LinkedIn is the social media epicentre for the business world. To date, over 3 million businesses have company pages on LinkedIn. Over 150 different industries are represented and 1,275,000 products and services are promoted on these pages.
With more than 500,000 company pages created between 2012 and 2013, more and more businesses are taking advantage of the social media platform’s ability to promote brand awareness and LinkedIn’s popularity is growing fast.
It is vital to not only have a strong LinkedIn presence, but also have an engaging and well-communicated company page for your business. Getting started isn’t difficult. The experienced team at Infodec Communications have developed this guide to point you in the right direction.
First things first. Before LinkedIn will allow you to create a new company page, there are a few things you need to have sorted.
- Your position at the company must be listed under the title experience on your LinkedIn profile
- You must have a verified company email address listed with a unique domain name, for example: contact@infodec.com.au
- LinkedIn requires that you have a number of connections through your personal profile, at least a few
- Finally, your profile strength must be rated by LinkedIn as at least intermediate or better
Now you’ve got the basics covered, let’s move onto some tips for promoting your business on LinkedIn.
Showcase what you and your business offers. LinkedIn launched its Showcase Page feature in November last year. It is aimed at companies that offer a number of products and services. With the introduction of Showcase Pages it’s now possible to build an individual page for each product or service and market each showcase page individually to better targeted, relevant consumers.
This introduction is aimed to replace the now defunct Products and Services tab that once listed the products and services offered by a particular business on their company page.
Advertise on LinkedIn and hit your target. Advertising on LinkedIn is a great way to target employees and owners of businesses in specific industries. Marketers tend to still think of LinkedIn as a B2B-only social network, but this is far from the truth. With over 300 million registered members worldwide and more up-to-date
professional information registered by its users, LinkedIn allows extremely targeted advertising opportunities with a wide scope for consumer engagement.
There are two types of ads or sponsorships on LinkedIn—sponsored advertisements and sponsored posts.
You will find the sponsored advertisements in a section on your LinkedIn page headed ‘ads you may be interested in’. These ads are small and comprise of a headline, a small image and brief body copy, specifying a call to action.
The sponsored posts appear to be just like any other LinkedIn post but are labelled with the word ‘sponsored’ just at the top right-hand corner. They appear amongst the posts made by your connections and can be commented on and shared with others just like any other LinkedIn post.
When deciding which ad type to use, it’s important to first consider what marketing objectives you wish to meet, what outcomes you would like to see.
If you want to drive sales for your business, sponsored ads are a great way to offer discounts and other opportunities to your prospective customers. If, on the other hand, you would like to promote brand awareness and begin relevant conversations with your target consumer base, sponsored posts are a great way to generate ongoing consumer engagement and build relationships.
This is just the beginning of what LinkedIn can offer your business in terms of affordable and effective online promotion. In 2014 LinkedIn is proving to be a powerful social networking platform for the contemporary content marketer.
The online marketing experts at Infodec Communications are experienced with the building of LinkedIn company pages and the launching of robust LinkedIn advertising campaigns. If you would like any further information on how Infodec can improve your company’s online presence with LinkedIn, contact us today to discuss a communications strategy, tailor-made for you.
