LinkedIn Company / Business Page Best Practices w/ Examples

A LinkedIn Company (or business) page is an excellent way to keep people informed about your company, brands, products and services and job opportunities. Creating a page for your business is fairly straightforward. But, like any platform, you’ll be much more effective if you dig into the manual, apply best practices, add your own creative touches, analyze then improve.

Why You Need a Company Page

LinkedIn is the premier social network for business professionals. The platform has over 460 million users throughout the world. Depending on the business your company is in, LinkedIn offers access to a key demographic.

In some ways, LinkedIn is nowhere near as sexy as other social networks. Day to day, it can feel like a haunt for recruiters and weird spammers.

However, it appears that LinkedIn users are more interested in your company, compared to other networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. A study of referral sources found that LinkedIn was responsible for 64% of all homepage referrals from social channels.

And if you are a B2B business, in the market for talent, or simply looking for new partnerships – these visits can be very lucrative. In fact, LinkedIn’s ad rates certainly confirm this idea. If you can generate free, organic traffic – then all the better.

Requirements to Create A Company Page

Creating a LinkedIn page for your company is straightforward. First, you’ll want to make sure that you meet the following criteria.

• You have a personal LinkedIn account with your actual first and last name.
• Your personal LinkedIn account must be at least seven days old.
• Your profile has several connections on it.
• You’re a current employee at the company you wish to create a page for.
• You list the company in the experience section of your profile.
• You have a company email address listed on your LinkedIn profile.
• Your company email address is linked to a domain unique to your company (no Gmail, Yahoo, etc. email addresses.)

Unless you are the CEO setting up your page, you will need to set internal policy guidelines for access.

How to Create A Page

Assuming you meet all the requirements above, you can create your page in a few simple steps.

First, log in to your LinkedIn account. Click the link for Work at the top of your page, and then select Create a Company Page.

Next, add the name of your company and your company email address. Check the box to verify that you’re an official representative of your company with the right to act on its behalf by creating this page.

Once you’ve entered that information, LinkedIn will allow you to begin editing your company page. Fill out every field as accurately and with as much detail as possible. Our goal is to create a dynamic, engaging place for followers of the company to come and interact with the company. The first step in achieving that goal is creating a solid foundation of information about the company. Keep that in mind as you fill in each field.

Optimizing Your Business Page

So, you’ve created an engaging page for your company. Now, let’s look at some LinkedIn company page best practices. These tips will help you develop a rich, full-featured LinkedIn page for your company, which will be more likely to generate organic traffic,

Add Images

The first thing you’ll want to do is add some strong imagery to your page, starting with your company logo and banner photo. LinkedIn accepts JPEG, PNG or GIF image files. You’ll want a square image for the logo. The minimum size for a logo is 300 x 300px, but the image can be much larger than that if you wish. The logo can be up to 4mb in size.

The minimum size for a banner image is 646 x 200 pixels. It can be larger as well, with a maximum size of 2mb.

Take time to make sure that these aspects of your page look great, and that the images you’ve chosen are optimized for display on LinkedIn. Consider recruiting a member of your staff that’s familiar with programs like Photoshop or Illustrator for help creating professional imagery for your page. You can also look at online tools like Canva, Stencil or Pixlr.

Add A Keyword Rich Description

When adding your company description, you’ll want to focus on adding relevant keywords to your copy. LinkedIn pages are SEO friendly with permalinks, and Google and other search engines will preview up to 156 characters of your description copy. You’ll want to lead with some relevant keywords, if possible.

Optimizing your LinkedIn page is a great way to grab additional real estate in your brand search results.

You won’t be able to rank #1 for a brand term w/ modifiers, but you will be able to consistently appear in the mid-section of search results for most brand + modifier searches. Since you control the content – doing this can be a solid, easy win.

LinkedIn members can search for your company by name, or they can use keywords. So, be sure to include keywords that describe your business, industry, and specialties.

Create Showcase Pages Where Appropriate

One useful feature of company pages is the ability to create showcase pages. Showcase pages allow you to highlight individual brands or initiatives that fall under the larger banner of your company. Creating showcase pages for your company is one of the LinkedIn company page best practices.

Let’s use “Company X” as an example. Company X manufactures a wide range of consumer electronics products. So, within the LinkedIn company page, there may be several showcase pages for the individual brands that fall under the larger umbrella of Company X.

Not only do these pages make it easy to shine a light onto the different brands your company offers, but it creates a better experience for LinkedIn users as well. Let’s go back to the Company X example again. Let’s say I’m a LinkedIn user interested in following Company X on LinkedIn. I’m interested in some of the brands Company X manufactures, but I’m not interested in all their brands. With showcase pages, I’m able to select the portions of the company I want to receive updates from. So, I could receive updates about the brands I like, without having to see updates for the brands I don’t.

Creating a Showcase Page is simple. From your company page dashboard, click the Edit icon on the right side of the page. Next, select “Create A Showcase Page” from the drop-down menu. Now, you can begin adding content to your showcase page. Be sure to add a banner image, company logo and as much relevant information as possible about the brand.

Keep in mind that your showcase pages function just like your company page. To keep followers of your company page engaged, you’ll want to share meaningful content with them. The same holds true for your showcase pages. To truly leverage the LinkedIn platform to engage with your followers, you’re going to need to make sure you’re sharing lots of meaningful content.

Go Global

LinkedIn allows you to set up your company and showcase pages in more than 20 different languages. If your business has a global audience, take advantage of this feature so that your page is easily accessible for people in other countries.

If you are testing a new market, this can be a simple way to test responsiveness, especially if you are looking for new employees and/or partners.

Set Goals

Set reasonable goals for the growth of your following on LinkedIn so you can create a plan to achieve those goals. The analytics data LinkedIn provides will make it easier for you to set goals and put your plans into action.

If you want to refer traffic to your website, then define that goal. If you want conversions on LinkedIn (ie, recruit contacts) then define that. If you want engagement from companies in your industry (ie, potential clients or vendors) – then define how you will measure that.

Delegate

If possible, identify the members of your team who are best suited to help with your company page and recruit them to help with the development of your page. Growing your team is probably going to be necessary as you begin producing more content for your page (more on that later).

Again, here is where defined goals are useful. If you can delegate management with explicit goals, then that will naturally define the type of content. You can also quickly judge return on time invested.

Create A Content Calendar

Creating a calendar for your LinkedIn updates is a great way to organize your efforts. It’s another one of the LinkedIn company page best practices. Stick to the timeline as much as possible, but feel free to deviate from it, depending on current events.

A calendar or simple editorial process allows you to have items in the “pipeline” so that they can be improved, revised and approved before a deadline arrives.

Analyze

LinkedIn provides a range of different analytical tools for you to learn more about your audience and the way they engage with your business page. These tools are invaluable when used correctly and will be very helpful to you, especially as your following grows. We’ll discuss these features in greater depth a bit later in this post.

Growing Your Business Page

So the goal of social media is to create a platform that encourages people to engage with your company. Now that you’ve created your company page, it’s time to start connecting with members of the LinkedIn community. Keep these items in mind as you build your page, content and, community.

Remember that you are more likely to engage with people already using LinkedIn rather than bringing your general audience to engage with you on LinkedIn. That said, you do need initial traction. You can build traction with paid ads or you can reach out to a few subsets of people you already know on LinkedIn who are interested in your company to organically “spread the word.”

Recruit Your Employees

Encourage your employees to connect to your business page and interact with it. Beyond interacting with your page, they can also add the company page link to their email signatures.

Tell Your Customers

Use your other marketing channels to let your customers know you’re on LinkedIn. Set up a website and add your company page to your social media follow buttons, include your new company LinkedIn page in your regular email/newsletter updates, share it on Facebook or Instagram, etc.

Your goal isn’t to get more of your customers to use LinkedIn; rather, it’s to find customers in your existing audience who already use LinkedIn.

Add A Follow Button

LinkedIn makes it easy to add a follow button to your website. That way, when LinkedIn members visit your company’s site, they’ll be able to follow you with a single click.

Join LinkedIn Groups

Believe it or not, there’s a group on LinkedIn for almost anything. Identify the groups that are relevant to your business and join them. You can search for groups by keywords, which makes it easy to find the ones most important to your business.

Contribute to conversations in these groups. Aim to be helpful and supportive of the community. Be cool and don’t just use the group to promote your company page. That’s annoying, and the members of the group are not likely to engage with you.

Like Facebook Groups, these usually have either the most attention or the most spam. Find groups that truly fit you and your company, and add to the conversation rather than viewing it as a promotion opportunity.

Content

Content is going to be the key to growing your audience on LinkedIn beyond the initial connections you make. The more useful and engaging the content on your LinkedIn page is, the easier it will be for you to expand your page far beyond the initial connections you’re able to make.

What Is Content

Content is anything you post on your company’s page. Company updates, infographics, articles and think pieces… even cute cat videos count. On LinkedIn, the content that you share will appear on your company page as well as in the timeline of all of your followers.

Sometimes, someone within your company creates the content you’ll be sharing. Other times, you’ll be sharing content that was created by someone else but has value to your company and your followers.

What to Share

When it comes to sharing, you’ll want to make sure that the things you’re sharing make sense for your company as well as your audience. The most successful company pages on LinkedIn share content which seamlessly marries the interests of the company with the interests of their followers.

Of course, you’ll want to add any relevant updates about your company. Beyond that, you’ll want to share things that are useful to your audience. Things that are useful for your audience can include things like articles about your industry, think pieces and current events.

Your ultimate goal is to share content that engages your audience and gets them involved in the conversation. Empower your followers to weigh in on the things you share by asking open-ended questions that encourage dialogue. When your audience engages with your company in the comments section, be sure to get in on the action!

Share “Top [X]” Lists

If you’ve spent any time on the internet in the last five-plus years, you’ve undoubtedly noticed the huge amount of top 3, top 5, top 10, etc. lists. Believe it or not, there’s actually a reason behind these types of posts. Simply put, people love them.

LinkedIn studied company page updated that received 1,000 impressions or more and found that top content lists received 40% more amplification than other posts.

Share Videos

LinkedIn and Youtube can be seamlessly integrated, which means that if you share a video from YouTube, it will play directly in your follower’s feeds when they click the video. LinkedIn found that not only do posts with videos result in more likes, comments, and shares, but they’re also more shareable than other types of content. Posts with videos receive a 75% higher share rate than posts without them.

Ask Questions

Ask your audience open-ended questions. These questions encourage your audience to engage with you…and don’t forget to respond to their comments and answers! According to LinkedIn, updates that include questions are 50% more likely to receive comments from your followers.

When to Share

LinkedIn’s users are on the site primarily in the morning (just got to work), in the early evening (just leaving work), and during the week (rather than weekends).

To give your updates the best chance for success, you’ll want to do most of your posting on weekdays, in the morning or the late afternoon. If you can, avoid posting at other times, especially on the weekend.

Some of the most engaging and well followed LinkedIn business pages post as many as five times each day, so share often! Just make sure that what you’re sharing is relevant to both your company and your audience.

Creating Original Content

Creating your own content is one of the best ways to engage with your audience. Often, when you share content from other sources, it’s already been optimized with a lovely image or video, and a clever headline. When you create your own content, you’ll need to do that legwork on your own.

You’ll want to start by creating a clever headline and intro for your content. Be as concise as you can be while still making sure that your headline is informative. Ask thoughtful, open-ended questions that encourage your audience to engage with your post.

Next, add some rich media to your posts, like a photo or video. Posts that include rich media are far more likely to engage your audience – in fact, it’s 98% more likely to receive comments!

Don’t forget to double-check the tone of your content…You want to come off as a friendly, honest, engaging company. So sales-y language or promotional messages typically don’t do very well from an engagement perspective.

A final note on creating your own content: LinkedIn users want to see updates that provide industry insight more than any other type of content. So stay on topic too 😉

Repurpose What You Already Have

Chances are, your business has been producing useful content already as part of your other marketing efforts. Don’t be afraid to optimize this content for LinkedIn and use it there as well. You’ll provide the LinkedIn community with valuable industry insights, while also getting the most use out of your existing content.

Use The 4-1-1 Rule

For every one piece of content you share which directly relates to your company, you’ll want to share a piece of content from another source and four pieces of content written by others that your audience is likely to be interested in. If you follow the 4-1-1 rule, your page will feature a nice mix of important updates about your company as well as compelling content focused on the needs of your audience.

Tailoring Your Content to Specific Audience

One useful aspect of LinkedIn company pages is the ability to tailor posts to specific segments of your audience. Sometimes, you’ll find that a particular update only resonates with a portion of your audience as opposed to your entire audience.

By tailoring your posts to specific segments of your audience, you’re able to ensure you’re serving your audience with only the most relevant content.

Pin Your Most Important Content

LinkedIn allows you to pin your most important updates to the top of your page. That way, the most important content on your page receives the spotlight. It will be the first thing people see when they visit your page.

Keep It Short

There’s tons of content vying for your audience’s attention in their LinkedIn feed. You’ll want to keep your intros short and sweet. If you can keep updates or intros within the Twitter standard, they’ll usually perform better.

Try pointing out a key benefit of the content you’re sharing, highlight a quote or ask a thought-provoking question designed to engage your audience and elicit a response.

Include A Call to Action

You could spend time crafting the most thoughtful and engaging piece of content of all time, but it’s all for naught if you don’t include a call to action.

Make sure you’re sharing content with a purpose and that your audience has clear instructions on what to do. Should they click a link? Watch a video? Answer a question in the comments section?

Whatever the purpose may be, make sure you’re communicating that clearly to the audience – and meeting your goals.

Analyze

You’ve created your page, developed an audience and added tons of great content to your page. Next, we’re going to use LinkedIn’s semi-robust set of tracking tools to analyze and refine our posts.

These tools can provide valuable insight into what your audience likes and doesn’t like, as well as what they’re most likely to respond to in the future.

Acting on the data you receive will prove vital to the success of your business page, so careful analysis is one of the LinkedIn business page best practices.

Updates

The first analytics tool LinkedIn provides is the updates section. In the updates section, you’ll see some valuable analytic information related to each of your updates.

Preview

This section shows a short preview of each of your posts.

Date

When each of your updates was posted.

Audience

This section shows which segments of your audience saw each update.

Sponsored

LinkedIn offers you the ability to advertise your posts to reach a larger, highly targeted audience. If any of your updates were sponsored, it would display in this section.

Impressions

This is the number of times your post showed up in your follower’s feeds.

Clicks

This metric indicates the number of times your update, company logo or company name was clicked on.

Interactions

LinkedIn defines interactions as likes, comments or shares. Interactions are a vital statistic as they show the number of people that engaged directly with the content you’ve posted. The interactions metric provides valuable insight into how engaging your content is.

Followers Acquired

This metric shows the number of new followers you’ve acquired as a direct result of updates you’ve posted.

Engagement

LinkedIn displays this metric as a percentage. LinkedIn calculates that number by dividing the number of impressions your post received by the number of interactions your post received. The higher that percentage, the more engagement your post received per impression.

Followers

This section provides valuable analytics data that are related to the people following your page.

Type

• Total – This number displays the total number of followers of your LinkedIn company page.
• Organic – These are your followers who were acquired organically. Your organic followers are the followers you gained naturally, without advertising.
• Acquired – These are followers that you’ve gained through LinkedIn advertising campaigns.

And note that like Quora, Pinterest, Reddit, and other social networks – you can often generate organic traffic with engaged acquired traffic. So if you pay to acquire an influential reader, that can lead to organic shares which lead to organic traffic.

Follower Demographics

You’ll find some of the most valuable analytics data LinkedIn collects in the follower demographics section. This area breaks down your total followers based on five types of demographic data.

• Seniority
• Industry
• Job Function
• Company Size
• More

Follower Trends

This graph shows how your number of followers has changed over time. There’s a drop-down menu that allows you to tailor the date range.

How You Compare

This section shows how your page stacks up against similar pages in your industry. This feature is one of the more unique features on LinkedIn.

Visitors Section

The final section of analytics information is the visitors’ section. In this section, you can gain valuable insight into what the people who are visiting your LinkedIn page are doing once they arrive there.

Page Views

This graph displays the number of times your page was viewed over the given date range. The drop-down menu at the right allows you to adjust the date range of the graph.

Unique Visitors

Similar to page views, the unique visitors graph shows the number of unique visitors your page has received. This graph targets visitors by IP address and removes visitors who have visited your page before.

Career Page Clicks

Chances are, you won’t see any reporting for this section. LinkedIn gives you the option of creating a career page which can be a valuable recruiting tool for your business. However, the career page is a paid feature, and it’s far from cheap. But, it may be something to consider if a specific goal of your company page is to drive hiring efforts.

If you do have a paid career page, this section will show how many times visitors clicked the different elements of your career page.

Visitor Demographics

Similar to the demographic information provided in the followers section, this graph provides demographic data about all of the visitors of your page, not just the ones that follow you. Be sure to use this data to improve your general personas and marketing strategy.

Using the Data

LinkedIn provides all this valuable insight so that you can analyze, interpret and take action on it. Based on the data your page is returning, you’ll be able to learn more about your audience and their likes, dislikes, and interests. This data will allow you to tailor your posts further to make sure you’re serving your audience with the most engaging content possible.

Consider Advertising

LinkedIn advertising could be a great way to drive even more engagement with your most popular content. Based on the data you receive, your updates that are already receiving lots of engagement organically within the LinkedIn community make great candidates for promotion.

LinkedIn provides several advertising options for company pages. These options include traditional display advertising, sponsored inMail, and sponsored content updates. While display ads and sponsored inMail provide additional opportunities for you to grow your audience, you’ll be focusing on sponsored content updates in this case. If you do decide LinkedIn advertising is a smart option for you, you’ll find other tracking and conversion data at your fingertips to help refine your campaigns.

Tracking Conversions

The development team at LinkedIn makes it easy to integrate code into your website or landing pages. This code will allow you to receive more actionable data about the things that visitors referred by LinkedIn are doing on your site.

Refine and React

Let the data you’ve received from your LinkedIn dashboard, as well as your other tracking efforts, inform the decisions you make moving forward. As networks like LinkedIn continue to grow and evolve, companies wishing to keep up with that growth and continue to reach their audience must evolve as well. Tweak your content, your messaging and your goals as needed to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your presence on LinkedIn, and providing value to the members of LinkedIn who follow your page.

Next Steps

Go to LinkedIn and setup and/or revise your own LinkedIn page!

You might also be interested in –

• My guide to LinkedIn advertising
• AdEspresso’s guide to promotion on LinkedIn
• HubSpot’s list of 12 excellent LinkedIn pages