Founded in 2002, LinkedIn offers businesses and non-profit organizations the ability to connect with a growing audience of professionals. From claiming and optimizing a free company profile to running targeted advertising campaigns, LinkedIn is a platform to consider for organizations of all types and sizes.
Creating a Company Page
Does your business have a company page? If so, check with your team to identify current page admins and request to be invited to the page’s managers. Otherwise, creating a company page costs nothing and can be done via your individual LinkedIn profile by visiting the “Work” icon in the site’s desktop menu. You will be prompted to complete a brief setup process of business information and can add additional members of your team to co-manage the new page.
Optimizing Your Page
Like a business page on Facebook, it’s important to present a great impression to visitors of your page, provide them with the information they’re looking for and be easily found for your organization type and industry. Whether your page is new or established, ensure you’re leveraging all available fields such as uploading quality profile and cover images and completing all applicable “Edit Page” sections such as adding contact information, a company description and the prominent call to action button.
To help show up in searches and recommendations for your business type, carefully consider the industry you select for your company’s page and the specialities you can add from the “Edit Page” setting. LinkedIn also allows you to easily invite connections of your personal profile to help bolster your page’s following.
Publishing Content
Similar to posting on other social media platforms, publish content at regular intervals. Avoid what’s known as “binge posting” by posting several updates in a condensed period of time and then failing to post again for a while, creating an appearance of inactivity.
Also keep your followers in mind when publishing content. People don’t enjoy “salesy” content, especially if it’s all that’s being published from a page. Publish primarily educational and entertaining content, and when you do post a sales-oriented piece of content, frame it in a way that helps to solve your customers’ problems.
Utilize Hashtags
Popularized by Twitter, other major social platforms including LinkedIn followed suit in adopting hashtags to help categorize posts by topic. By adding relevant and popular hashtags to your content, you will boost your page’s reach to users who regularly engage with similar types of content.
Targeted Advertising
Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn offers the ability to advertise on its platform to targeted audiences of potential customers. You can select a campaign spend within your marketing budget and choose groups of users to target with ads based on their characteristics such as location and job title. The LinkedIn dashboard then provides transparent performance data to allow you to evaluate effectiveness of your ads.
Free Resources
There are many great tools available to grow your LinkedIn presence and lessen the effort involved with publishing great content. For images, you can utilize a high-quality stock photo website such as Pexels.com with libraries of royalty-free images. For organizing your content, Google Drive’s tools offer free software for planning and collaborating with team members. Lastly, social media management tools such as Buffer.com offer the ability to post to multiple social media platforms simultaneously and to schedule your posts in advance.
Summary
LinkedIn is among the top social media platforms to consider leveraging for your business, especially if your target audience includes professionals. Connect with potential customers by optimizing a company page, developing a follower base and regularly publishing quality content. LinkedIn advertising allows you to boost that reach to target audiences and encourage action, all with an efficient budget.
