Anyone who knows me knows I’m a big fan of LinkedIn and the #1 LinkedIn US Female Expert. I joined LinkedIn almost six years ago, and I’ve really enjoyed participating the evolution of this global professional networking platform from a barely noticed niche site to a behemoth in social media seen as an absolute necessity for sales and marketing professionals.
Of the recent developments on the site, most exciting to me are LinkedIn Company pages and all the free (that’s right, free!) capabilities offered that most businesses and organizations aren’t taking yet full advantage of.
In a nutshell, here’s what you can easily get from a LinkedIn company page:
» A company overview that includes your elevator speech and key points of competitive advantage.
» Products & Services — provide details on everything your company offers to customers. Use the Products & Services Spotlight to include up to three HTML call-to-action buttons linked directly to landing pages on your website, so your followers have an opportunity to take action immediately.
» Careers — post job openings at your organization.
» Use the status update feature to regularly provide information on events, new hires, product introductions and industry awards. These go to everyone who follows your company with their regular news stream.
» Analytics to tell you the demographics of your followers, the number of visitors to your company page, and what content they’re most interested in.
Here are a few simple tips to get started:
» Set an administrator. Decide the person or people you want responsible and set them up as page administrator(s). They become the keepers of content.
» Get branding set. Position your logo so your company page and updates always appear with logo.
» Optimize keywords and content. LinkedIn is a search engine and is searchable by other search engines. Make sure all pages make good use of keywords, and you tell your business story throughout.
» Include locations, because many searches target geographies.
Attracting followers is your next assignment. Start by encouraging all your LinkedIn contacts to follow your company page. By that simple step you’ll be announcing to their networks that you have a company page. Just imagine if you have 200 contacts with 200 connections each, you’ve just found a way to communicate to 40,000 potential interested targets.
Want to learn more? Click here to get my eBook “LinkedIn Secrets.”