Written by Kaia Vincent
With more than 774 million members, LinkedIn is the largest professional network on the internet, so it’s essential for your company that you make your presence known.
But firstly it’s important to decide on what you want LinkedIn to do for your business.
It could be that you want to use LinkedIn to do one or all of the following:
Setting objectives from the offset will allow you to measure success of your LinkedIn activity and build the right strategies for your specific goals.
But be realistic with what’s possible. If unplanned, social media can be a time-eater, so wind-down big ideas or volume of content if you don’t have the resource to keep pace. We’d advise starting small (a couple of posts every week) and build up as you get to grips with managing your company page.
Maximise the benefits of LinkedIn
Here’s a few tips for enhancing your LinkedIn company page, as well as a quick guide on how your employees should be using it.
Portray the right impression with best-sized imagery
Make sure your images are sized correctly:
For larger SMEs, commission a graphic designer to help you develop a professional look, but, if you’re a micro with a smaller budget try Canva; it’s low cost and easy to use. The design tool also allows you to set-up your brand tool kit and create custom sized images that can be downloaded. They have templates already set-up in the right sizes too.
Populating your LinkedIn profile and keeping it updated
It sounds obvious but populate the company profile page so you can give potential followers an informative overview of your product, service and if recruitment is your key driver – what it’s like to work at your business. Don’t forget about SEO here as search engines will pick up keywords in your social profiles and posts.
The number of posts you create should be determined by how much time you dedicate. Don’t under-estimate how long it takes to put a post together. It’s a good idea to time yourself – you may be surprised at how long it can take? We’d suggest starting with a low number, two posts a week and then build up rather than starting big and having to cut down.
Choose a monthly or quarterly theme to keep momentum for your posts, blogs and articles
You can easily run out of steam and ideas with your postings so why not develop a content calendar, selecting a theme for the month or quarter and then develop content posts, blogs and articles to suit. There should of course be a correlation with your brand – and also don’t forget the reasons why you’re doing LinkedIn in the first place.
If you’re stuck for content ideas, why not utilise Google alerts or a paid tool such as Paiger, it allows you to set-up criteria about the types of media articles you’d like to see and then allows them to share them on your LinkedIn company profile page as well as send directly to your staff.
So, you’ve got your company page and some content planned for your updates, fantastic – but how do you start to increase your followers so more people will see you? Here is where your employees can help.
Are your employees on LinkedIn? What do their profiles look like?
Ask your employees to create a LinkedIn profile or update it if they already have one. It’s a good idea to offer a few guidelines to keep everything looking professional.
Some points to mention might be:
Get connected by widening your network
Now get your employees to request their connections follow your LinkedIn company page. They need to Go to the ‘Company page’ and in the right-hand margin they’ll see an option to invite connections. Click on the ‘Invite more connections’ button and start sending invitations. This will help grow your followers much faster than leaving it to a few members of your marketing team.
Quick and easy sharing tip
Don’t worry, you don’t have to write a ‘round robin’ every time you post something on LinkedIn. When you push out a post from your company page just remember to tap the ‘Notify employees’ link (see image below) which appears just above all posts on your company page. This will auto-send a notification to every employee, giving them the prompt to share the post without you having to let everyone know.
Providing some etiquette rules is a good idea to ensure staff understand your guidelines when leaving a comment.
New employees
Don’t forget to update all your new employees with the LinkedIn guidelines and ask them to connect.
What’s in it for them? Well for one, it will progress their personal professional network and opportunities when the time is right. You might also wish to provide an incentive such a prize for the best LinkedIn profile or most activity.
So now you have an idea on how you could increase your LinkedIn visibility – go for it!
