Promoting Your Business on LinkedIn by Using your Company Page

If your business has a social media presence on LinkedIn, you should definitely be setting up a company page to help build your brand awareness. It will also create a channel that will help to promote your products and services to customers, as well as potential customers, and it will increase the visibility of your company to a much wider audience. All these desirable outcomes can be achieved simply by creating an effective LinkedIn company page.

Start by filling in company details

To get started on your company page, go to the Interest section at the top of your LinkedIn homepage, and choose Companies from the drop-down menu. First, you'll have to click the Create button, so the company page can be worked on, and then the first things you'll have to enter are the official name of your business and the email address which you want to be reached at.Then you should click on Continue and resume entering company information, such as an overview of your company history and product offerings. You'll also have a chance to enter some very detailed information, such as any specialties that the company has, as well as the most important services and products offered by your business. You might also want to enter a couple of sentences about those aspects of your company which make it unique, and which distinguish it from all your rivals.

Upload a logo and banner image

Since your LinkedIn company page essentially serves as an advertisement for your brand, you should maximize its appeal by uploading a company banner image and logo, so that your business will stand out. The logo is what all LinkedIn users will see when searching for a company which can provide products and services that they're looking for.Your logo also appears on staff profiles, so inform your employees that they should all be adding the company page to their individual profiles, so that an even broader audience of LinkedIn users can be reached. Before you upload your logo to the company page, resize it into the standard logo dimensions of 100×60 pixels.At the same time, you should upload another logo which is 50×50 pixels, because this one will appear in status updates in the feeds of your followers. Then you should go ahead and create an attention-getting background image by choosing one of the great free graphics tools so that you can develop an image which is both professional and appealing to represent your brand.

Post company updates

At this point, you're ready to create some high-quality content, and to plan a whole schedule of posts which your followers will consider helpful and interesting. Rather than thinking of your company page as an advertising platform, you should consider it as something closer to a discussion forum. You should definitely post company news on your company page, but you should avoid using the page as a direct sales channel.It will provide much greater value to you as an industry discussion venue, and a place for thought leadership content. Your main objective of the company page is to engage with followers, so toward this end, you should provide advice and whatever resources you have which are related to your industry. Post helpful tips that will solve problems for your followers, or which will somehow make life easier for them. That increases the likelihood that they will share your content with their friends and acquaintances.You should also be careful about how frequently you post content to your company page. LinkedIn does not require the same high profile of activity that some of the other social media channels do, so it's best not to cram the feeds of your followers with constant updates and content that they'll never read. At the most, you should post one update per day, especially when you're first starting out. When you see that your followers are consuming that content and perhaps looking for more, you can increase your level of updates accordingly.

Attract followers by promoting your company page

Once your company pages been created, there are a number of ways that you can promote the page so as to gain new followers. First of all, you can involve the employees at your workplace, encouraging them to add the company to their own personal profiles, so that they receive company updates and can easily share them with acquaintances.You should also add a link to the company page in your email signature, and you should take the opportunity of promoting your page in any company blogs or newsletters which are issued. Finally, you should also add the Follow Company button to your website, so that more followers will discover your LinkedIn company page.

Create showcase pages

The only thing better than having a company page which you can use in LinkedIn to attract new followers is having a company page with several extensions of it, and that's what showcase pages amount to. Showcase pages can be used to promote individual products or to feature specific brands, and they allow you to customize messages for distinct segments of your audience.If you have products which might be ideal for a certain segment of your viewing population but not for others, you can create a showcase page to feature this product and then make it available to the intended target audience. In this way, only a certain segment of your followers will see the content in the news feed which was designed specifically for them, as being relevant to their lifestyle, or as solving a particular problem of theirs.This will inevitably result in higher engagement among those specific segments of your followers and will reduce the likelihood of wasted effort, and possibly even annoying some of your followers with unwanted news items. You can create as many showcase pages as you like to highlight individual brands or products, and you are encouraged to do so since these can be excellent for super-targeted messages reaching super-specific audiences.