LinkedIn for businesses: curate a professional image

To create a business profile on LinkedIn, you first need to make a personal profile, which is free and very quick and easy to do. This personal account does not necessarily have to contain content for you to set up a strong profile for your business. However, it’s recommended that you maintain both profiles, since you represent both a point of contact and a company brand ambassador. Therefore, the better your personal profile looks, the better you are positioning your company. 

From the upper toolbar, select the ‘Work’ menu, followed by the option ‘Create a Company Page’. Next, you are prompted to enter the name of your company and select a URL, such as linkedin.com/MyCompany. This web address can also be accessed from outside of the network and is used by search engines. Take time to consider your URL, as they can be somewhat cumbersome and the LinkedIn administrators are able to change them again. Furthermore, your URL must be completely unique, providing another hurdle to overcome. You also have to confirm that you are a legitimate representative of the company, because, of course, anybody could hypothetically create a company page for any business.

The next step is to write a description of your company in 200 – 2000 characters. Your description should answer the following questions:

• In which sector are you active?
• Which services do you provide?
• Roughly how many employees work for your company?
• Where are you active?
• What is the story behind your company?
• What are some of the special services you provide for customers or employees?

When filling out your description, ensure that you enter the most essential information first. This is because LinkedIn reduces the description to a short preview; especially when reading text, internet users can stop paying attention remarkably quickly, and might be put off by clicking on the ‘read more’ button. You should therefore make sure your writing follows the inverted pyramid principle, whereby, essentially, the most important information comes first.

LinkedIn has more options for businesses: you can make your company’s USPs crystal clear thanks to the selection of special fields. This will also help users find you with the search tool. Some elements are mandatory, including the company website, the approximate number of employees, the type of industry, and the type of business. If you wish, you can enter up to three groups in which you are most active. These all indicate the topics that are most important for your business. LinkedIn furthermore enables businesses to adjust their profiles for other languages. So, if your target audience also includes people outside of the United Kingdom, you can enter alternative business descriptions in addition to one in English.

You can switch to your desired language in the upper section of the editing page. Once you’ve done this, you can enter the text that you have adapted for your international target audience. The ‘Standard language’ setting defines your original language. Once you’ve filled everything out and checked that it’s correct, click ‘Publish’ (in the upper right corner of the page) to save your changes to your page. If you’d like to know how your page looks to other LinkedIn users, click on ‘Go to member view’. This will show you the updated version of your profile without publishing your changes.

You needn’t worry about keeping your company profile up to date on your own. If you add administrators, several people can operate and edit the same page. Administrators must all be registered LinkedIn users with their own LinkedIn profiles. You can also assign different access rights to different people; each administrator can therefore take on their own role. For example:

• Designated administrators: The creator of the company page also belongs to this group. This type of administrator can post company updates and add more admins.

• Recruitment publisher: The purpose of these recruiters is to publish company updates.

• Sponsored content publisher: These administrators can create sponsored content to be displayed to users in that network.

• Administrators for generation of leads: The members of this group can download leads from the campaign manager. These administrators are responsible for performance analysis.

• Pipeline builder administrators: Users with these rights can set up special pipeline builder target pages that can be used to target pre-defined user groups.

All company employees that are registered with LinkedIn can support your web presence on social media. When employees enter your company in their profile, they should make sure they create a link to the right company page. In addition, your employees (yourself included) should accept the system’s suggestions in the professional experience settings. Finally, employees should be linked to the company profile. This sets a good impression for prospective employees and business partners.

Regardless of which strategy you use for your LinkedIn marketing strategy, you should always monitor, measure, and analyse your performance. The network has a range of tools for this purpose. When you select the ‘Analysis’ tab on the company profile, you will see three performance measuring categories: visitors, updates, and followers. The first option examines your web traffic, displaying a graphic with a visitor count, broken down into mobile visitors and desktop users. Furthermore, LinkedIn provides businesses with key demographic data on visitors, according to local factors (i.e. country/region) and professional characteristics, such as job position, size of the business, and sector. You can also find out similar information about your followers: A graphic illustrates the number of subscribers and their demographics.

As previously mentioned, LinkedIn is a business networking site. This fact cannot be stressed enough, as it should inform all your marketing efforts and posts on the platform. While most of LinkedIn's users are also likely to use Facebook and Twitter, users visit different social media sites with very different intentions. Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest emphasise users’ personal interests, while LinkedIn is associated with professional pursuits – and user behaviour adjusts accordingly. The network can be used for innovative purposes that would be completely ineffective on other platforms; for example, b2b marketing and recruiting work far better in a business context such as LinkedIn, as users are specifically looking to further their professions. Keep this in mind when designing your content; ensure that users stay informed about relevant issues. With this network, you benefit from sharing expertise and interesting information, rather than through funny posts.

Blog posts serve as LinkedIn’s primary marketing tool, and can be used in more than one way. Not only can these posts be used to share company updates, you can also inform users about achievements and new products, and announce future collaborations and partnerships. You can inform your followers about developments in the industry or share ideas for increasing productivity. Essentially, you can distribute any kind of content you like, as long as you keep your focus on the business. Generate fresh ideas with a well-coordinated content curation strategy.

You can increase the impact of your content strategy by encouraging your employees to get involved using their personal profiles. Ask your employees if they would be interested in spreading your content or creating your own. If you do this, however, remember that everyone has their own profile to maintain, and it is not up to the company to dictate what goes on a personal profile. In addition to a company page, you can also create focus pages. In principle, these are structured like and generated in the same way as company pages. They serve the purpose of highlighting specific posts from you. In doing this, you can devote a separate page to your brand, a product, or a special service.

With LinkedIn Ads, you can extend your outreach even more. The platform provides three options for this:

• Sponsored content: if you advertise your posts, they will also appear to LinkedIn members outside of your immediate community, significantly expanding your outreach.

• Advertising: With LinkedIn, you have the possibility to use more traditional advertising methods. This will appear at the top or right of the website.

• Sponsored InMail: With this option, you can send your target audience updates that appear directly in their LinkedIn inboxes.

As a career-oriented networking site, LinkedIn is an effective recruiting platform. By placing job advertisements on this platform, you achieve far less scatter loss by reaching specialised users directly. The job advertisement is displayed in your company profile and suitable candidates are invited to submit applications.

To advertise a job, go to the menu of your private profile and select ‘You’ and then ‘Job offers’. The next page will have your company details automatically filled out for you; all you have to do is fill out the job title. The system will offer some suggestions for this. After this, you need to enter the job description. You are also prompted to specify up to three areas of interest so that LinkedIn can recommend the job to the most appropriate users. You also need to enter the kind of employment (full-time, part-time, internship, etc.) and the career level, as well as a detailed and informative job description. Finally, you should state your contact details and publish the advertisement.