Your company and its employees are on Linkedin, but are you optimizing their presence?
I read a recent article from Search Engine Land that talked about the link between Search Engine Optimization and Linkedin. It was a fascinating look at how a properly optimized Linkedin page, both company and employees’, can boost SEO and organic visibility. The author, George Aspland, CEO of eVision, sums it up perfectly:
“Having a company page with associated employees (each with optimized profiles) who are active with a large number of connections, can increase the visibility of your content both on LinkedIn and with search engines, while giving you an effective online networking tool to communicate with hundreds or thousands of connections.”
It got me thinking how great this would be if every Marketo employee had an optimized Linkedin profile that linking to the Marketo company page and actively sharing Marketo content and news. Pretty much every one of our employees was already on Linkedin, we just needed to help them optimize their profile and encourage them to share. As part of the Social Media Month initiative that I wrote about last week, one of the workshops that I put together was based around this very concept; Marketo picture day and Linkedin profile optimization.
“Sharing updates with these connections should help increase awareness of your messages and the Web content you link to in your updates, and possibly increase the rankings of that content as your connections share, bookmark/like, and link to your content.”
In an effort to get everyone excited and ready to put their best virtual foot forward, I hired a professional photographer to come in and take new headshots of the entire staff. The photographer captured multiple shots with several different poses of each employee. We encouraged employees to come a few minutes early with their laptops opened up to Linkedin where they could have a Linkedin expert give them tips to optimize their profile.
At the end of the day we were able to give 111 Marketo employees stunning new headshots to update their Linkedin profiles and other social networks if they chose to do so.
For individuals, it’s a great way to build connections in the industry, with vendors and partners, and for Marketo, it’s a fantastic way to share our B2B Marketing Blog updates and exciting company news. Marketo requires employees to disclose all affiliations and be fully compliant with our Social Media Policy, and this effort supports that as well.
We then took it a step further by repurposing the photos as nameplates on our desks. Adding a bit of fun and personality to the project, we asked each employee to submit a fun fact about themselves along with their favorite quote.
This is a fantastic way to synergize and encourage cross functional engagement and collaboration across our different departments.
What do you think of our initiative here at Marketo? Are you encouraging your employees to optimize their Linkein profiles and share content with their networks? Are they linking back to your company page?