James Spillane
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 130 million members following over 1.9 million companies worldwide.
A LinkedIn Company Page provides an ideal platform to tell your story, engage with followers, and share career opportunities. It helps humanize your business, giving visitors a chance to learn about the people behind your organization. It also provides an efficient way to speak to millions of professionals through word-of-mouth recommendations and trusted testimonials.
Oh yeah, it also generates leads.
A Company Page gives your business an opportunity to showcase your products and services, as well as to seek out opportunities with millions of business professionals who are also consumers. With this kind of B2B and B2C reach, it’s no wonder LinkedIn dominates Twitter and Facebook for online lead generation.
In a recent study of over 5,000 businesses, inbound marketing industry leader HubSpot found that traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate, at 2.74%, almost 3 times higher (277%) than both Twitter (.69%) and Facebook (.77%).¹
Sound Interesting? Here are 25 tips to build up your LinkedIn following:
- Set-Up a Complete User Profile– People form connections with people, not companies. Flesh out the details of your life, such as past experience, education and skills; be sure to add yourself as an employee or member of your company.
- Add your Photo– People are more likely to connect with you and your company if they can put a face to a name.
- Customize your Public URL– You should edit your profile so that your LinkedIn profile URL looks like http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname. To do this, click on “edit” next to your public profile URL, and then “edit” once again on your public profile settings page.
- Activate Company Page Status Updates– Make sure to add yourself as admin so you’re able to edit your page and publish status updates.
- Company Overview– Create a Company Overview description, adding the most important information first (the first 8 lines are visible before being truncated).
- Insert Landing Page Link to Overview– Don’t miss out on an easy lead gen opportunity. Link to your website homepage, about us page, blog, or a targeted offer such as an upcoming webinar.
- Add Company Specialties– Optimize your page’s internal SEO. Help people searching for companies like yours within LinkedIn find you by clarifying exactly what you do.
- Link to Company Website– Leverage the vast LinkedIn community by making it easy for your target audience to find your website.
- Ask for Recommendations– Endorsements from colleagues, partners, and clients highlight your experience and underscore your credibility.
- Include Products/Services– The “Products” section of a LinkedIn page provides an opportunity to link to and explain each of your products and services. Ask existing customers to “recommend” your products.
- Add Banner to Product Page- If you have a banner or image that promotes a product or offer, you can use it to link to the relevant landing page.²
- Include a Video on Product Page– If you have a cool YouTube video, you can add it to your product page to add some visual spice to your product content.²
- Update Status Daily– Post status updates that point connections to your content offers or other information they might find relevant.
- Add Blog RSS Feed– This takes a few seconds, and will automatically update your page with the latest blog articles published on your website.
- Connect to Twitter Account– You can connect your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile, allowing you to post LinkedIn status messages to Twitter, and to pull tweets into your LinkedIn status. This will help you leverage these networks to build connections on both sites.
- Find People by Company– Search under the “companies” tab to find people working in your industry or those in your target market.
- Join Relevant Groups– LinkedIn groups offer a great opportunity to connect with others in your industry and to keep-up on industry information and trends.
- Engage People in Groups– Engage in existing group conversations and use your blog posts to support your engagement. If someone else comments, keep the conversation going.³
- Connect with Frequent Engagers– Solidify relationships formed in Groups by creating new connections.³
- Start a New Group– If you can’t find any decent groups for professionals in your industry, create your own. This will help to establish you as an industry thought leader. Invite key industry leaders to participate.
- Promote your Group– Invite industry leaders to participate in your new group. Cross market your group on social media by creating a similar group or page on Facebook,Google+, etc.
- Optimize your Group– Engage with your group by adding discussion questions, industry news and relevant blogs, or by sending announcements to group members. Encourage other group members to participate as well.
- Experiment with Direct Ads– LinkedIn Direct Ads work like Google AdWords or targeted ads on Facebook, allowing you to target ads by job title and function, industry and company size, seniority and age, and LinkedIn Groups.
- Be Professional– Don’t be overly spammy or promotional (if you are inherently spammy and/or promotional, try to dial it down).
- Be Authentic– Just be you. Remember that in business as in life, there is no substitute for authenticity.
If managed properly, your LinkedIn Company Page can be a powerful tool to engage your target audience, build your professional network, and generate leads for your business. Building up your LinkedIn following will help you accomplish all of these things.
¹ Hubspot, “LinkedIn-277% More Effective for Lead Generation than Facebook and Twitter”
² Hubspot, “How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page in 15 Minutes”
³ Kuno Creative, “11 Steps to Generate Leads Using LinkedIn”
*Excerpts also taken from Hubspot’s ebook, “How to Use LinkedIn for Business”
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by James Spillane.
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Great advice and hints and also I recommend ensuring all staff connect to the company linked in profile and that all staff havd a consistent profile representation for you as their existing employer.
Ian Moyse
Ian,
Thanks for the great input! I agree that it is critical to maintain consistent profile representation throughout your organization, as it denotes professionalism and sends a signal that your brand means business!!!
Chris