will appear on your Company Page, and in the news feed of your followers’ and employees’.
You can also include curated content, such as valuable blog posts from external sources, but take care to consider whether the content will really add value to your community of followers. Always add your own thought or comment, don’t just copy and paste a URL. This is an opportunity to demonstrate you have your ear to the ground and are engaged with industry issues.
To share more in-depth company produced news blogs or opinion articles take to the LinkedIn publishing platform. This can’t be done via the Company Page, but key team members from your company can publish articles from their personal LinkedIn profiles to boost your company’s presence within your community.
We wrote a blog recently on how to write clear, engaging content – read more on this here >>
LinkedIn is an opportunity to level the playing field for your small or medium B2B business and outshine far larger competitors. If you are consistent, purposeful and a little creative you can craft compelling content that catches the attention of your target audience and demonstrates why you deserve to be on the consideration list for future projects.
Good luck and keep us posted on how you get on!
Connect with Jill Willis via LinkedIn
