Be honest: when’s the last time you updated your LinkedIn company page?
Although the platform may not seem to be scoring as many headlines as Facebook or Instagram, companies can’t afford to sleep on their LinkedIn presence.
LinkedIn’s rapidly growing user base of nearly 600 million professionals speaks for itself, especially in the B2B space. Beyond being a prime place to share content and flex your industry influence, LinkedIn performs 277% better than Facebook or Twitter for generating visitor-to-lead conversions.
At a glance, running your LinkedIn company page might seem pretty simple.
But growing an engaged following on LinkedIn is apples and oranges compared to any other social network.
And given the platform’s best practices and new slew of business features, there’s perhaps no better time to revisit your LinkedIn presence.
Below we’ve broken down the anatomy of the perfect LinkedIn company page whether you’re looking to optimize your current profile or start from scratch.
Creatives and copy for your LinkedIn company page
First things first: businesses need to cover the basics of their profiles. Although setting up your LinkedIn company page is straightforward, there are some important decisions to make in terms of optimizing your creatives and profile copy.
Choosing a company logo and cover photo
Chances are you already have the creatives on deck for your company logo and cover photo. In addition to your company tagline, this is what users will see “above the fold” when checking out your business.
Unlike Facebook or Twitter where you might use a cover photo of your team, clean and colorful imagery is your best bet on LinkedIn. When in doubt, keep it simple.
Here are some examples of optimized LinkedIn company pages which take different creative approaches to their profiles.
For starters, MailChimp uses a yellow color scheme and a minimalist background that’s on-brand. Nothing fancy, but effective nonetheless.
Drift’s cover photo actually promotes an informational product which is totally fair game on LinkedIn. This tactic shows off their expertise and also serves as a call-to-action for anyone who lands on their page.
Meanwhile, Zapier uses their cover photo to hype up the fact that they’re hiring. This makes perfect sense given that LinkedIn is top spot to recruit talent. Unlike the two previous examples, Zapier uses a text-only version of their logo.
The approach you take to your creatives is totally up to you, though we recommend coming up with a cover photo that’s exclusive to LinkedIn for the sake of giving your profile some flavor.
And just as a refresher, here are the social media image sizes to remember for your LinkedIn company page.
- Company logo (300 x 300 pixels)
- Square logo (60 x 60 pixels)
- Company cover image (1536 x 768)
Filling out your LinkedIn profile
Any given LinkedIn company page contains a series of subsections. Businesses should ideally fill all of these sections out 100%, with the exception of the “Jobs” section if you aren’t hiring.
About
This section highlights your company’s basic information, including a brief “About” blurb and a place to list industry-specific keywords in the “Specialties” field. The information here is more akin to a Facebook “About” section versus a stylized Twitter or Instagram bio.
Life
The “Life” section is an opportunity to show off your company culture. Here you can highlight your company’s values, provide a snapshot of your workers’ day-to-day lives and explain what separates you from other companies in your space.
Jobs
If you’re hiring via LinkedIn, this section will aggregate and house your job listings.
People
The “People” tab will populate based on which workers have your company listed as their employer. There’s also a brief demographic breakdown based on your employees’ location, education, roles and skills. This section is valuable for potential prospects and people interested in reaching out to your company.
Coming up with an effective LinkedIn content strategy
LinkedIn is a unique beast when it comes to your content strategy.
How so? Well, consider how your LinkedIn company page needs to simultaneously speak to totally different audiences.
Current customers and prospective ones? Check.
Employees and recruits? Double-check.
Industry players and competitors who want to watch your latest moves? Yep, they’re checking you out, too.
Part of the beauty of LinkedIn is the freedom companies have in terms of what they can post, though. Here’s a breakdown of some of the most common types of content we see on LinkedIn pages for business:
Question-based content
Picking your followers’ brains is a smart move to encourage likes and comments on LinkedIn. Oddly enough, text-based posts can actually stand out on LinkedIn in a sea of articles and external links.
Articles and industry-specific posts
Unlike other social networks where posting article after article might be looked down upon, doing so is embraced on LinkedIn.
There’s no better place to drop your latest link, granted you couple it with a meaningful caption. Here’s a good example of a conversational caption from Hubspot that eventually leads readers to click through to a new blog post.
Resources and case studies
Considering that 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn, publishing your company’s resources, freebies and lead magnets is a no brainer. This does double-duty of signaling your influence within your industry while also serving as a helping hand to your followers.
Event coverage
Attending an event or conference? Take your LinkedIn followers along for the ride. This sort of behind-the-scenes content is authentic, easy to create and is a welcome change from solely promotional posts.
Employee showcases
Recognizing your employees on LinkedIn allows you to show off the human side of your business. This example of employee recognition from Lemonade managed to score great engagement while also highlighting their company values.
Culture-centric content
Again, not everything on your LinkedIn company page needs to be promotional. Whether it’s off-the-cuff office content or examples of your company giving back, anything that shows off your company’s culture is a big plus. Doing so is powerful for positioning and making an emotional impact on your followers.
Best practices to maximize your LinkedIn engagement
Now that you have an idea of how to fill out your LinkedIn company profile and what to post, it’s time to think about how you’re going to maximize your profile’s reach.
Want more followers? Looking to attract the attention of industry players and influencers? Here’s how you do it.
Get your employees involved
Okay, this is the big one.
Employee advocacy is the absolute best way to grow your LinkedIn presence and exponentially increase your content’s reach.
Think about it. When you restrict your company content to your company page, you’re only being seen by your current crop of followers.
But let’s say you have a few dozen employees with a couple hundred followers each. Even if there’s some overlap between your page followers and theirs, this enables your posts to be seen by thousands who’d otherwise miss out on them.
Rather than manually have employees post company content, platforms such as Bambu allow companies to curate and amplify social content within a single platform. This encourages a uniform approach to sharing content that ensures that as many eyes are on your company as possible.
Prioritize video content
Video content is quickly taking over social media itself and LinkedIn is no different.
LinkedIn released its video capabilities in 2017 and has been stressing the importance of video ever since. It’s no surprise that video content is among the most popular and LinkedIn and appears to be prioritized by the platform’s algorithm.
From educational video to company commercials, companies should step up their video production ASAP in an effort to stand out on the platform.
Come up with a consistent content calendar
Consistency counts with just about any social network.
Based on our data regarding the best times to post on social media, engagement appears to shift between mornings toward the late-afternoon throughout the workweek. Typically we see most companies post at least once daily, although we encourage businesses to experiment with frequency.
Having an understanding of your timing and frequency can help you put together a comprehensive content calendar specific to LinkedIn. With the help of Sprout, you can then publish directly to your LinkedIn company page and schedule your content alongside your other social profiles.
Understand your analytics
According to Sprout’s 2018 Social Index, audience insights and data-driven strategy should be the top priority of any company looking to thrive on LinkedIn.
In other words, you need robust analytics.
What posts are your top performers? When are you scoring the most shares and followers?
Although the platform has adequate native reporting, a third-party reporting solution like the one we offer at Sprout can dig even deeper into your LinkedIn analytics.
For example, Sprout is capable of tracking impressions, engagements and clicks to clue you in on what’s working and what’s not. Based on these numbers, you can fine-tune your LinkedIn presence accordingly.
And with that, we wrap up our guide!
Does your Linkedin company page look like a million bucks?
Growing on LinkedIn is truly a one-of-a-kind endeavor versus any other social network.
As a result, you need to know exactly how to properly run your company page.
From creatives and content to understanding your company data, these pointers can put you on the right path toward building a more engaging profile.
We want to hear from you, though. What has your company’s experience been like on LinkedIn? Are you experiencing more engagement than usual these days? Let us know in the comments below!