Best known as the place to go for job hunting and company networking, LinkedIn is making a name for itself as a professional content marketing platform. Their new ideas easily and brilliantly integrate LinkedIn to your own blog and company website. Better yet, they have revamped their 2008 feature of Company Profiles and launched new Company Pages. This catapults LinkedIn into an intelligence-gathering tool for individuals and a free marketing tool for businesses to grow brand awareness and attract new employees and customers.
Company pages are suitable for organizations, non-profits, government agencies, large corporations and small businesses. Often a page has been started for your company with no one being aware of it, so do a search for all branches of your business. If any of your employees have created a LinkedIn profile with an email under your company domain, then you have a Company Page. Example: if your company is MarketSmart, it would be JohnDoe@MarketSmart.com. Whether creating a page or just optimizing your current page, utilizing everything LinkedIn has to offer will optimize your company in an entirely new way.
Company Page Basics
Most professionals have a LinkedIn profile with their interests, history and qualifications. Now companies can provide the same information on their Company Page’s three public tabs: Overview, Careers and Products & Services. Each tab offers great features and one-of-a-kind optimization.Overview Tab
- Basic company information like employees, location, industry, etc.
- Shows updates about new hires, current employees and your degree of separation from anyone working at the company. Seeing a friend or classmate working at a company makes you more apt to get involved!
- Twitter and/or company blog feeds
- A “Follow Company” option
Careers Tab
- Display job postings
- Paid accounts let you add videos and more
- Paid accounts can customize this page to show targeted content to whoever is viewing the page. Does your resume have a lot of marketing? Beware: this tab will tempt you with all the marketing jobs available at the company!
Products and Services Tab
- Describe your products and services
- Get recommendations from users on products and services
- Add videos and promotions
- Purchase ads to showcase recommendations
- Seek more recommendations!
- Get the “Recommend” button to put on your website next to your products and services.
Analytics Tab
- Compare your company to similar companies
- See overall page views
- Amount of page views on each tab
- Amount of unique visitor per month
- Number of clicks on each link on your Products & Services tab
- Amount of company followers
- View followers by industry, function and company.
When you set up your profile be sure to include:
- Company name
- Company size
- Company website
- Industry
- Operating status
- Year company was founded
- Up to five locations
- Standard and square/thumbnail logo
- Description
- Specialties
- Twitter ID
- RSS feed
