The Ultimate Guide on How to Set Up Your LinkedIn Page for Business Success

Seven hundred sixty-six million professionals have a presence on LinkedIn. This fact alone has caused the global business community to look at LinkedIn with a fresh set of eyes. Establishing relationships with like-minded professionals, keeping up-to-date with industry trends, creating a thought leadership presence, and uncovering potential consumer leads has never been more accessible to anyone and everyone. 

LinkedIn is undoubtedly the world's largest professional networking platform. But are you properly positioned to capitalize on this?

Here is a step-by-step guide to setting up your LinkedIn Corporate Page and putting it to work for your organization, your Team, and your online positioning. 

Do you something today that your future self will thank you for, take action! 

Getting Started

1. Creating a LinkedIn Page

A LinkedIn Page serves as the organization's voice on LinkedIn. It enables people to learn more about your organization or school, brand, goods and services, and career possibilities.

• Begin by visiting the LinkedIn Pages section.

• Select the appropriate category for your business. Choose either the “Small business” option or the “Medium to large business” option depending on the size of your business.

• Enter the Page Identity details, Company or Institution details, and Profile details.

• Add your Company details and logo
• Don’t forget to verify that you have the right to act on the company’s behalf by ticking the checkbox.

• Click the Create page.
• Bear in mind that you could receive an error message if your LinkedIn account is new or if you don't have enough connections. This means that, if you want to have a business page, you need to build up your profile and expand your network. Once you have created your page, click “Start building your page!” and add more details.

2. Getting the best out of your created page

To obtain tangible results, you need to optimize the company page. To do so, you need to consider the following.

1. Tell the company’s story. With a well-worded description and concise headline, you will quickly convey what you are all about to your prospective clients or future Team members. Be sure to upload a professional cover photo, add some feed posts, photographs, published content, and infographics to illustrate your company’s works. To add this information, click the pencil icon on your profile under your company name.

1. Location. It’s important to add all your locations to let clients know which store or office is closest to them.
2. Hashtags. Don’t forget about hashtags. They do help in making your profile searchable. Here's a pro tip: Use the search bar in the upper left-hand corner of the home page to research industry appropriate hashtags. Choose two that have many followers and one unique to your organization for your Company Page's hashtags. This will help people find you for what you want to be found for and begin the process of helping you brand your wording simultaneously.

3. Add LinkedIn buttons

To make it easier for people to find your LinkedIn profile, add social media icons to the header or footer of your website or newsletter.

4. Engage with your network

Don’t let those new connections fall by the wayside. Nurture your relationships by participating in discussions, answering questions, liking, and commenting on the content in your newsfeed. LinkedIn is an engagement-driven platform, the more you engage, the more you appear, and the greater your reach becomes.

5. Create a LinkedIn marketing strategy

It's time to think about your LinkedIn marketing plan. On LinkedIn, what targets will your business achieve? You may use LinkedIn for company recruiting, social sales, customer engagement, or all of the above.

LinkedIn Marketing Tips

Publish content that adds value

Marketing on LinkedIn is less about creating sales-y promotional messages and more about adding value to the lives of your audience. In fact, B2B marketers who put their audience’s informational needs first make up 88% of the top performers in content marketing.

So you should use LinkedIn to create, share, and publish content that serves some purpose–whether it’s to educate, inform, guide, inspire, or entertain your audience. This improves the chances of getting your audience to engage with your content and building a connection with you or your company.

And when someone engages with your post, there’s a chance it’ll also show up in the feeds of their connections, further increasing your reach.

Note that you don’t necessarily have to share only your original content. But don’t hesitate to share insightful and informative content relevant to your industry even if it’s from a third-party. This will establish that you’re the go-to source for valuable industry-related information.

Get your employees involved

LinkedIn is all about the connections you make. And as the most reliable advocates of your brand, your employees can play a critical role in broadening your reach and strengthening your network on the platform. So your LinkedIn marketing strategy may benefit dramatically from the involvement of your employees.

Encourage your employees to add your company to their personal profiles as an employer or under the Experience section. This automatically turns them into followers and helps your company get noticed on the platform. Plus, it’ll make it easier for your employees to engage with your company updates and share them with their connections. They can share news, articles, or posts featuring your brand. 

Optimize LinkedIn posts for maximum engagement

If you're familiar with LinkedIn and its ever-changing algorithms, you'll recognize that it can be a struggle to even reach your audience of followers, let alone try to engage a larger audience beyond your network.

The algorithm ranks posts based on the following: engagement probability, interest relevance, and connections. 

Here are some of our top tips to help your posts rank a little higher, and hopefully get them the exposure they deserve!

• Utilize Hashtags. Using hashtags will ensure that people who search for content on a particular topic can find posts quickly and easily.
• Optimize video posts to grab attention. Think about the last time you had ten minutes to spare on watching a video at work (um, never). Then decide how long your video should be. Statistically speaking, short videos (2-3 min) have maximum engagement.
• Tag companies/people/pages mentioned. If you are tag users in your post, they may be inclined to share the post with their professional network, opening your post up to a broader audience.
• Write strong headlines. 
• Size images appropriately.
• Use appropriate emojis. When deciding whether to use emojis and which emojis to use, it's important to know your audience.
• Make sure you use clear and simple call-to-action.
• Share timely and only relevant content.
• Respond to comments within the shortest possible time to encourage more engagement.
• Ensure to proofread. It’s important to note that LinkedIn is a platform designed by professionals for professionals, and how you convey yourself on the platform determines how people view your brand.
• Optimize all-text posts. LinkedIn allows 1300 characters per post. It’s essential to treat the first 2 to 3 lines as engaging as possible as posts longer than 140 characters are particularly hidden and given LinkedIn’s ‘See More’ button.
• To prompt responses, you can lead with questions.
• It is advisable to keep the post short. Otherwise, make use of paragraphs, page breaks, and bullet points to make it more readable.
• Call out key stats, points, and quotes.

Learn from LinkedIn Analytics

?No marketing initiative is complete if you don’t track and measure its performance. LinkedIn analytics is a free tool users can utilize to measure the effectiveness of their social strategy and monitor their performance. LinkedIn Analytics tab gives you three immediately useful metrics: visitors, updates, and followers. However, within these three useful metrics there are more specific, granular data that may or may not be useful to you, depending on where your particular interests and goals lie. These metrics are efficient in capturing the performance of your LinkedIn Company page.

Target the right audience

Target your ideal customer based on traits like their job title, company name, industry, and professional or personal interests. Reach people you already know with website, contact, and account targeting.

Consider launching a showcase page

To highlight a special side of your brand, you may need to try out LinkedIn Showcase pages as it’s a great way to start. These pages give LinkedIn members another way to follow you. Creating a showcase is an easy process once you’ve created a business page. What you need to do is go to Admin tools and create a showcase page.

The Use of LinkedIn Marketing Tools and Apps

Although LinkedIn is a powerful tool for driving new business on its own, with additional applications, browser extensions, and tools there are ways that you can supercharge your efforts. These are some of the LinkedIn apps and tools that are most helpful:

LinkedIn Sales Navigator 

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the paid sales solution for LinkedIn. It is a market management platform designed to help sales reps more efficiently tap into the broad network of LinkedIn and eventually land more (and better) offers.

Canva

Canva is a website for graphic design that enables users to create images, displays, posters, documents, and other visual material for social media. This platform comes in handy for LinkedIn’s use as images generate a great deal of engagement. Users can select from several professionally built models and, via a drag and drop interface, customize the designs and upload their own images.

For the original article and a complete library of articles that offer tips, trends, and insights, join our complimentary VIP community here.

If you've not yet taken a look at this keynote from the Purpose Summit last year, now may be a good time to give a listen. In it, I discuss the Global Communication Shift and how to navigate disruption by using LinkedIn.

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.

#Linkability #smm #CorporateBranding #ThoughtLeadership #LinkedinTraining #CorporateTraining #LinkedIn