Due to the professional demographic of LinkedIn, it’s only a matter of time before more businesses leverage the professional opportunities available by searching for products and services through LinkedIn Company Pages. It is in every business owner’s best interest to ensure that his or her company be found prominently in the Company search results when someone decides to look for a business that specializes within the company’s niche area. To further enhance the experience, the page for your company should be complete, accurate, and enticing for potential customers.
Here are five strategic tips to help you properly establish your firm’s LinkedIn Company Page:
Take Control: LinkedIn might have already created your page automatically, but now it is time for you to register yourself as the person who edits and controls the page. Assuming that you currently work at the business for which you will be creating the page, you will be able to edit your company’s page by changing the settings for the page. The first thing you should do is define who will be the administrators of the page. LinkedIn allows everyone who has a registered email address with your company’s domain to become an automatic administrator, but this should be limited to your key marketing staff who will oversee the page. There is no engagement on a LinkedIn Company page like there is on a Facebook Page, so there is really no internal need to have too many administrators for your company’s page.
Establish Your Branding: There are two logos that you can upload: one standard logo for the general LinkedIn Company Page and a square logo that will appear on the network updates of your followers when you post a status update. The square logo is critical because it will appear on all of your followers’ network updates, so make sure you both entice engagement as well as allow users to know at one glance from where the network updates are coming from by creating a sharp looking square icon.
Optimize Wording: Just as you would embed keywords in your LinkedIn profile so it appears prominently in LinkedIn people searches, you want to do the same with your company’s description and specialties. Choose keywords that your potential customers might look for, instead of words that simply make your firm sound sophisticated, so that your company appears in relevant LinkedIn searches. Though you’ll want to keep your corporate branding in mind when completing your company’s page, it can help to tweak some of the verbiage so that your company floats to the top during a relevant LinkedIn Companies search.
Location, Location, Location – Take Advantage! : When professionals search for a service provider, chances are they look for someone close to home, and they can do this by entering their company’s ZIP code into the appropriate field when searching for companies. LinkedIn gives you the ability to add up to five different locations for your company, so if you have multiple locations, make sure you utilize this function so that locations in your biggest porential markets are represented for maximum exposure.
Be Social: Allowing Companies to publish status updates in the LinkedIn news feed of their followers is one of the new LinkedIn features to leverage in 2012. There is no EdgeRank on LinkedIn, so rest assured that all of your followers will see all of your updates. Be cognizant of the professional demographic that is LinkedIn, and only share “shareable” information that appeals to them – and hopefully has them engaging with to spread the word about your company through the networks of your followers.
There is obviously more that you can do with your page, primarily by establishing robust Products and Services pages. But the above tips should help get your company’s presence on LinkedIn Companies (pun intended) off to a good start.
What other tips would you add?
The above is a summary of selected content from my critically acclaimed new LinkedIn for business book “Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing,” available at Amazon, Kindle, Nook, or iTunes.
