Over 58 million companies have LinkedIn company pages, and that's a great place to start, but you may not get the results you desire from your company page alone. The road to real corporate marketing success begins with company employees presenting a consistent branding message on their personal LinkedIn profiles.
But if you are company management, how can you help your employees share the responsibility for promoting your company's products or services?
It starts with creating LinkedIn best practices guidelines and sharing them with all employees. The guidelines should include profile standards as well as simple LinkedIn activities that will be helpful for the employees as well as the company.
A LinkedIn training session is a quick and easy way to share the guidelines with your employees—and they will be more likely to follow the guidelines if they understand the strategy behind them and see the personal value in addition to the corporate value.
Of course, I've provided LinkedIn training for hundreds of companies and would be happy to assist you and your company as well. Click here to check out the details and register for my upcoming virtual workshop Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page & Effectively Market Your Business.
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What to include in your company's LinkedIn best practices guidelines
The first six items below are typically one-time profile updates that all employees can quickly and easily perform. The last item includes activities employees should be encouraged to engage in on an ongoing basis.
1. Photo. Bring in a photographer and get professional headshots. You only get one chance to make a great first impression, and the photo is the first thing people see when they view someone’s profile.
2. Background photo. Design a standard company background image that all employees can put on their personal LinkedIn profile. This could include your website address, physical address and phone number, photos of your products or facilities, etc.
3. Keywords. These are critical on LinkedIn, and if you expect your people to show up in a search, you have to give them a list of five to ten of the most searched-for terms for the company—these are usually your products, services, brands, etc.—and then encourage your employees to place them in the right spots on their profiles.
4. Standard company description paragraph(s). Share with them one succinct paragraph to be included in their About section and a more detailed two or three paragraphs to be included in their job description for their current job at your company.
5. Add media to Featured and current job experience entries. Give them videos, slide shows, photos of your best work or products, customer testimonials, etc. that they can display on their profile by uploading a file or linking to the information.
6. Each employee’s job entry correctly attached to your company page. Make sure your company logo shows up on their job entry for your company. This is must-have branding. If it doesn’t show up, it means (1) they added this job entry prior to your business having a company page with a logo attached or (2) they selected the wrong company or no company when adding this entry to their profile.
7. Sharing, liking and/or commenting on company status updates. This is a bit hard to monitor because it is ongoing and not a one-time profile change. But the more it’s done, the more sets of eyes your company updates are seen by, and we can all agree that is a good thing.
For additional LinkedIn company branding ideas, be sure to check out my upcoming virtual workshop Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page & Effectively Market Your Business.
