Top 3 Mistakes Companies and Teams Make on LinkedIn

How important to you is your brand?

The company that you founded, that you manage, that you work for...how much do you care about it? I bet it’s important to you, that you would protect its name and its integrity. 

What happens when you become the source that is damaging the brand you respect and care for? 

You might be thinking that you would never do such a thing. However, companies and teams hurt their brand every single day on LinkedIn. Now, this is never intentional. But it still happens because companies and teams continue to make the same mistakes.

Here are the top three mistakes that companies and teams make on LinkedIn and how you can avoid them:

 Mismanaging the company LinkedIn page

The first step to having a company presence on LinkedIn is to set up a company page. However, a few common mistakes that companies and teams make are ...

• Using a personal profile to represent a company presence.
• Expecting the company page exclusively to tell the organization's story rather than tapping into the power of having your team help tell the story for you (this is immensely helpful in attracting top talent and inbound client acquisition when done correctly).

Sometimes these types of missteps are an oversight, but they are always damaging to your brand.

If you don’t set up and manage your LinkedIn page properly, it’s better than to not have one at all. When someone- a potential client, partner, investor, donor, or prospective employee - looks up your company on LinkedIn, they are expecting to see something professional and inviting. If all they are met with is an unpolished page, it makes your company look unprofessional, disjointed and dodgy. Your efforts on LinkedIn will fail to attract the right people.

It’s also important that you encourage employees to share informative, interesting and helpful content in order to give your business credibility. When you have a network of active employees linked to your account, it breathes life and attaches faces and personalities to your brand, which in turn, builds trust.

At the end of the day, mismanaging your company page only makes your brand and image look bad.

Having a “dead” page

There are some companies who have set up their LinkedIn page properly...but that was it. They made their page public, had a professional write their summary, ensured that website visitors could find their LinkedIn page...and then they never touched it again.

This gives the impression that you don’t care about engaging with potential clients and employees or marketing your company. If you don’t care, why should they?

The entire point of LinkedIn is to connect, inform and engage with other working professionals. So what is the point of creating a company page that doesn’t fulfill this purpose? As a business, you build a brand by showing others who you are. This can be done easily by posting statuses, reposting articles, reposting employee-written articles and engaging with connections.

Outsourcing LinkedIn management to unqualified individuals

You should never put your brand’s reputation in the hands of someone who is unqualified.

There are many businesses who understand the importance of LinkedIn, but don’t know how to maximize their presence on the platform. And I get it. After all, that’s why I am here. However, many of these companies and teams end up outsourcing the management of their LinkedIn company page to unqualified individuals. 

The reality is that a random assistant is not qualified to manage your brand on LinkedIn. When they have little to no experience, the trust of your companies’ brand name, everything your company has worked to achieve, should not be given so easily. However, when businesses think they are handing their LinkedIn page over to the right person, the right business they could run into more trouble when they run into a scam. Unfortunately, there are many scams on LinkedIn.

Don’t outsource this task to a LinkedIn “expert” that you haven’t researched. Many of these so-called experts don’t measure KPIs, have no experience actually growing businesses on LinkedIn and use third party bots that spam connections and get can get your company page and Personal Profiles shut down.

Always be careful about who you entrust your brand to. And if you trust yourself or your team with your brand, be sure they know what they’re doing on LinkedIn. While LinkedIn is a powerful tool, it can only help your business if you use it correctly. 

If you have any questions about how to properly manage your LinkedIn company page or are looking to outsource the task, don’t hesitate to contact me.

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Kim has attracted an audience of over 235,000 professionals from around the globe on LinkedIn and is the CEO of Linkability, Inc. She is a dynamic Entrepreneur, Global Business Communications authority, and three-time business founder. Linkability is a strategy and consulting firm that provides world-class Intrepreneurs, Entrepreneurs, and organizations with consulting, services, and products that helps to grow robust networks and drive tangible results in sales, marketing, and thought leadership positioning.

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