Your Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn For Business - Profici

LinkedIn for Business

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Your Ultimate Guide

Your Ultimate Guide: LinkedIn For Business 

With 562 million users, LinkedIn is all about building networks and connections. It’s not only about who you know, but

about who your connections know.

That’s the real power of LinkedIn for business: the ability to tap into existing connections and grow your brand through

word-of-mouth. It’s also the top-rated social network for lead generation.

If your LinkedIn marketing strategy is limited to a personal profile—especially one with an out-of-date, bare-bones resume

—it’s time to up your game. You need a detailed Company Page if you want to grow your audience and drive business

results.

In fact, according to insights from LinkedIn, completed Company Pages generally receive twice as many visitors than

those with incomplete pages. And organisations that post at least monthly generally gain followers six times faster than

those that don’t.

Read on to learn how to create a winning LinkedIn strategy for your business.

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Your Ultimate Guide: LinkedIn for Business

How to set up a LinkedIn Company PageA Company Page helps LinkedIn members learn about your business, your brand, and job opportunities with your

company. Company Pages are also a great way to establish industry expertise. 

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Your Ultimate Guide: LinkedIn for Business

LinkedIn Company Pages used to be viewed primarily as HR landing pages for brands. Though this is still one way to use

LinkedIn, the network is also becoming the perfect place to drive business results, raise brand awareness, promote career

opportunities, and educate potential customers on your products and services. Rich content and compelling status

updates can help to establish your brand as a leader in your industry.

Here’s how to set up a LinkedIn Company Page for your business. Note that if you don’t have an existing personal

LinkedIn profile, you’ll need to set one up before creating a page for your company. If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile yet,

set one up by following our detailed instructions and return to this post once you’re done.

Step 1. Add your companyHead to the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions portal for creating Company Pages and click the big blue Create a Company

Page button.

Enter your official company name and choose the URL that people will use to find your business on LinkedIn. You can’t

change this URL later, so choose wisely. Click the box indicating that you have the right to act on behalf of your company,

then click Create page.

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Your Ultimate Guide: LinkedIn For Business

LinkedIn automatically creates the shell of your Company Page. All you have to do is start filling in the details. In the

welcome pop-up box, click Get Started.

Step 2. Add a cover image and logoChoose a cover image to capture the feel of your business. The image should be 1536 x 768 pixels.

Since LinkedIn is a professional network, your company logo takes the place of your profile picture on other social

networks. Your logo also appears on your employees’ LinkedIn profiles. Use a square logo sized to 300 x 300 pixels.

Don’t skip this step! LinkedIn data shows that companies with logos get six times more traffic to their Company Pages.

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Your Ultimate Guide: LinkedIn For Business

Step 3. Create a company descriptionYou have 2,000 characters to describe what your company does, and why potential followers should care. This is

important text, so get your marketing and content teams involved in crafting your messaging.

The first 156 characters are especially important, as that’s what will appear in the Google preview of your company page.

Underneath your company description, you can add up to 20 company specialties. These act as tags or keywords that will

help people find your business on LinkedIn, so don’t skip this detail. Make sure your company’s various products,

services, and strengths are well represented here.

Not sure what you should include? Try some social listening to get a sense of what words people are already using to talk

about you and your industry online. Think about this from your customers’ point of view.

Step 4. Fill in your company detailsEnter your business website URL. You’ll then provide your company details using several drop-down menus that indicate

your 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 provide at least one location for your business.

If you already belong to some relevant LinkedIn Groups that you’d like to feature on your company page, you can enter

them in the appropriate section here. Otherwise, you can leave this field blank for now.

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Your Ultimate Guide: LinkedIn For Business

Step 5. Publish your pageClick the Publish button and your Company Page will go live.

Before going any further, click the Go to member view button at the top right of the page to see what your Company Page

looks like to others. If you’re happy with your page, great! If not, click Manage page and make any tweaks necessary to

get it looking just right.

Step 6. Add page administratorsYou don’t need to be in this alone. LinkedIn allows you to choose which employees can administer your page.

To add team members, 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. You must already be

connected with them on LinkedIn to add them as page administrators.

Click Save changes to finish setting up your team.

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Your Ultimate Guide: LinkedIn For Business

Step 7. Optimise, optimise, optimiseNow that you’ve set up your LinkedIn Company Page, it’s time to make sure it’s performing at its full potential. A few

quick polishes, summarized in the video below, will ensure your Company Page follows best practices and looks as

professional as possible.

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Your Ultimate Guide: LinkedIn For Business

How to create a LinkedIn marketing strategySetting up a company page is simple—but don’t let that lull you into slapping something together without a LinkedIn for

business strategy to maximise your page’s benefits. Rather than simply racking up followers and connections, think about

how you can use LinkedIn marketing tools to uncover new opportunities to grow.

Start by developing SMART goals. After all, you’ll never know whether you achieve your goals if you don’t take the time to

set goals in the first place. LinkedIn can support businesses in many ways, so you need to determine exactly what you

want to get out of your LinkedIn business efforts. Are you trying to build a network for social selling? Establish yourself

as a thought leader? Recruit top talent in your field?

Whether you want to tackle all of these aspects or focus on only one, you need to create goals to help you work toward a

target, then understand how your efforts are paying off. SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and

time-bound.

Keep in mind that even if you’re new to using LinkedIn for business, you can gain a lot of useful intelligence for goal-

setting and strategic planning by examining who’s already connecting with you—and how—on your other social channels.

If you haven’t yet developed audience personas, this is a great time to do so, as knowing who you’re trying to target is key

to crafting the right message. If you’re using LinkedIn for recruiting, be sure to consider employees’ and candidates’

needs as well.

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Your Ultimate Guide: LinkedIn For Business

LinkedIn for business: tips and ideasJust because you build a Company Page doesn’t mean that followers will come. You can boost your chances of success

with the following LinkedIn for business tips and strategies.

1. Encourage your employees to connect with your company’sLinkedIn PageYour colleagues and employees are your best resources to start growing an audience: according to LinkedIn, employees

have on average 10 times more first-degree connections than a company has followers, and companies with a strong

employee advocacy program in place are 58 percent more likely to attract top talent—and 20 percent more likely to retain

them.

Employees are your biggest advocates, and by adding them as followers you also tap into each of their networks,

expanding your reach tremendously. Encourage employees to add their position at your company to their LinkedIn

profiles. Your Company Page will then be linked from their profiles, and their profiles will in turn appear on your Company

Page.

2. Publish valuable contentThe best way to grow your audience and keep your followers is to provide them with value by posting articles or company

updates on a regular basis: LinkedIn recommends at least once per weekday. In addition to appearing on your Company

Page, your posts appear in each of your followers’ news feeds.

If you know of a blog post or a news article from an external source that would benefit your followers, you can share that,

too. Even if the content doesn’t originate from your team, it will show that you have your ear to the ground in your

industry. This can also help foster important connections with other thought leaders. Be sure to provide value and

context to your post when sharing—don’t just copy-and-paste the URL.

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Your Ultimate Guide: LinkedIn For Business

To share more in-depth expertise, try publishing articles on the LinkedIn publishing platform. Rather than sharing content

from other networks or your website, you can create and publish articles within the LinkedIn ecosystem. You can’t publish

articles directly from your Company Page, but the leadership team or key faces at your company can publish articles from

their LinkedIn profiles and can help boost your company’s presence on the network.

Make sure you’re familiar with practices for sharing content on LinkedIn, outlined in the video below, before getting

started.

3. Include rich mediaYes, LinkedIn is business-first, but you still need to make your content stand out from the crowd—and text-only posts are

not the way to do that. LinkedIn figures show that posts with an image included get 98 percent more comments.

If you have a YouTube channel, try linking to your videos from LinkedIn. While other social channels require you to upload

native videos for autoplay, on LinkedIn, YouTube videos play automatically in the news feed, and can generate a 75

percent higher share rate.

4. Take advantage of LinkedIn GroupsBeing an active participant in a LinkedIn Group can help you and your business network with other professionals and

businesses in your field, especially those outside of your immediate circle of current and present colleagues, classmates,

and employers. Participating in a Group discussion will also attract views to your Company Page.

To find a group with interests that align with your business goals, use the search feature at the top of your LinkedIn

homepage or check out LinkedIn’s suggestions with Groups discover. You can also create a new Group based on

whatever topic or industry you’d like.

If you belong to an association, check to see if it has a members-only LinkedIn Group, which can be a valuable source of

professional networking and development. The American Institute of CPAs, for instance, sponsors a LinkedIn Group with

more than 69,000 members, where in-depth professional conversations can continue for months.

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Your Ultimate Guide: LinkedIn For Business

If you create a group or join a group that you want to showcase, you can add it as a featured group on your company

page. To do so, click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn Page, then choose your company page under the Manage

section.

Select the Overview tab from the top menu, then scroll down to Featured groups. Start typing in the name of your group

and it should auto-complete. You can add up to three featured groups to your company page.

5. Try Showcase PagesShowcase Pages function like subdomains of your Company Page, allowing you to spotlight specific areas of your

business, like a particular brand or ongoing initiative.

LinkedIn members can choose to follow one or more of your Spotlight Pages if they’re particularly interested in a specific

aspect of your company. You can create up to 10 Showcase Pages by default. If you need more, you’ll need to submit a

support request to LinkedIn.

To create a Showcase page, 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 Create a Showcase Page.

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Your Ultimate Guide: LinkedIn For Business

Adobe, for example, has Showcase Pages for five of its products, all targeted to different audiences.

While the main Adobe LinkedIn Company Page has 887,000 followers, the Showcase Pages have follower counts ranging

between 5,000 and 64,000. Those are much smaller numbers, but the Showcase Page followers are getting updates and

information about the specific elements of the Adobe portfolio that they’re interested in—so these are valuable

relationships to foster.

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Your Ultimate Guide: LinkedIn For Business

6. Go global with multi-language toolsIf you have customers—or want to have customers—in countries where English is not the primary language, you can

create custom descriptions of your company in 20 different languages. The appropriate description will appear for each

LinkedIn member based on the language settings they have chosen to use when viewing the network. You can set your

company name to appear in these languages as well.

When you publish content and updates, you can post in different languages and configure the settings so that your global

followers see your content in their chosen language. This is a great way to build credibility with LinkedIn’s international

members and show that you care about working with them in a way that puts their needs first.

7. Understand the LinkedIn algorithmWhile most other social networks keep their algorithm secrets closely guarded, LinkedIn provides quite a bit of

information about how its algorithm works. Here’s how the algorithm rates and ranks your content, in a nutshell.

1. A bot evaluates your content as spam, low-quality, or clear. The takeaway? Quality is important, as you obviously want

to aim for the clear ranking here.

2. The algorithm measures initial user engagement. Is your post getting likes and shares? Good. Are users hiding it from

their feeds or marking it as spam? Whoops, not so good. Again, quality is key, but so is relevance. Make sure your posts

speak to your followers, giving them reasons to engage with rather than hide your content.

3. The algorithm does some further checks for spam and credibility based on the quality of your account and your

network. Engagement is also very important in this stage.

4. Human editors review content and determine whether it should continue to be displayed, or even boosted.

Of course, it’s not always quite that simple. For more details and strategies for making the most of the LinkedIn

algorithm, check out our post How the LinkedIn Algorithm Works (And How to Make it Work for You).

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Your Ultimate Guide: LinkedIn For Business

8. Incorporate LinkedIn adsLinkedIn members provide the network with detailed information about their professional interests, associations, and

skills. That means LinkedIn has exceptional targeting capabilities, allowing you to make laser-focused strategic decisions

about incorporating LinkedIn ads into your social media marketing strategy.

LinkedIn offers several different self-service advertising solutions. Here’s a quick overview:

 Sponsored content: Amplify your content to reach a wider audience than you could organically and draw new

eyeballs to your Company Page.

 Text Ads: These are pay-per-click or CPM ads that appear on the LinkedIn homepage, profile pages, Groups pages,

search results pages, and more.

 Sponsored InMail: Similar to email marketing, but within the LinkedIn ecosystem. Sponsored InMail allows you to

send personalized ads to LinkedIn members’ inboxes. Messages are only delivered when members are active on

LinkedIn, making them likely to be noticed.

Utah State University’s Jon M. Huntsman School of Business used LinkedIn Sponsored InMail ads as part of a campaign

to attract qualified candidates to its MBA program. Using precise targeting, Utah State achieved a 27.5 percent open rate

on its Sponsored InMail messages and a 71 percent conversion rate for requests for information.

These are just the self-serve ad options. LinkedIn also offers advertising products that you can purchase through an ad

platform, or through a LinkedIn marketing partner. You can find all the details in our Guide to LinkedIn Ads.

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Your Ultimate Guide: LinkedIn For Business

9. Learn from LinkedIn AnalyticsLinkedIn’s research shows that posts tend to get the most engagement in the morning, followed by posts published after

business hours. This is a good starting point when planning your publishing schedule, but what works for the average

business may not work best for yours.

Fortunately, LinkedIn offers detailed analytics to help you learn what kind of content your followers are most likely to

engage with, understand your follower demographics, and track traffic and activity on your company page.

Here’s how to access LinkedIn Analytics for your Company Page:

Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn Page, then choose your company page under the Manage section. Click the

Analytics tab and choose Visitors, Updates, or Followers.

Tracking who is visiting your Company Page—and how they interact with your content once they get there—will allow you

to tweak your LinkedIn for business strategy based on real data, maximizing the effectiveness of this important business

social network.

For more key ways to take advantage of LinkedIn for business, check out our post on how to give your business a

LinkedIn makeover. The tips are hugely valuable even if you’re just starting out using LinkedIn for business purposes.

Above all, remember that LinkedIn is a professional network that allows you to build credibility, create a meaningful

network, and glean insider expertise from established experts in your industry. It’s a valuable tool in your social marketing

arsenal, so make sure you’re using every opportunity it provides.

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Your Ultimate Guide: LinkedIn For Business