I've always known that having a presence on LinkedIn was a good idea and have done some work to improve my personal LinkedIn profile, but it's a necessity to build a great LinkedIn Company Page too, if you're planning a Social Media Marketing strategy.
The key word there being GREAT. All too often companies go ahead and set up a LinkedIn Company Page without too much forethought or planning around the ongoing management of the page and that generally leads to poor ROI on a deserted page. *Crick crick*
So what can we do to stand out from the 3 million + other company pages out there and attract more followers while engaging our audience?
Here’s what they are doing differently to take advantage of business opportunities on social media.
How to Build a LinkedIn Company Page Your Audience Will Love
1. Get to Know Your Audience
At the heart of the inbound marketing methodology is the simple premise that all activities and content must revolve around your buyer persona. And LinkedIn is no exception. Search for connections that fit the profile of your buyer personas - ideally you are looking for ones that might be interested in building a relationship with your company and becoming your brand advocates.
Take care to identify their interests and pain points, and use those findings to position your LinkedIn page on the back of the solutions and actionable insights they seek.
2. Establish a Company Presence
Before you build your follower community, craft a compelling story that your audience can identify with. Help your readers understand your vision, purpose and the value you can bring to their business objectives and challenges. Here’s how:
- Include a high-quality logo and banner
- Deliver a great narrative about your company, specialties and industry, using short and concise, yet powerful descriptions
- Highlight your products and services with links and videos
- Drive word of mouth with tips, news coverage and product features
- Showcase your business for employment and career opportunities
To amplify the opportunities for your brand to be heard, make sure your profile features the activities of your business and links to all the important pages; your business website, blog, professional Twitter account and so on.
3. Attract and Connect With Your Audience
Now that you've established your presence, work on building and nurturing relationships by attracting followers to your company page and helping them stay abreast of the latest industry news, views and developments.
Join in conversations on LinkedIn groups. Connect your brand to topics that are engaging people. Start your own discussions, reply to comments and be active in other community groups. Make sure you use this as an opportunity for followers to get to know your business better and to establish credibility for your brand.
Voice your presence to both employees and partners. Encourage your staff to be active and passionate brand advocates, by linking their job titles to your Company Page or sharing articles and updates on their personal pages. Followers are more likely to engage with you when they see other professionals with skills and experience connecting with your brand.
Integrate your page into company communications to encourage customer feedback and help you focus on your conversations. Be sure to add a Follow button to your website and blog pages that allows you to grow your community by driving traffic to your content.
4. Engage Your Audience With Killer Content
Demonstrate the value you can offer to your followers by building engagement and brand trust with a stream of rich, insightful and relevant content. Use your LinkedIn status updates as a megaphone to amplify your voice.
Quick ways of engaging on LinkedIn are by sharing a job posting or an article, or leaving a comment in Groups or by posting news and industry related articles. Follow a regular posting schedule to keep that conversion going. The rule of thumb is to post 20 times per month to reach at least 60% of your audience. Don’t forget to include links, images and videos to drive better engagement. And finally, remember to keep tabs on analytics so you can identify your engagement rates and the posts that produce the best results
Why The Best LinkedIn Company Pages are the Best
1. They Use Showcase Pages
The bad news is that LinkedIn will be retiring Product and Services pages on 14th April 2014. The good news is that they are offering us Showcase Pages instead.
Ok, but what is a showcase page, you may ask? Simply put, it is an extension of your company page that allows you to spotlight your brands, products or services as individual elements. This is actually a fantastic initiative, most especially for complex or diverse B2B companies that have a variety of offerings under their umbrella. A showcase page acts much like a company page with 2 main features differentiators. Those are:
- A more prominent hero image (banner) at 974 x 330 pixels
- Two-column design for the feed to highlight relevant content
Here's the existing company page design:
And a snapshot of a showcase page layout:
Definitely 'pops' a little more, don't you think?
Why are showcase pages great for marketers? These beauties allow you to segment audiences for your different offerings and build communities around a specific aspect of your business. Hyper-niche, hyper-interest if you like.
Showcase pages will also appear in LinkedIn search results. If your company name doesn't spell out exactly what it is you do or offer, a showcase page may be your ticket to some organic search growth. People searching on LinkedIn for specific solutions could very well pick up your showcase page ahead of your company page that is less optimised for the search term. This is very exciting indeed.
Adobe has already amassed large followings on their Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud (as seen above) showcase pages as these pages deal with the unique elements of each of those products. Genius!
2. They Share Awesome Content, Often
The type of content you create and share is going to either boost or break your social media marketing. Mediocre, irrelevant or just plain boring content is not going to win you fans. It has to be interesting and valuable for your audience if you are to be successful. LinkedIn shared some insight into the general interest areas of it's members.
- 60% of members are interested in industry insights
- 53% are interested in company news
- 43% are interested in new products and services
Filling up your content bank with a variety of content types, forms and formats will enable you to satisfy the needs of your entire audience.
LinkedIn have also revealed that companies posting 20 times a month, on average, reach 60% of their followers with 1 or more updates which is why top company pages post on a daily basis.
Top Tips To Sharing Compelling Content With Your LinkedIn Followers
- Use powerful headings and descriptive but concise intros to catch attention and stimulate interest
- A clear call-to-action, such as a link, leads to twice as much engagement on a post
- Including images in a post resutls in a 98% higher comment rate
- YouTube videos can play directly in the feed and usually result in a 75% higher share rate
To sum it up - sharing content that is quick to consume and valuable to your audience on a regular basis puts you in a prime position to be seeing conversion from your LinkedIn following.
3. They Engage Their Audience
Moreover posting quality content often, the best LinkedIn company pages understand the importance of getting their audiences to engage with that content.
Posing questions is a great way to elicit response from your followers, as are mini-surveys or polls. Once conversation is flowing, it is imperative to respond in a timely manner, address any queries raised, offer advice, etc. This ensures that followers know there is someone 'real' on the other side of the company profile, ready and willing to engage.
Similiarly posts with a strong call-to-action such as 'like' or 'share' do decidedly better for engagement.
4. They Use Sponsored Updates
Sponsored updates are helpful to extend your reach, raise awareness and drive quality traffic to your LinkedIn Company Page. It is a form of advertising where you are able to set an allocated budget to promote specific posts. These updates will then appear in newsfeeds of people who match the criteria you stipulate.
Here's How to Sponsor Your Update:
1. Post your update to your company page. After a moment or two, you will see a 'Sponsor Update' button just below the post. Note: You are able to sponsor any update on your page - even an older one - it needn't be a new post.
2. Next you'll be prompted to name your campaign. Make it as clear and descriptive as possible in order to make tracking easy.
3. Add your targeting criteria. There are a number of options here:
- Location – by country and some areas
- Company – by name or category (industry or size), or exclude
- Job title – by title or category, or exclude
- School – by school name, or exclude
- Skills – by skill name, or exclude
- Group – all or a particular group, or exclude
- Gender
- Age – several age brackets to choose from
A handy tool will indicate how many LinkedIn profile's match your criteria as you edit these fields which gives a strong indication of the potential audience to reach.
4. Select a payment option. This is where you set your budget and select either a cost per click (CPC) or cost per 1,000 impression (CPM) model, depending on your objective.
5. Check your preview to ensure that all looks good to your audience.
6. Track your results. Insights are provided inline on sponsored updates alongside the organic reach. Here you'll get an overview of the overall impressions, clicks, interactions (like, share or comment), followers acquired and your engagement rate (clicks and interactions divided by total impressions).
As with any other marketing effort, it is vital to track and measure the performance, testing what works better for your audience and use that insight to drive your future campaigns.
Ok, so there we go. 4 things that the best LinkedIn Company Pages are doing to attract and engage their audience. Do you have any examples of a great LinkedIn Company Page? Do share in the comments.
