Many people use LinkedIn to promote themselves, find a job, share content written by themselves or the company they work for, and to find and interact with LinkedIn Groups that are relevant to them. However, I've noticed an odd trend among the many people who have viewed my LinkedIn profile over the last year. Often when I look up the company they work for to learn more about them and why they might be looking at my profile, I find that their company has no brand presence on LinkedIn.
If you're a brand, you should be looking beyond those features targeted at individuals and consider the benefits of creating a LinkedIn Company Page.
Compared to Facebook, where organic reach has fallen significantly, organic reach is incredibly high on LinkedIn, with posts from your LinkedIn Company Page reaching an average of 60% of your followers if you post at least 20 times a month! Even at the individual post level, the average LinkedIn posts reaches over 3x as many of your followers organically as the average Facebook post.
You can also further maximize your organic reach by posting during normal business hours and avoiding late afternoon, night, and weekend posts. Even if you want or need to post outside of those peak hours, keep in mind that you'll get the best results for your top content in that 8AM - 4PM, Monday - Friday window.
There are a lot of great opportunities for employees, senior officers, and business owners to help with everything from marketing to recruiting new talent using LinkedIn. However, having a LinkedIn Company Page gives your brand a central hub for you to share content and build an audience of followers that are interested in your company, the industries it serves, and what your business has to offer.
One of the biggest benefits of publishing content from your LinkedIn Company Page over a personal profile is having analytics that show you how your content is performing. LinkedIn's post analytics are unique in that they break out impressions, clicks, and social interactions by organic and ad driven results, so you'll be able to see just how much of an impact your ads are having and how many clicks and interactions are due to your organic reach.
Building a LinkedIn Groups strategy and having your employees help promote your content in their own networks on LinkedIn are great, but LinkedIn's true powerhouse feature is LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn ads are able to target anywhere from as broadly as an industry down to people who work at a specific company. You can also target by job title, seniority, education level, specific schools, and more. It is the most powerful B2B social advertising platform available.
You can improve your ad results by building a LinkedIn ad audience from a persona, so that you can target your ads to the right people. You'll often find that you need to do quite a bit of research to figure out the right industries, seniority, and even job titles to target. Once you truly understand your target audience though, your ads will perform much better.
How Can You Get the Biggest Benefits Out of Your LinkedIn Company Page?
2. Don't feel like you can't compete with the big dogs. More than half of the top 250 posts in Percolate's analysis were written by everyday people, not influencers with name recognition and a huge audience. Even if you're a small brand or an individual who works for a small brand, you should still publish your content on both your LinkedIn Company Page and LinkedIn Pulse.
3. Take advantage of the powerful, built-in social monitoring. In LinkedIn's Company Page Notification Center you can see every public mention of your brand on LinkedIn. With these notifications you can understand who is sharing your content, what people are saying about your business on LinkedIn, and you might even identify potential opportunities to reach out for customer support issues.
4. Feature your key products and services with a LinkedIn Showcase Page. Showcase pages appear in the right hand menu to visitors viewing your LinkedIn Company Page. You can include additional information about a division of your business, or a key product or service. Showcase pages can be individually followed and function essentially as a mini Company Page with a more specific focus. Just be sure to think carefully about the Showcase Pages you want to create, because a neglected Showcase Page isn't benefiting you.
5. Structure your LinkedIn posts for mobile. 50% of LinkedIn's unique monthly visitors are visiting LinkedIn on mobile, as of August 2016, so you can't afford to ignore mobile users. Instead you should be optimizing your content for them. Try to keep your posts (or at least any key bits) to under 150 characters, anything more than that and you risk your text being truncated and your readers having to click "More" to read your full post. You'll also want to keep your titles below 70 characters in order to avoid them being cut off.
Keep in mind that that link descriptions don't appear on mobile, so your posts need to still make sense if you remove them. When building images for your LinkedIn posts remember the original image size for links is 1200x627, and the safe area that is never cropped across any mobile device is 1000x586. Be sure that any key parts of your image are kept in that safe area to provide a consistent experience across all mobile devices.
As you can see, a LinkedIn Company Page can easily become a core part of your LinkedIn strategy, with many benefits and features for your brand.