If you have a business that serves other businesses (B2B), or a B2C business that caters to specific business roles, having a company LinkedIn company page can help generate leads. According to a study done by InsideSales.com, social media, in general, is overused when it comes to the number of leads actually generated. However, of these low performing social media channels, LinkedIn is responsible for 97% of a business’ social media leads!

This data is backed up by LinkedIn, whose stats show:

• 91% of executives rate LinkedIn as their first choice for content relevant to their profession
• 30+ million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages
• 50% of B2B web traffic originating from social media comes from LinkedIn.

But, having an optimized company page versus a bare-bones page can mean the difference between getting a continuous flow of high-quality leads and driving potential leads away. 

In this article, we’ll review all of the steps to fully optimize your LinkedIn company page. We start with a complete checklist for you pros, but we’ll go over each step in detail. By the time you’re done, your LinkedIn company page will be at its very best.

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First of all, you’ll need to create a company page if you haven’t already done that. If you have, skip down to the Optimizing Your LinkedIn Company Page section.

How To Create A LinkedIn Company Page

1. After logging into your LinkedIn profile, click on the “Work” menu item, then, click on “Create a Company Page” in the sidebar that opens.
2. Select your business type, “Small business” or “Medium to large business”:
3. Complete the fields. Make sure your spelling is correct and choose the best options available for your business type:

Optimizing Your LinkedIn Company Page

LinkedIn pages do not have a separate login and password. Rather, they are managed by verified LinkedIn profiles. If you are a manager of a company page, you’ll see those pages you have access to by clicking “Me” in the header menu and looking under the “Manage” section:

Navigate to your company page by selecting it in this list.

If your page is new or has some obvious pieces missing, LinkedIn recently introduced a “Build Your Page” completion guide that will automatically appear at the top of your company page.

LinkedIn points out that completed pages get, on average, 30% more traffic, so this optimization is well worth the effort.

Hovering over the checkmark at the far right will show you the pieces you’ve completed and the ones that LinkedIn is suggesting you add.

Even if you don’t have this “Build Your Page” guide, we’re going to revisit each of these items, along with everything else, to verify that they are set correctly, or have you modify them if needed. 

NOTE: At any time while making these changes, to see what your page will look like to a regular LinkedIn member, click the “View as member” button at the top right.

Company Page Basic Information

To edit your company page basic information, click the pencil icon at the far right of your page.

All of these basic information forms the core of your company page and, when done properly, will help increase your page discovery when people search for industries and related services that your organization offers. Everything, except the “Post” item listed in LinkedIn’s “Build Your Page” wizard, is located in these settings. Let’s go through them one by one.

Page Info

Beginning at the top of the left sidebar, we have options for Page info.

Logo

Ensure that you have a quality copy of your logo. Your company logo Image should be sized at 300 (w) x 300 (h) pixels. If your logo doesn’t fit nicely into a square, make a judgment call regarding whether you should cut part of it off or leave white space at the top/bottom or sides. Keep in mind, at 300px x 300px, its pretty small. Including text on the logo is not ideal as it may be illegible.

Name

Make sure your company name is correct. Be careful about making the name too long and LinkedIn will truncate it if its too long, which doesn’t look great.

Tagline

A tagline is optional but recommended. It should state in a few words the benefit your clients get from your services.

Other Languages

If you operate in markets where other languages are common, you can add this information in other languages. Click the “Manage information in another language” link to add a Name and Tagline in other languages.

Buttons

Next, you can customize the button that appears below your tagline on the main company page.

This button will be some call-to-action you can choose from a preset list of options. Clicking that button will hyperlink to a web page of your choosing. You can only have 1 button, so decide on what website you’d like visitors to your LinkedIn company page to visit, and set that up in your button.

Overview

In the Overview section, you’ll update most of the basic information about your company.

The information entered here will appear in your About section on your LinkedIn Company page:

Description

Use this space to describe what your company does. Focus on the benefits you deliver to your clients rather than the features of your products or your company history. Avoid getting too specific here. Although there is space for 2000 characters, don’t feel you need to use it all up. Chances are if the description is longer than about 750 words, no one will read it as it will feel like a chore to read such a long description. You can use paragraphs here, but no fancy formatting. Use hyphens or asterisks if you need to write a short bulleted list. Use relevant terms and phrases that describe your organization’s mission and purpose (remember, LinkedIn members can search by keywords).

NOTE: If you operate in markets where other languages are common, you can add this information in other languages. Click the “Manage information in another language” link to add a Description in other languages.

Website URL

Enter your website’s main URL. Your URL should start with https (not http). If your website URL doesn’t start with https, contact your web developer and get that fixed right away. 

This URL will be shown as entered to users in your About section, so feel free to use capital letters (camel case) to make words stand out.

(ie. https://DigitalMarketingPeople.ca instead of https://digitalmarketingpeople.ca)

If your organization doesn’t have a website, you can check the “My organization doesn’t have a website” checkbox. (but, come on… you know you need a website right?)

Industry

Ensuring that your company page is assigned to the best industry category is important because it helps people quickly understand what vertical your organization plays in. 

You have to choose from a predetermined list of industries, so have a look through them all and pick the best match.

Add Company Size

Don’t misrepresent your company here to try and appear bigger than you actually are. Be honest and list an accurate size of your company, in terms of the number of employees.

Company Type

Chose from the available options that which best describes your company type:

Phone

Add your main/headquarters phone number here. You can add different locations in a later step, but you won’t be able to add phone numbers for them. If you have multiple locations, this should be your main reception/switchboard.

Year Founded

Add the year your organization was founded. No one is checking corporate registration data to verify this, so if you started before you were formally registered and you feel that’s important, feel free to enter the year you started offering services under through this company/brand.

Specialties

You can add up to 20 specialties. These will be used when people do searches in LinkedIn to help pair their needs with what your company offers. As much as possible, use all 20 specialty options. It may take a while to look them all up and finalize a list, but this will help tremendously with your company page discovery.

NOTE: At the time of writing this article, trying to click on “Add a specialty” was *broken*. Hopefully just a temporary glitch! However, you can click directly on the word “Add a specialty” and start typing to create a specialty and press enter when done:

Locations

Add as many locations as you have physical premises for.

Your first location should be your “primary location” (checkbox at the bottom).

Company Page Hashtags

Add up to 3 hashtags topics that matter to you. These hashtags will allow your page to enter the feeds and react and comment from the perspective of your brand. Doing this exposes your company name and brand to a wider audience who is already interested in the topics you are.

To discover which hashtags make the most sense for you, spend some time typing some hashtag ideas into the LinkedIn search bar and visit the feeds for the suggested results to see if that hashtag topic makes sense for you. 

This, again, can take some time, but the time will be well-spent since this will help with exposing your company to those interested in your specialties.

Featured Groups

You can specify groups that you want to showcase. Groups that you participate in or are industry-related make sense to include here. A Featured Group must be a public/published group. Any groups added as a featured group will appear on your company page here:

Edit Your Company Page’s Public URL

If you haven’t customized your page’s public URL, do so by going to “Admin Tools” -> “Edit public URL”.

Here’s you’ll be able to change the URL to your company page to something meaningful. This change will not take effect immediately and needs to resemble your page name. See the guidelines for details. You only change this URL every 30 days, but I recommend setting it once and leaving it unless you have a business name change or something drastic like that. Hopefully, you’ll start using this link in various places, so you don’t want to change it and have those links break after a while.

Update Your Company Page Banner

Add some color and appeal to your company page with an attractive banner image. The image is very wide and not very tall, so you’ll have to choose something that can show effectively. For example, this image we were using (when LinkedIn had a taller banner image) is cut off and doesn’t show well anymore.

To replace your banner image, click the pencil icon at the top right of the banner image.

The image should be 1128px (w) and 191px (h). Here’s something more suitable.

Also, just because you chose the banner once, doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it forever. In fact, you can change up the banner image as often as you want, and you can create different background images for all types of events, such as:

• Holiday banners for different seasonal holidays
• Launching a new product or service
• Announcing an upcoming event you might be hosting
• Sharing recent business awards

Create Showcase Pages

Highlight the different brands, business units or initiatives within your organization. Create a Showcase Page when you want to share specialized content with an important target audience. A showcase page is almost the same as a company page and has most of the same features, so completing a showcase page will take some time.

To create a Showcase page, select “Create a Showcase Page” from the “Admin tools” menu.

Once created, your main company page will show your showcase pages on the right side like this:

Create Posts

According to LinkedIn, companies that post weekly see a 2x lift in engagement with their content. Engagement leads to potential clients, so we want that!

Some ideas about what to share:

• Showcase what makes your brand unique
• Share industry-related news
• Share awards, certifications, company accomplishments
• Ask questions of your audience to get their feedback and encourage discussion
• As appropriate and with permission, share work-in-progress and final products of your work
• Share any press-releases, blogs articles or updates published on your website or 3rd party websites
• Spotlight employees to humanize your brand. Recognize important team moments or celebrate your employees with personalized shout-outs from your Page
• Highlight the best of your brand by re-sharing mentions from employees, executives, and key customers. Find them under your Page’s Activity tab

Whatever, you write, keep it succinct. No one wants to read a long post.

Scheduling Posts

You cannot schedule a company page post directly from LinkedIn. However, it is possible using 3rd party tools like Hootsuite, PromoRepublic, Buffer, Khoros, Sprout Social, Sprinklr, Salesforce, Hubspot, SharpSpring, SEMRush, and others. This can be useful if you are planning a week or month of posts ahead of time.

Allowing Or Disabling Comments

You can control whether or not your post can receive comments. Usually, you’ll want to encourage engagement and discussion, but sometimes, if its a sensitive topic, or otherwise, you may want to turn off commenting for a particular post.

Click the “Anyone” drop-down above the “Create a post” dialog and select “Advanced settings”. Here, you can toggle commenting on or off.

Targeting Your Message

Note: Targeting only applies if your page has at least 300 followers. 

Sometimes you have a post that applies only to a specific audience. To customize your audience, click the “Anyone” dropdown and then select “Targeted audience”.

Your combination of targeting options must add up to a target audience of at least 300 followers.

Hashtags In Posts

Adding hashtags to your post will include your post in the feed of posts using the same hashtag. You can add more than one hashtag, but don’t go crazy here. 

3 or 4 hashtags are ok. More than 5 hashtags are excessive and will drive viewers away because your post comes across as spam.

You can press the “Add hashtag” link at the bottom of the “Create a post” dialog, but it’s not necessary. All that does is insert the “#” symbol in your post where your cursor is. You can accomplish the same thing by typing the “#” sign. Then start typing your hashtag after the # symbol to form a hashtag like “#SEOTips”

How do you know which hashtags to use? The best way to do hashtag research is before you write a post, search for hashtags in the LinkedIn search bar. Select one of the autocomplete hashtags and visit that hashtag feed. At the top of the feed, you’ll see the number of followers:

You don’t have to always select an auto-complete hashtag. You can make them up, but, if no one else is using or searching for that hashtag, it won’t benefit you very much. If you have a big brand or audience, invented hashtags may “catch on”, but you have to have a compelling hashtag.

Also, Hashtags don’t need to be only at the beginning or end of your post. Sometimes people use them as part of their message like:

NOTE: hashtags are case-insensitive, but if you pick from the auto-complete options, LinkedIn will automatically give you all lowercase. However, camel-case (capitalizing the first letter of each word and acronyms) is much more readable.

#SearchEngineOptimization is the same as #searchengineoptimization (only much more readable)

Celebrate Teammates

If you want to recognize an employee, give kudos or welcome someone to the team, you can use the “Celebrate a teammate” link at the bottom of the “Create a post” dialog:

This gives you the option to welcome or recognize an employee.

To welcome an employee, you need a picture of them and you can add a brief description. Optionally, you can tag other teammates. of course it’s best if this employee is already on LinkedIn and connected to your company. If so you can call them out using an @name.

If you choose to recognize an employee, they will need to already be connected to your company as an employee. LinkedIn will guide you through a simple recognition wizard to compose something like this:

Call People Out By Mentioning Them With @names

While writing a post, you can call people out by typing an @ symbol and then someone’s name. They do not have to be a contact. These users will be notified about the mention and can help increase the reach or engagement of your post. Once a name is selected, their name will be in bold in your post. Once you publish the post, clicking on that name will bring people to that user’s profile.

NOTE: users can turn off these notifications. See LinkedIn’s help for details.

Image Posts

In general, you should aim to include an image in your posts rather than just plain text. Images typically result in a 2x higher comment rate. If you include 3-4 images (producing an image collage), these posts perform especially well for organizations.

To add an image, click the image icon and select an image.

When adding an image, there is an option to “Add alt text”. Do this, and be sure to add a keyword related to your image as part of the alt text.

You can also click anywhere on the image to tag it with people in the image or somehow related to it. Don’t abuse this by tagging people that have nothing to do with the image.

If the image doesn’t fit nicely into LinkedIn’s post format, LinkedIn will do its best to fit your image. However, this often leaves white bars on the sides and doesn’t look ideal. Try to make sure your image fits to have that ideal edge-to-edge feel. The post image should be 1200px (w) by 628px (h).

NOTE: This image width issue is more pronounced on a mobile phone.

For example, not ideal (image is not wide enough):

Better: (image is edge-to-edge)

Video Posts

According to LinkedIn (and most marketing research), posts that include video get up to 5x more engagement. Attach videos when possible, even if it’s just you with your phone camera. You cannot upload a video longer than 10 minutes, but… let’s be real here. Unless you are a well-known person, no one is going to watch a video longer than one or two minutes on social media. So, keep the video short and punchy.

To add a video, click the video icon.

After selecting your video, click the “Edit” link at the top-right.

Fill in the details giving your video a title, thumbnail image, and caption file if you have it.

Live Video

Once you’re ok with regular video, you can apply to LinkedIn to be allowed to run live video. Live video gets 24x more engagement than a regular post. When you’re ready to apply, go here: LinkedIn Live.

Share Documents

Upload PDFs or PowerPoints to showcase what makes your brand unique. To do this, click the document icon and select your file (either from your local computer or from cloud storage).

Grow Your Page Followers

LinkedIn reports that once pages gain 150 followers, their opportunity for growth becomes exponential. So, getting to that number and greater as quickly as possible should be the focus of your LinkedIn efforts.

Invite Your Connections To Follow

Tap your network to grow your community. Invite your first-degree Profile connections to follow your LinkedIn Page to grow your organization’s community.

From the “Admin tools” menu, select “Invite connections to follow”.

Then select people you actually know personally to invite to follow your page.

Have Employees Connect To Your Company Page As Their Current Employment

Once you have your company page up to par, encourage all of your employees to update their LinkedIn profiles so that their current work section is associated with the new company page. The linking won’t happen automatically. You need to manually update your work section and tag it with the company page.

Ask your employees to update their personal LinkedIn profiles by editing (or adding) their Experience section. When adding or editing their experience at your organization, in the “Company” field, have them erase and re-enter your company. As they are entering the name, auto-complete should find your company. You’ll know you have the right option when you see your company logo. Choose that option and save it.

Once the profile is saved, you can verify the connection is correct by visiting the employee profile and looking at the experience section, you should be able to click on the company name and link through to your company.

From your company page (viewing as a member), you can see all of the employees linked to your page:

Encourage Employees To Share Your Page Updates

After creating a post, click the post menu and select “Notify employees of post”. Encourage them to share it on their profiles to help the post gain a wider audience. This can only be done once every 7 days, so if you post regularly, choose an important post to notify your employees about.

Gain Page followers directly from your website

Add a link to your website so people can get to your LinkedIn company page. You can just link directly, or add this button to your website.

With all of this in place, your LinkedIn Company Page is fully optimized and ready to start delivering you some leads!

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me at eric.poulin@digitalmarketingpeople.ca.