Is your LinkedIn company page optimized for engagement?
While much of the engagement on LinkedIn takes place on a personal level, don’t overlook the potential of your business’s LinkedIn page.
Your company page can serve as a valuable channel to communicate and engage with your community - plus, new features for company pages are always being released, helping to make them an even more useful tool in your social media marketing arsenal.
If you're not sure how to make the most of your page, these tips will help - I've collected a listing of key steps that every brand should take to make sure its LinkedIn page is ready to engage.
1. Ensure the accuracy of your profile information
The first key note is that both LinkedIn profile and page content is searchable on the platform, and users both within and outside the LinkedIn platform may find your company’s listing as a result of the terms you use.
Given this, you need to ensure that the information about your company is both up-to-date and accurate.
Add your company’s website URL, phone number, and information using the various fields available.
2. Personalize your LinkedIn Page URL
All company pages and profiles are given a standard-issue LinkedIn URL, but you can also create a customized link for both - and it's worth doing.
This can be a great way to spruce up your LinkedIn presence. Making the change is easy and just takes a few clicks.
There are a few LinkedIn policies to keep in mind if you decide to change your public URL. You can only change the link once every thirty days, for example, and any dropped URLs may be made available for others to claim after 365 days (this abandonment rule doesn’t apply to your primary URL which contains your profile’s unique identification number.)
Also, don’t be concerned about losing traffic that might be directed to your old URL - creating a vanity URL for your page won’t deactivate your main one.
3. Serve up some specialties to feed LinkedIn’s algorithm
The specialties section of your company’s LinkedIn page presents an opportunity to communicate your business’s core strengths in an easily scannable format.
The specialties you list on your LinkedIn page are also searchable, so use the specialties section to add the keywords that will help LinkedIn direct the right traffic to your page. You can change or add specialties to your page by selecting the 'Overview' tab in edit mode.
4. Update your images
If you haven't updated your profile’s background image, this is opportunity you're missing.
It’s your place, make it your own. Customize your company page by adding a quality image of your logo, and a distinctive banner or cover photo.
Get creative - you can even incorporate a CTA into your banner image to further engage visitors.
5. Make every character count in your headline
Appearing immediately under your company’s name, your page headline is prime real estate when it comes to communicating your brand message. For both personal and company profile pages, your headline needs to grab readers’ attention, and make them want to stick around.
LinkedIn profile headlines are limited to 120 characters so you may have to be creative when crafting one for your company. Once you’ve chosen your copy, you should also test its appearance using a mobile device to make sure it looks the way you planned.
6. Optimize your page content for both humans and search
Because web searchers may find your LinkedIn page when researching your brand via Google, you should consider your LinkedIn company page as a central location where people can learn more about what your organization does.
Create both an overview and accompanying page content which tells your business’s story in a compelling way - paying particular attention to the first few lines of your company’s overview as this is the content that will be visible to users across devices.
And again, to improve your page’s search visibility, include relevant keywords.
7. Appeal to market segments with Showcase Pages
Once you have a company page, you can also create Showcase Pages which highlight different aspects of your brand or company culture. You can use these specialty pages to curate content on a single topic, create a learning center, promote a new product or even highlight your team’s accomplishments.
Creating this type of niche content is another way to help your company get discovered.
8. Give your favorite groups a spotlight
LinkedIn groups are another engagement tool available to companies and individuals on the platform. When LinkedIn members join a group, they become visible to other people in that group. This enables them to bypass LInkedIn’s limitations on seeing people outside their network.
If your business owns a group, or your team members are active in a group owned by someone else, you can use the 'Featured Groups' section of your business profile to let other LinkedIn members know where they can connect with your people.
9. Engage as a company by joining communities
A recent addition to LinkedIn’s lineup of features for entities is the ability to follow topic-based communities on the platform.
Each business can choose up to three communities by selecting the relevant hashtags.
Selecting communities to follow enables your company to view and comment on updates bearing the related hashtag, while LinkedIn will send you notifications when a topic is trending in your community so you can join the conversation.
And while you can only select three communities to join, you can change your selections at any time. Try out a few to see which hashtag categories work best for you.
10. Be on the lookout for new features
As noted, LinkedIn is always adding features, and has been doing so at a faster pace than ever in the past few months.
For example, one, short-lived feature the platform tested earlier this year allowed company page admins to “grow your page audience” by inviting personal connections to follow their company LinkedIn page.
Understandably, the feature was removed - but while this feature came and went in a flash, it's worth keeping an eye out for similar experiments as LinkedIn continues to search for ways to support company-level engagement.
Ready, set, engage
Your LinkedIn page is the perfect base from which to launch your brand’s LinkedIn engagement campaigns. You can’t do everything with a company page on LinkedIn that you can with your personal profile - for example, you can’t send connection requests or personal messages from your company page and you can’t publish on LinkedIn Publisher (f.k.a. Pulse). But as LinkedIn continues to add new features to company pages, these limitations may change.
With your company page optimized, you’ll be ready to begin publishing updates, following and commenting on others’ posts and analyzing the outcomes of your efforts.