If we asked you what type of social network is the most important for a business, a LinkedIn business page would likely come much further down the list to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, even TikTok.
However, a company page on LinkedIn can provide you with more opportunities for networking, hiring, staff retention and happiness, and much more.
The question is, should you be using a personal LinkedIn profile or create a company page? How do you make a LinkedIn marketing strategy?
This guide to LinkedIn will help you answer all these questions and more, including how to create a LinkedIn business page.
What is a LinkedIn business page?
A LinkedIn business page is a dedicated page on LinkedIn for your business, school or organisation. As the owner of a business page, you can (and should) market about your business, post about what you do, advertise your service, run job listings, promote upcoming events and more.
For a personal LinkedIn user (such as job seekers), they can visit your page and learn more about your business and what you do, who works at your business (past and present), apply for jobs you’ve advertised and more.
LinkedIn business pages also allow you to run LinkedIn Ads, which are popular for business-to-business (B2B) companies, recruitment services and more.
5 Top Benefits of a LinkedIn Company Page.
1. Reach a unique target audience.
LinkedIn claims they have more than 800 million users in more than 200 countries. Their aim is to provide a platform to connect ‘the global workforce’ as ‘the world’s largest professional networking’ platform.
When someone is on LinkedIn, they aren’t there to connect with family and friends or to watch pressure-washing videos. They have work on the mind, whether that’s to grow their network, browse job vacancies, to find a particular connection to fulfil a need or to catch up on industry news.
This makes having a LinkedIn company page a goldmine for those who can provide the solution to these needs, particularly for B2B marketers.
Does your business provide commercial legal, accounting, software or other relevant services? Are you a recruitment service? Can you provide value to businesses? Then you need a LinkedIn company page, my friend.
Plus, LinkedIn provides you with analytics to easily understand who is following your page and engaging. This provides you even more specific information about your target audience than Facebook or Instagram can provide in terms of the type of work your followers do.
2. Increase workplace culture.
One of the key reasons businesses use LinkedIn is for recruitment. Your employees are very likely LinkedIn members, especially if you’re in a ‘professional’ setting, and can be the biggest advocate of how great a workplace you are to build a career with.
Part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy should be to promote your company culture, people and achievements across the board. As your staff are on LinkedIn to build their own networks, they’ll be likely to share and promote this type of content themselves, helping you also reach their network of followers too.
Engaging your employees on LinkedIn will also help increase the engagement rates on your profile. Once you create a company page, encourage your staff to connect with your profile and add your official page as their place of employment. Then, once you start posting, use the ‘Notify Your Employees’ button on every post to help them know when you make an update, and hopefully engage with it.
3. Reach top talent when recruiting.
40 million people reportedly use LinkedIn to look for jobs every single week. Remote jobs on LinkedIn also reportedly more than doubled from March to October 2020.
If you’re looking for new team members, LinkedIn is not only ideal for reaching top talent, but it’s also great for finding them in places you may not have initially envisioned.
As a poster of a job ad on LinkedIn, when someone applies for a job through one of your vacancy listings, you’re connected with the applicant’s personal account. This is handy for aligning the skills they have on their application with those on their LinkedIn profile. You can also see if their peers have endorsed them, as well as anything they didn’t think was important to add to their application, like educational institution details, minor certificates, etc.
4. Unique competitor analysis.
Competitor analysis is an often under utilised benefit of LinkedIn. It’s very likely your competitors are on LinkedIn, and if they’re not, it’s likely some of their team are.
You can use your competitors’ own LinkedIn company updates, job openings and connections to see how they’re innovating, what’s working for them and potentially their growth too. This can help you find gaps in their marketing plan to use in your own or even get ideas of something you may have missed.
For example, say your competitor has job openings for a particular skillset you yourself do not have in your business. It’s not one they’ve advertised before and could indicate they’re building a new product or taking a new angle.
5. Assert industry authority.
When you create a LinkedIn page, you should be optimising it with everything from your company website and company logo to a cover image, your business’s vision and more. You should also add a post weekly (at the very least) to give users a reason to follow you.
However, besides talent acquisition and networking, LinkedIn business pages also allow you to assert your industry authority. Is there something new you’re doing in your business? Have you been nominated for an award or even won some? Show off the team to your audience, for example you could highlight a Day in the Life of an SEO Specialist 2021. Tell the world about it on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a professional network. Like we mentioned, it’s a place where people look for industry news, amongst other things. Become their source of news. When they need a service like yours, who knows, they may just think of you.
How to Create a LinkedIn Business Page.
Step 1. Create a LinkedIn personal profile.
You will need a LinkedIn personal account to make a LinkedIn business page, and be logged in. If you do not want to be on the platform personally for whatever reason, you can use an alias page admin profile.
Once you are logged into your LinkedIn profile, select the ‘Work’ icon in the top-right corner. There you will see (and need to click on) the ‘Create a Company Page’ option at the bottom of the list.
Step 2. Select your business type and size.
LinkedIn will now prompt you to select the type of business that best represents your company from a list, including:
- Small business (200 employees or less).
- Medium to large business (More than 200 employees).
- Showcase page (a sub-page to an existing page).
- Educational institution (school or university).
Select the one closest to your business in its current form.
Step 3. Fill out your business details.
In this step, you will be filling out some details about your business. You are not required to provide all the information, but it is advised you fully complete this step to get the most from your profile.
The type of information LinkedIn will ask you includes:
- Your business name. Remember, it’s important for NAP in search engine optimisation and brand awareness to keep your business the exact same everywhere you put it online.
- A public URL. It’s best to keep this as your business name.
- The industry of your business. There is a dropdown menu for this, so pick the closest to what you do. This will help people be able to find you if they’re looking specifically for an industry in particular.
- Your company website.
- The size of your company. LinkedIn will provide some options.
- The type of business you’re creating a page from.
- Your company logo. Remember to only upload a high-resolution logo, around 300x300px.
- A description for your business. You’ll only have around 120 words to explain what your business does and why you’re the best at it.
How to Optimise Your LinkedIn Company Page?
Once you have created a LinkedIn business profile, you’ll be able to edit it whenever you need in the admin view. If you ever forget how to get into your profile, go back to your homepage and it should be in a bar on the left-hand side.
You should ensure you optimise your LinkedIn as completely as possible. This will make people aware what you do, where you do it and why you do it.
How to optimise your LinkedIn business profile:
- Add your business logo, consistent with that elsewhere online.
- Ensure you add your business’s physical or servicing location. You may want to add more than one location or the headquarters, but it’s important for job seekers and potential customers to know where they may be heading to reach you.
- Include a thorough description of what your business does. You’ll have up to 2000 words to outline a little history of your business, your main services or products and what makes you stand out. If you’re used to search engine optimisation writing, ensure you include relevant keywords for those who could be searching for what your business does.
- Upload an engaging cover photo to help encourage potential followers to feel enticed to click through to your profile. It’s common for businesses to align their current advertisements and marketing campaigns with their cover images on their LinkedIn page.
- On every post, you should be utilising relevant hashtags. While hashtags aren’t as common on LinkedIn, they can help you connect with users who don’t follow you and have them engage with your posts. You should add up to three hashtags per post relevant to the topic.
LinkedIn Business Profile FAQ.
Why should businesses create a company page on LinkedIn?
If you are a B2B business, LinkedIn is the perfect platform to reach working professionals and decision makers within other businesses. With more than 40 million people using LinkedIn to search for jobs each week, it also gives you further reach if you’re hiring.
As for who uses LinkedIn, there are more than 11 million users in Australia alone, with the main age demographic being those between the ages of 25 and 34. LinkedIn revealed in an article with Yahoo the most common job titles on the platform are:
- Mental health specialist.
- Nurse/medical frontline workers.
- Social worker.
- Healthcare, medical support workers.
- Construction workers.
- Customer service workers.
- Professional, personal coaches.
- Real estate specialists.
- eCommerce specialists.
- Digital content freelancers.
- Education workers.
- Social media/digital marketing specialists.
- Specialised engineering roles.
- Cyber security specialists.
As you can see, the main demographics on LinkedIn are very vast, appealing to a range of different industries. For businesses who provide services, software or support for these industries, it’s a gold mine for you to be on these platforms, marketing what you do, your culture, job openings and more.
Is LinkedIn business page free?
The beauty of creating a LinkedIn business page is that it comes with no additional costs and is completely free to setup. There are some very simple requirements that you need to meet in order to be able to create a business page, which include having a company name and a company email address. If you meet these requirements, it should only take a couple of minutes to create your business page.
If you are a business that utilises LinkedIn premium then there will be an additional cost to creating your business page. The cost of LinkedIn premium is $80.56 per month or $773.30 per year, which gives you additional benefits such as receiving 15 InMail messages per month and business insights regarding functional trends and growth.
InMails are messages that are sent to other LinkedIn members even if you are not connected to them. This membership allows the user to view an unlimited amount of profiles on LinkedIn as well as see who has viewed your profile.
Is LinkedIn good for small businesses?
Small businesses often exclude themselves from niche social media platforms, like LinkedIn, but are the ideal user for the social network’s business uses. LinkedIn is commonly known as a social media platform for business professionals and B2B marketers. If you cater to these demographics and audiences, then you can be more niche than you can on other platforms and grow your audience quite quickly.
Having a LinkedIn business profile also allows your employees to connect their personal accounts to your business account. This provides legitimacy and helps you build your authority from the authority of your own team. Encourage your team to use LinkedIn and engage with your profile to reap mutual benefits.