You’ve got a LinkedIn personal page – but did you know you can create a Company Page for your small business as well? A LinkedIn Company Page can be a fantastic platform from which to market your business and build a community for your customers, and it’s absolutely free. This post will walk you through how to create a LinkedIn page for your business as well as how to optimize it for marketing success.
How to Set Up Your LinkedIn Company Page
1. Start with a Personal Account
All you need to get started is a personal LinkedIn account from which to manage the Company Page. If you have multiple employees, then you might plan to use the account of the employee who will be managing the Company Page. Or, you might have reason to give admin access to multiple employees in your company—just keep in mind that if they leave your company, you will need to remember to remove their admin access.
Here are your first steps for setting up a LinkedIn Company Page:
- From your personal account, click the “Work” drop-down in the menu bar and select “Create a Company Page”.
- A short dialog will appear, asking for the name of the company and requiring you to attest that you have the right to create a page for that company.
- Put in the name of your company and click “Create Page”.
For this article, we’ll create a Company Page for “Minimum Wage Software”. Here is what a blank template for your company page will look like:
2. Upload Images
Graphics and photographs are a crucial part of your Company Page. Images elicit greater interest among people, and greater interest means they will retain information better—i.e. your brand will be more impressionable and memorable.
To add images:
- Click on the “Update cover image” pane of the template
- You’ll then be able to upload an image for your page banner.
- LinkedIn recommends a 1536×768 pixel image. Images of a different size will be stretched or compressed to fit the banner space, which may not be ideal.
3. Add Company Details
Just as with any online listing, it’s important to fill in as many details about your business as possible.
On the initial template page for your LinkedIn Company Page you can:
- Add a company description
- Specify the language your page should appear in
- Add a list of up to 20 areas of specialization for your company
- Enter your company website’s URL
- Enter information about your industry, company size, and corporate structure,
- Specify your company location(s)
- And add up to three featured groups.
4. Publish Your Page
Once you’ve added this information, hit the Publish button and your page will go live! Note that there is no preview functionality; Once you hit Publish, your company site is live, so you may want to be prepared to put up at least the basic company site as soon as you start the process.
Here’s what the LinkedIn Company Page looks like for our software company mockup:
How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page
Optimize Your Page for Search
Note that while you have 2,000 characters to use in your company overview, only the first 156 characters will be indexed by Google (not sure what we’re talking about? Check out this post on how Google/SEO works). That means your first 20 to 30 words are critical for getting some indexing action for your Company Page. The rest of the text is searched by the internal LinkedIn search engine, so your keyword efforts there will be less universal, but still productive.
Use Career Pages
If your company is hiring, one of the more powerful features of LinkedIn is the ability to add Career Pages to your Company Page. These pages let you share the story of your company with potential hires, describe the jobs that you have open, and bring new candidates directly to your Company Page.
Career Pages are not free, but you can get a free demo of how the system works to decide if it’s right for your company’s HR outreach effort.
Update Regularly for Maximum Impact
Just as with your personal page, you can publish posts (known on LinkedIn as “updates”) to your LinkedIn Company Page. You might share a company milestone or achievement or share links to relevant content—blog posts, TED talks, or articles of interest to your customer community. Shareable content may include your own content or that of other thought leaders in your industry. You can let your updates percolate organically through your community, or you can use the Sponsored Content feature to promote your updates to the appropriate user communities.
Use Page Analytics
Frequent updates will effectively build engagement among your customer base, but only if it’s the right content. LinkedIn provides easy-to-use analytics to let you assess how much attention your updates are bringing to the page. This will help you determine what to keep posting to maintain interest and what to do away with.
Extend Your Reach with Showcase Pages
You can also extend the reach of your Company Page by creating Showcase Pages. You can have up to ten Showcase Pages connected to your Company Page for free, and you can pay LinkedIn to increase your allotment. Showcase Pages can be about anything at all—an exciting new product line, a company event, an industry award your company earned, etc., but they make the most sense when they are used as permanent features of your Company Page, not as short-term pushes.
We’ve really only scratched the surface of what you can accomplish with a Company Page on LinkedIn. As a marketing tool, a place to find new company recruits, and a credible platform to build your company’s thought leadership image, a LinkedIn Company Page is a great investment for your time and energy.
For more help creating company profiles on other online directories, download our free eBook below:
