social media tips

We’ve posted in the past about optimizing your personal LinkedIn profile to build your platform and business connections. And with more than 90 million users in over two hundred countries, LinkedIn is certainly still a powerful social media tool that you should be using for personal gain. But have you taken the time to focus on your corporate presence on LinkedIn? Companies can now take advantage of LinkedIn more strategically than ever before, making it essential that you learn how to get the most out of your organization’s page. We’ve listed the essential steps to optimizing your LinkedIn company page below.

1. Edit and develop

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn allows all employees with an @company.com email address to edit a company’s profile. Start by designating someone at your company to keep track of the company’s LinkedIn presence—likely the person who is currently handling your other social media accounts.

Next, develop and edit the page. LinkedIn aggregates information about your company from three sources—Capital IQ, Yahoo!, and LinkedIn user profiles. Read over what is already written about your company on LinkedIn and edit as needed. Write strong, clear copy for the overview section and list your company’s specialties. Upload your company logo, designate a website URL, and list vital company stats. Keep in line with your company’s positioning, but be short and concise, as is appropriate for social media profiles. If you’re having any difficulty editing your company page, check out LinkedIn’s Learning Center to learn more about the specifics of editing.

2. Have a keyword strategy

The prevalence and relevance of keywords are what will enable people to find your LinkedIn profile through online searches. Want to show up when someone searches LinkedIn for “design”? Use the word design as much as possible in your summary, specialties, and profile description. This also makes it more likely that your LinkedIn profile will show up in Google search results for the same term.

3. Utilize the LinkedIn profiles of employees and connections

Ninety percent of the information on a company’s page comes from its employees’ profiles, according to a Mashable article on optimizing your LinkedIn presence for recruiting purposes. The more optimized your employees’ LinkedIn accounts are, the more cohesive and complete your brand will appear. Consider hosting a LinkedIn optimization workshop for your employees. After all, the landing page for your company’s LinkedIn profile proudly lists the employees of the company with links to their personal profiles, and you want them to be the best possible brand ambassadors.

What employees have on their LinkedIn profiles is also important because viewers of your company page are able to see statistics about them. LinkedIn lists the average highest degree obtained by your employees, annual company growth (as reflected by employees’ LinkedIn profiles), average years of experience, and other facts. All this information is displayed in a chart with a comparison to other companies in your field, making it important that your employees list things like their degrees and their correct titles and start dates.

If you’re connected with any clients on LinkedIn, solicit recommendations from them. A client’s personal championing of your product or service is a powerful sales tool, and it’s easy to get these recommendations on LinkedIn. Endorsements are handled the same way as they are on individual profiles. You can request them with the click of a button, but be sure to personalize the default message.

4. Show off

You want your company’s LinkedIn profile to showcase your expertise in your field and prove to users that your company is the best in the business. Luckily, LinkedIn gives companies plenty of space to display what they bring to the table.

Company profiles now feature a “Products & Services” tab where you can list what you have to offer, including descriptions and 100 x 80 pixel icons of each product or service. Here, you can also create banners that rotate with each user click. These banners include much larger photos with accompanying links to your website; think of this as a landing page to educate potential clients and generate leads. Done correctly, your Products & Services page can be a great marketing tool.

You can also upload your YouTube videos onto your LinkedIn profile, on both the Overview and Products & Services pages. Do so if you have great videos—visually interesting videos can be informative and make your page stand out.

Be sure to embed your Twitter and RSS blog feeds onto your page. This is a great way to display your knowledge in the field and also keeps your page looking fresh.

5. Tailor your page to specific audiences

This step is especially important for companies with a very diverse product offering. LinkedIn’s “Audiences” function is powerful in that it lets companies change what page viewers see depending on specific audience attributes—similar to the Circles feature in Google+. It isn’t hard to do, either. You can create an audience by selecting a few different attributes (industry, job title, company size, seniority, etc.), and then LinkedIn prompts you to edit a clone of your basic company page. Just a few clicks and voila!—you have targeted marketing.

6. Cover all your contact bases

Now that you have people on your LinkedIn profile, you want them to take it to the next level and actually contact you. Facilitate this by including several different ways prospective clients and employees can reach out to you. Designate a contact person’s LinkedIn profile on your company site and also be sure to list his or her email address and your company’s phone number and website.

7. Monitor your analytics
LinkedIn provides an analytics tab on company pages that displays a number of different charts measuring statistics such as page views, unique visitors, clicks, visitors broken down by industry, and more. Importantly, it compares your company’s performance in these categories to that of similar companies, allowing you to measure your LinkedIn success against your competitors’. Like any measurable social media campaign, you should keep an eye on your analytics; be wary of any dramatic dips or rises in unique visitors and any accompanying strategies executed that month. Tailor as needed.

While you’re out optimizing your own LinkedIn profile, be sure to follow Greenleaf! Find us at http://www.linkedin.com/company/greenleaf-book-group.