Step Up Your Employer Branding Strategy on LinkedIn

I think we can all agree that LinkedIn does play a big role when it comes to Employer Branding. If not because of the hidden and gradually developing potential it has, then only because of the fact that, as a company, you have a LinkedIn company page. And that company page serves a bit as a virtual office building — in other words, a mirror of what your company is like on the inside. Granted, you’re, after all, the one who decides what to show and what not to show on your company page, but your employees play quite the role there, too.?

In this article, we’ll dig into the new functionalities LinkedIn has released for companies to showcase their Employer? Brand and what things companies should pay more attention to if they want to make sure LinkedIn portrays their Employer Brand as faithfully and positively as possible.

Employer branding LinkedIn features you may not know about

The essential thing about employer branding is that it needs to be authentic and it needs to be consistent. It’s not a short-term commitment, it’s not gonna magically happen in one week’s time. You need to build it up slowly, spread it, be consistent with it, and trust your employees to do the same.?

Here are 4 features available on LinkedIn you may not know about that can help you showcase your employer brand on your LinkedIn company page. LinkedIn rolled these out in the course of the year, and actually using these features – and so making your company page complete — will help you structure your company page so that it’s optimal for your target audience and your goals.

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• Workplace. This feature allows you, as a company, to set up a workplace policy on your company page. This means that you can define what kind of company you are – hybrid, remote, in-office – and thus transparently provide candidates with an idea of what environment you offer. On top of that, you can also select up to three benefits your company offers.

• Commitments. To provide greater insight and connections, LinkedIn is enabling employers to highlight company commitments directly on their company page. These can range from diversity, equity, and inclusion to work-life balance, sustainability, and others.

• Life or What We Do tab. These tabs offer a look into an organization’s culture and employee life. The Life tab is a paid feature that allows you to add information about company leaders, culture, company photos, employee perspectives, and testimonials, etc. The What We Do tab also contains client testimonials, candidate perspectives and insights, and contact information.

• My Company tab. This tab offers every organization on LinkedIn a trusted, employee-only space to help them join the conversations. Here, employees can, for example, share organic posts and content curated to build employee advocacy, access an employee-only community on LinkedIn, interact with one another, and so much more.

Best practices for companies working on their Employer Brand

Content distribution

Let’s set right off with the first (and essential) best practice for companies who want to enhance and promote their Employer Brand on and via LinkedIn: be consistent in your content output.

This may seem like an obvious thing to say, but you’d be surprised to know how many pages have little to no content live on their pages. Or there is some content, but there is no consistency to it, both in terms of topic and timing. Not sharing content implies that there is no chance for the audience – including clients, potential customers, or interested candidates – to find out more about you as a company, your policies as an employer, your offering, etc.…?

Producing content is a daily practice for a large percentage of the companies out there, so why not share it on LinkedIn? Scheduling it to be published with consistency will help build up your brand on the platform and will allow your employees to share that content and amplify it.

Ambassadorship?

Which brings me to the second best practice: install an employee advocacy program. Employees are the voice of the company, we know that people trust people more than logos, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that giving them a voice as your brand ambassadors can yield incredible benefits.?

That goes for employer branding, too – which is actually one of the best reasons to leverage their next networks to spread your authentic brand — think of talent attraction and retention, referrals, and more. Your employees are key to that.

Employee contribution

Ambassadorship also allows for employee involvement and content co-creation, which is linked to the next best practice: let employees contribute to your company page content.?

The main advantage for you as a company is that it puts a face to the logo — it humanizes it.?

For the employees, the value lies in being featured on the company page and, of course, being able to build up their personal brand as thought leaders.

Co-creating content with your employees will guarantee a more constant and easy-to-use stream of content that you can post on your company page, and it makes your whole page and claims as an employer more authentic and credible.

LinkedIn as a company won’t provide actual support and guidance for companies looking to focus their efforts on promoting their Employer Brand, but what is certain is that they are paying more and more attention to developing features for them to do so. Making company pages more valuable is the first step, and that entails all those features that make them come to life, and make them more representative of the culture behind them.