LinkedIn is the most extensive professional social media website that businesses and individual people use to network with people all over the world, to create new leads and establish their brand. It’s an important platform every business should consider, if not already be actively sharing and engaging with their following there.

LinkedIn has over 560 million users worldwide, and more than 18 million company pages. It’s where most of the Fortune 500 companies, their executives and decision-makers, like to spend time. Social media is a huge help for businesses, but when it comes to generating leads, LinkedIn wins them all. The network has the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate, almost 3 times higher than that of Facebook and Twitter. Its results are even more efficient than for social media in general.

People enjoy using LinkedIn, and especially with the addition of the publishing platform where they can read valuable and interesting content within their interest and expertise. Marketers do not need to break barriers to approach their audience, like with other social networks, as they’re the ones looking for content that they can learn from, that can change the way they do business for the better. According to LinkedIn, 80% of their members want to connect with companies on the website, and 50% of them are more likely to buy from a company they engage with on LinkedIn. This is a valuable opportunity for just any business, but for B2B (business-to-business) companies, LinkedIn is truly a gold mine. Half of the social traffic coming to B2B blogs and websites is straight from LinkedIn.

The network is most certainly the best place for businesses to reach and build relationships with both customers and clients. If you still haven’t dug into LinkedIn, creating an account and starting with it may seem a bit intimidating and time-consuming. Don’t worry. It’s easy when you have the right resources. To help you out, we created a step-by-step guide to starting a company page on LinkedIn, and shared some thoughts on what you can do to increase your exposure as well as how to measure the results of your marketing efforts.

5 Steps to a LinkedIn Company Page

LinkedIn company pages give businesses an amazing opportunity to promote their company and products or services, build brand awareness, and attract top talent. Make sure your page reflects the image and reputation you aim for with your business.

To create a company page you need an existing LinkedIn account and a valid email address. LinkedIn themselves will verify if you’re eligible to do this on behalf of your company.

Once you are logged-in click on the Work tab in the upper right corner, and select Create a Company Page at the bottom of the menu. Fill in the required fields and you can start building your page following these five steps to make sure everything is perfectly set:

1. Upload Your Company Logo and a Cover Photo

The first thing people see when searching your business on LinkedIn is your profile image. The image also appears on your staff individual profiles. The best way to use this space is for your company logo. It establishes your brand right away, and makes your page stand out. LinkedIn says that company pages with logo images get 6 times more traffic.

Use the same logo image from Facebook, Twitter and other social channels, just change its size to match the 300 x 300 pixels requirements from LinkedIn.

The cover photo is another way to make your page more compelling. There are absolutely no rules on how to use this banner, so you can be as creative as you want, playing with messages that reinforce your brand or simply promoting your latest achievements and products. The size specifications here are 1536 x 768 pixels and a more rectangular layout.

2. Add a Compelling Well-Optimized Company Description

The About Us section gives you space (up to 2,000 characters) to briefly tell potential followers what they need to know about your company. Make sure to use simple language, but tailored to a business-minded audience, and optimized for keywords that are relevant to your business, industry and market share. The first 156 characters of the copy are the most important as they will also appear in Google’s search results when people look up your company. This improves your business’s position in search, as LinkedIn has a perfect 100 score on Moz’s domain authority, which means Google loves them.

Include your company’s main products and services and add few sentences about what makes your brand unique on the market. Underneath the description you can also list up to 20 additional specialties, words and phrases that LinkedIn members can use to find your company.

3. Complete Your Page with All Company Details

Fill out all other relevant fields to fully complete your LinkedIn company page, as this will boost the visibility of your profile and drive double the visitors compared to incomplete pages.

First and foremost, add the correct URL to your company website, so it would be easy to find. List at least one office location, as well as the address of your headquarters if your business is international. Select the industry you work in, the type of your company (public, non-profit, educational), and provide information on the number of your employees.

In this section, you can also add any LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your business and want to be featured on your company page.

4. Add Page Admins

If you need help managing your LinkedIn company page, you can select and add other page administrators who will be responsible to keep it up-to-date. You need to be already connected with these people to be able to add them as admins.

On your personal LinkedIn profile, under the Me tab, you can find the Manage section. Click Manage admins to add page administrators, recruiter posters, sponsored content posters, and other team members who can help spread the word on your behalf.

5. Create a LinkedIn Career Page

If you’re going to also use LinkedIn as a recruiting tool for your business, their Career Pages are perfect to showcase your company and thriving culture, drive interest, and boost your hiring efforts by building a quality pipeline of candidates for your current and future open roles.

Under the Life tab on your page you can share in-house produced quality imagery, videos and articles about everyday activities at your company, introduce your employees, publish top notch in-depth content they’ve created, give them recognition and value their perspectives. Professional development is the second most important factor when accepting a job offer, so make sure that job seekers know there are plenty of opportunities for growth in your company.

How to Attract and Engage Greater Following on LinkedIn

People are not going to find and follow your company page just because you’ve created it. You’ll also need to promote it and help expand its potential influence. The tips and strategies bellow will significantly improve your company’s chances for success.

Build Your Community

Start with the people in your company. Encourage your employees to link to the company page when listing their positions on their personal LinkedIn profiles. With this they help boost the visibility of the page and tremendously increase its reach, putting it right in front of the eyes of their personal and professional connections.

The people who work in a company are its biggest advocates. So make sure they also follow your page, as they’re potentially most likely to share and engage with your content.

Also, don’t forget to link prominently to your company page on your website and blog, in your emails, newsletters and other marketing channels, to encourage even more followers. LinkedIn’s plugin generator gives you the code to add a Follow Company button to your site if it’s missing.

Post Valuable and Engaging Content

The best way to directly engage with and grow your audience is to create and share useful, meaningful, interesting or entertaining content that they want to read and see. Make a commitment to regularly update your company page with fresh, relevant articles that give value to your readers. You can share interesting news about your company, industry articles, helpful resources, tips and advices, thought leadership pieces, and more in-depth expertise from external sources that would benefit your followers.

You can create new content relevant to your LinkedIn following, repurpose your existing successful articles, photos, videos or company updates created for your website and other platforms, or curate valuable content from prominent industry leaders and experts that you can share on your company page.

Each post appears on your company page and in the feeds of your followers. Make sure to use the opportunity to attract their attention and invite them to comment, like or share your posts. Your LinkedIn content is also indexed by Google so the posts that you share that engage your audience will also boost your rankings in search results.

However, you would want to share less on LinkedIn compared to other social media, as their members’ tolerance levels are lower. The network recommends posting once a day on the weekdays, best between 10 am and 11 am, with the option to curate or reshare the posts every other day. Still, you’ll need to carefully listen to what your following is saying, and adjust your content as needed.

Experiment with Images and Videos

Textual content works very well on LinkedIn, but rich media like images and videos cannot be ignored if trying to increase engagement. LinkedIn says that posts with an image generally result in a 98% higher comment rate, while links to YouTube videos played directly in LinkedIn’s feed have 75% higher share rates.

The recommended size when sharing solely an image is 1,104 x 736 pixels, and when sharing links with an image, it’s 1,200 x 628 pixels. Last year LinkedIn introduced their video platform, adding more ways for their members to share their ideas and experiences, and jump start new conversations. Instead of sharing links to videos on YouTube and other networks, opt to upload your videos directly on LinkedIn to boost your SEO, as they will certainly prioritize their native content.

Create Showcase Pages

Until last year, there was a Products and Services tab on LinkedIn where companies could share more about what they offer or highlight a particular brand or product line. Now there are Showcase Pages, listed right below the About Us section on the company page. They’re extensions of your page designed to promote a specific product or service, business entity, brand or initiative.

To create a showcase page go to your Edit tab and select the option. The rest of the steps are more or less the same as when creating a company page, except that here the information is more narrowly geared towards what’s being promoted.

You can create up to maximum 10 showcase pages, so focus on products and services that are most relevant to a LinkedIn audience, and ones for which you’ll be inclined to create regular updates. Also, make use of the separate analytics for your showcase pages and learn from what your followers are doing with your content.

Drive Your Marketing Goals with Ad Campaigns

If you want to incorporate advertising into your social media marketing strategy, LinkedIn is the perfect network to spread your message across your desired audience share. They have exceptional targeting capacity that allows you to address exactly the people you want, who will benefit from what you have to say.

LinkedIn offers three types of serf-service advertising solutions:

– Sponsored content – Native advertising that appears directly in the feed of the LinkedIn members you want to reach.

– Sponsored InMail – Unique form of advertising that lets you deliver personalized, relevant content through LinkedIn Messenger.

– Text ads – Pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) ads that appear on the side.

Make sure to check out LinkedIn’s guide to business advertising on their network.

Measure and Adjust Your Efforts with LinkedIn Analytics

LinkedIn has an integrated Analytics platform that provides company pages with valuable data insights on the performance of their content and following. It is very important to measure and analyze all your marketing efforts on social media, and LinkedIn Analytics is the tool to start with for your company page and updates.

The Company Page Analytics on LinkedIn has three sections:

– Updates, showing the data behind the content you post in both organic and sponsored campaigns, their reach and engagement rates;

– Followers, their total number, organic and through advertising, breakdown of their demographics, trends and how your page compares to other in your industry; and

– Visitors, showing the number of page views, how many of them are unique, your visitors demographics, as well as who’s checking your career page and job postings.

This is all very valuable data that helps you understand more about your audience, and what they like about your brand. It helps you visualize your performance at a glance and easily identify trends. Analyze what content receives the most attention and engagement in terms of comments, likes and shares, and look for similarities in their topics, appearance, or even time of posting. You can use this information to adjust your future content efforts, or decide what updates you can consider to sponsor.

Hope you’ll find this guide very useful when creating your company page on LinkedIn. Please share your comments and questions. We’d love to know.

If you’re already promoting your business on LinkedIn and know all the perks and setbacks, we’d best leave you with the winners of their annual Best Company Pages award for 2018. You’ll sure find lots of great inspiration here, and later brainstorm ideas on what you can do to further improve your business presence on LinkedIn.