If your business has a presence on LinkedIn, making sure your company page is up-to-date and fully optimized is an absolute must. Whether you're just getting started with a page or want to learn how to make your current efforts more effective, you’re in the right place.
While they may appear similar on the surface, LinkedIn company pages work much differently than personal profile pages. So, before we jump into creating or enhancing your company page, let’s talk a bit more about what those key differences are and how to use them to your advantage.
For starters, you won’t actually be able to create a company page for your business if you don’t already have a personal profile set up. Not only does this requirement help prevent spam armies from creating fake pages and posts, but it also ensures that every company page has an active page admin directly connected to the business it represents. If you are the one who is creating a company page for your business, then congratulations, that admin is you!
Other important distinctions between your company page and your personal profile page are found in the different content marketing tools that they each have to offer. While you can create quick posts or updates from your personal profile page, company pages offer more robust and, potentially, much more effective content marketing tools for businesses to utilize for awareness, outreach, recruitment, and even lead generation initiatives.
Like any social media channel or content-driven platform, LinkedIn pages won’t work nearly as well for your business if you aren’t making a dedicated and consistent effort into keeping those pages current, active, and optimized.
When that time and attention are there, however, your LinkedIn pages can become incredibly valuable tools for organic engagement and competitive content marketing. And the best part? It only costs you time, not money (meaning, there's no media budget required).
If you’re ready to start leveraging more of the perks your company page has to offer or if you want to make sure your current page is still up-to-speed, we’ve compiled this quick and comprehensive optimization checklist that you can use to help get the ball rolling:
In addition to enhancing the overall aesthetics of your page, the banner image space on your company page offers prime real estate for a custom branded graphic. Consider the different types of things you could showcase here, like your tagline, or high-resolution photography that showcases your work, your space, or your industry.
The banner image isn’t the only important player when it comes to page visuals. Since your employees and team members will ultimately be linked back to your company page, you’ll want to make sure that the photos and images on their personal profiles are up-to-par as well. This is a great excuse to have everyones’ professional headshots taken or updated. It’s also a great opportunity to run a quick audit of the team members who are currently using LinkedIn. Are they connected to your company page? If not, link them up!
The description section of your company page is by far one of the most important areas in terms of searchability and engagement. Think of this section as your business’ elevator pitch. In addition to your intro and taglines, those first few lines will need to clearly and concisely tell your audience who you are, what you do, and why they should care. You’ll also want to make sure that you are filling out your company, service, and industry categories, which help LinkedIn’s algorithms place your page and your content in front of your most relevant audiences.
LinkedIn offers a very generous 2,000 characters for a company page About Us section — and we recommend you use as many of those characters as possible. The About Us section is the “meat” of your company page. This is the place for you to offer as much information to your audiences as possible. You can include a lengthier explanation of who you are and what you do (look to the About Us section of your actual website if you need some ideas), your core values or mission statement, and in order to make the most of this section, we’d recommend incorporating at least one call-to-action as well.
There are a few extra bells and whistles tucked into this section that you don’t want to miss. First, after more than ten years of users asking for this feature, LinkedIn has FINALLY added a dedicated space for your company phone number. You also want to make sure you take full advantage of the Specialties List incorporated into this section. You can add up to 20 industry and service-specific keywords here and doing so is strongly encouraged because every word you add drastically improves your page’s searchability score.
Company pages are the perfect place to routinely publish blogs, case studies, business updates, and other cornerstone content that can be added to your pages’ Featured Content gallery. Not only will this give your individual posts more engagement play, but it also allows you to highlight top-performing content so that everyone that finds your page also finds examples of your work.
These content pieces are also valuable assets for your sales, service, and other outward-facing team members to share with current and prospective clients. We recommend designating 2-3 people who can be trusted to share or publish these updates in their own LinkedIn spaces to help boost your engagement even more.
Keywords are just as important for your social channels as they are for your website. When it comes to your company page, keywords can and should be incorporated in your posts, in your content, and throughout the pages’ descriptions and about us sections as well.
If you’re not sure which keywords you should be including, start with your services! What do your clients come to you for help with? Chances are if they’re searching for those services outside of LinkedIn, they are likely to be searching for them inside the platform too. Adding just a handful of industry or service-specific keywords to your company page will help bump your page to the top of your audiences’ LinkedIn search results. Never underestimate the power of the mighty keyword!
The latest addition to LinkedIn’s bag of company page perks is the free, in-app lead gen form that company page admins can now access. While the form is a rather simplified version of the more robust forms that you’d utilize on your own site or custom campaigns, it still offers company pages a quick and easy way to consistently reinforce their awareness and lead generation efforts within the platform. Once the form is enabled and your headline, description, and CTA links have been added, LinkedIn will use it to collect the quality leads that filter in from your company page views, link clicks, content downloads, and other page-specific engagements.
Want help with your company's LinkedIn page or other social initiatives? CID's award-winning team of branding, marketing, and digital strategy experts can help! Get in touch to learn how our creative intelligence can help build momentum for your business.
"Bring in the Klinkhammer," they said...and we did! Amy is part of our award-winning marketing & strategy team where she writes for ads, email, the web, video and so much more. She also drinks too much coffee and spends too much time debating the Oxford comma.