27 Jan 2012

It's Time To Stop Ignoring LinkedIn Company Pages



By Harry Hoover  at SocialFresh:
LinkedIn Marketing seems to be an afterthought among the other high profile social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
But there are some good reasons that your company should set up – and keep current – your own free LinkedIn Company Pages.
LinkedIn calls the Company Page a company’s profile of record AND a powerful way to speak to millions of professionals through word-of-mouth recommendations and trusted testimonials.
It’s essentially a LinkedIn profile for a company.

Why Does Your Company Need One?


Think of it this way, the Company Page helps humanize your organization.
It allows the page visitor to look behind the curtain, to learn about the people behind your brand.  In fact, you already may have a default page automatically generated by LinkedIn. If your employees have LinkedIn profiles using email addresses from your company domain, chances are you have a Company Page.
How do you find out if you already have one?
Use this LinkedIn company search.

LinkedIn Company Page Benefits

The LinkedIn Company Page can be a potent force to help you build your brand with a professional audience. It’s your hub on LinkedIn that allows you to:
  1. Build credibility
  2. Bring your brand to life
  3. Activate your employees and customers as brand ambassadors
  4. Boost your recruiting efforts
  5. Share customer recommendations and testimonials
  6. Update followers about corporate happenings
  7. Promote your products, services and corporate content
  8. Measure engagement
Convinced you need a LinkedIn Company Page?
Well, let’s take a look at the features and how to set up one.

Features

There are four tabs – three public – on your Company Page.
The overview tab gives you an opportunity to introduce people to the human side of your company. Visitors to the overview see your blog posts, Twitter feed and who in their network works at your company.
The career tab offers you a great opportunity to promote your job openings to the 120 million users currently signed up on LinkedIn. If you upgrade from the free page, you  are able to deliver much more content about jobs, your brand and your employees.
The products and services tab is a powerful feature, allowing you to promote your most important or newest products and services. Additionally, customer recommendations and testimonials about your products appear here, too. So, it’s a good way to virally spread the word about what your company does well.
Finally, we have the private analytics tab.  It is visible only to you and designated page administrators. Here you can see your page views and unique visitors benchmarked against similar companies.

Build Your Page

Now, let’s build out our Company Page. You can start here, if you didn’t find a page in the aforementioned Company Page search.
Gather up all the information you’ll need before you start filling out the profile. This includes:
  • An email address in your personal profile that is linked to your company domain
  • Your company name (be sure to use exactly the same company name as the one listed in your personal profile. For example, My Creative Team and My Creative Team LLC would be seen as two different companies.)
  • Names of page administrators
  • Logo
  • Corporate information such as:
    • A minimum of 250 characters describing your company
    • A list of specialties – keywords and phrases describing your product/service strengths
    • Blog RSS feed and Twitter account
    • Company size/type
    • Web URL – allows you to list your website or blog domain
    • Industry, operating status, year founded
    • Products or services, as well as people who would provide recommendations or testimonials
Fill out the Company Page profile as completely as possible, and once this is done click “Publish.” After the page is published you will be able to add careers, as well as edit your products and services tab.
Now, you are ready to promote and activate your page.  More on that and a look at some companies using pages effectively in our next installment.


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