- Use relevant and enticing images (most importantly, your cover photo).
- Consider using LinkedIn showcase pages.
- Take the time to write a strong About Us page with relevant keywords.
- Share engaging content.
So, we have covered the initial steps and got your company page up and running, but that is just the beginning. You really need to also make sure it is fully optimized if you want platform users to connect with you and ultimately grow your audience.
But how do you go about doing that? This was one of our questions in this week’s #SEMrushchat. We received a lot of excellent tips to help your page get more visitors’ attention.
1. Use Relevant and Enticing Images (most importantly your cover photo)
About the same as any social platform, really. Prominent logo, on-brand cover image, custom URL, short & concise elevator pitch (make that value prop known!)
Most aren’t visiting the page w/o seeing your content. Less about the page & more about the message.
Don’t underestimate the importance of visuals was one of the main pieces of advice given by our experts and community.
“Visually, you want to have a great banner. You also want to make sure that you have a Square logo, even if it means just using the icon and putting your company name in the banner.”, advised Viveka von Rosen, Chief Visibility Officer & Co-founder at Vengreso.
Your logo and cover photo are one of the first things visitors to your page will see, so make it count. Make sure you keep images updated with the very latest marketing materials. These images should be professional, and make sure they are enticing and make abundantly clear what your brand is all about. Images should also be consistent across social media channels; this strategy has a huge impact on brand awareness. This was a point reiterated in our chat.
Social media is super visual; skipping the graphics is skipping the social cues that give online interaction personality and connection
2. Consider Using Showcase Pages
Have you considered using LinkedIn showcase pages as an optimization tactic? It can be a great strategy for zooming in on particular aspects of your brand or to promote special products. It also presents a fantastic opportunity to highlight a special initiative or campaign; it provides a different way to connect with LinkedIn members, without them following your business page.
To use these pages successfully, it is critical that you regularly post on your showcase pages with all types of content, including videos or presentations. And remember that followers of a showcase page may be quite different from those that follow your company page. With this in mind, tailor your content.
On Showcase Pages — be careful. These fragment your audience, and your followers. It’s one more thing to manage, and makes sense if you have product lines or individual brands under a larger umbrella.
Don’t forget that you can target your post by location, as well as by industry, job type, seniority, school, and many more.
Creating a showcase page is easy to do:
- Select the Meicon at the very top of your LinkedIn company page.
- Pick your business page under the Manage
- Click Admin Tools, which you will find on the top right-hand corner.
- Choose Create a Showcase Page.
3. Share Engaging Content
Consistently posting content relevant to your audience, that will engage and inform LinkedIn members, is key to creating a successful LinkedIn company page.
Some don’t know how to get started creating content their audience will like, but the ideas are endless. Here are just some of what ways you can get started:
- Behind-the-scenes content
- Product development
- Latest trends
- Documents
- YouTube videos
- Infographics
- News involving your company
- Guides
- E-books
- Job openings
4. Take the Time to Write a Strong About Us Page with Relevant Keywords
It is essential to spend time creating a compelling About Us page on your company profile to boost your presence and increase authority; this was another common tip given in last week’s chat.
Make sure it’s on-brand! Add a relevant banner and profile logo. Fill in all the about sections with emails, website and contact info. Have
We recommend that you carefully research relevant keywords and use concise, easy to understand language that clearly demonstrates what your business values are. It should be a paragraph (under 2,000 characters) that gets to the core of who you are and what your business can offer.
Creating a Strategy for Your Company Page on LinkedIn: Building a Following
Creating a company page on LinkedIn is all well and good, but that in itself will not simply lead to legions of followers. Gaining followers takes time and effort. Here are some of the best ways you can do this, as reiterated in last week’s #SEMrushchat.
To make things even more straightforward, we have separated this into two types of strategy: organic and paid.
Organic Strategies to Gain Followers on LinkedIn
Joining groups
It can be all too easy to forget that LinkedIn is, first and foremost, a social media channel. Share your expertise and expand your network by actively participating in LinkedIn Groups beyond your scope of employees.
LinkedIn is a place for networking, so network! Share business and personnel updates, share your research and case studies, become a thought leader and communicate with your followers ?
Make sure to choose groups that are relevant to your company’s interest or industry; participate wisely and don’t spam. To save time finding groups, check out LinkedIn’s group suggestions on the Groups Discover page, or through the search feature on the homepage.
You could also create a LinkedIn group based on the topic or industry of your choice as well! This group can be added to your company page (for up to three groups in total), facilitating even more opportunities for member engagement!
How do you create a group on LinkedIn?
- Simply click the Iconon your page.
- Select your company page in the Manage
- Click the Overviewtab before scrolling down to Featured Groups.
- If you start typing the name of your new group, it will appear.
- Confirm the group.
Encourage Employees to Engage and Connect with Your Page
By far, one of the best strategies to boost the number of followers on your business page is to encourage your employees to connect with the page. It is an excellent way to exponentially increase your reach.
Get employees to spread the word by reposting and engaging with the content you publish. Having employees add the company to their LinkedIn profiles also boosts your online presence, as their profiles will also then appear on your business page. A win-win!
Tagging the page in updates is also key.
Vivek von Rosen also reiterated the importance of this:
“Make sure that your employees are engaged with your posts. Not only that, they are liking and commenting on them, but sharing them with their audience. I can almost guarantee that the combined audience of your employees is significantly greater than that of your company page. Even though we have almost 8000 followers of our company page, the combined networks of our employees are well over 100,000!
The benefit of this is when an employee shares your company page post, the follow button will be displayed to people not already following your company, which encourages them to then follow your company to access your content.”
Don’t Forget to Add to Your Email Signature
This came up as a frequently recommended tip. It is strongly advised to edit your work email signature with a LinkedIn company page link, encouraging readers to follow.
Email signatures, cross-promotion on other platforms, sharing among employees so that at least the internal team is following the content on a regular basis, do a collab-content so the reach can be maximized leading to more engagement. Consistent content.
Adding a Follow Widget to Your Blog or Website
This strategy is an easy step you shouldn’t miss out on if you want to expand your audience, taking a matter of minutes and paying dividends in follower numbers.
Paid Strategies to Gain Followers on LinkedIn
Create LinkedIn Ad Campaigns
Make the most of the fact that LinkedIn has a super sharp, laser-focused ability to target the audience you want.
How? It has in-depth information about its member’s professional skills and interests. Due to this knowledge, 92% of B2B Marketers use the platform above others. Use this to your advantage and look at investing in a LinkedIn Ads campaign.
There are a few different advertising options to choose from here. The most commonly used tactics are self-serve ad options.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored Content works in a similar way to sponsored posts do on Facebook, enabling you to promote content your business creates — whether this is articles, videos, or presentations. It can be a great opportunity for lead generation as you can target your audience very specifically, and catching the eye of B2B leaders. It is recommended that you pick carefully and choose only the strongest content you have, and repurpose it as much as possible for optimal value.
LinkedIn Text Ads
LinkedIn Text Ads are remarkably similar to paid ads on Google or Bing and can help boost traffic to your company page, working as pay-per-click or CPM ads.
Getting started with Text Ads is remarkably easy and cheap too. If you are new to ads, it could be a good place to start, but make sure you are doing A/B testing.
Sponsored InMail
Sponsored InMail is a nifty little tool under LinkedIn’s belt that can have a huge impact on your business. It enables companies to send a personalized image into another person’s inbox, with a sponsored tag accompanying it.
This option can be a great way to promote content and drive conversion through response calls to actions. You must choose wisely and pick only one CTA to increase the chances of a positive response.
Other advertising options come in the form of:
Partner Ads: The LinkedIn Marketing Partner program aligns companies with ad firms that can best help you meet your marketing goals.
Dynamic Ads: These ads directly target the person by addressing them by name and using their profile photo in the ad. To set this up, you will need to contact a LinkedIn representative.
Audience Network: This is a LinkedIn feature enabling companies to target a specific audience through sponsored content via partner apps or sites.
How to Engage Your Followers
While the number of followers you have is important for your company’s LinkedIn page to establish authority, it is equally vital to make sure they are engaging and ultimately outperform your competitor’s content. But how do you do that?
Capture Their Attention Immediately
One clear engagement boosting-strategy with followers is to make sure you use a great headline hook in the first and second lines of your post. This was something reiterated in last week’s #SEMrushchat too.
Authenticity is Key
People tend to gravitate towards content that shows vulnerability (for example, sharing personal stories). Why? Because an emotional connection is more likely to deeply resonate with your audience, as it feels more authentic, this makes content more likely to be memorable, and therefore, it is a key engagement strategy. Don’t keep posting content to sell.
Tell stories, share experiences, add value and answer questions.
CSR stories gain a lot of traction.
Client testimonials work well.
Making a positive impact towards environment and community.
Awards and recognitions.
Respond Constructively to Negative Comments
Greater follower engagement means a higher chance of receiving negative feedback. So what should you do? If someone criticizes your brand, respond constructively, and not emotionally. This is important as it shows you are proactive about trying to solve the situation. How you deal with criticism will be just as impactful on your brand as receiving positive feedback.
Avoid leaving company criticism without any reply at all; this will not do your business any favors. And definitely do not lose your temper — keep at the forefront of your mind the company’s reputation.
How often should I post on LinkedIn?
While making sure that posting content regularly is key important, it was equally highlighted in last week that you must prioritize quality over quantity. Intentional, strategic content that is genuinely meaningful to your target audience is much more important than posting any old piece of content.
A good strategy is to ensure that all content you publish is providing some sort of insight or advice to your reader. Once you have clearly decided on your posting strategy, maintain it.
A/B Testing
A/B testing to see if your target audience responds better or worse to the number of posts you publish is a great way to determine what works best for your brand.
What content engages audiences the most?
Using more videos was a suggested topic in the #SEMrushchat. Native video content helps your brand to communicate in a more personal way and it performs extremely well on LinkedIn. This is because, in relation to our last point on authenticity, it provides a channel to effectively tell a story.
When it comes to video content, making the first six seconds count is essential for audience engagement, according to LinkedIn best video practices. Using subtitles, making videos short and to the point was also recommended. Keep in mind, only a third of people use sound to watch videos on their mobiles, so the right text is critical. Planning for mobile engagement and providing a good user experience is vital, as 91% of LinkedIn members watch videos on their mobile devices.
Make the most of LinkedIn’s algorithm and target your audience directly. People love rich media too. We can’t help it; the brain finds it easier to process images over text. So, opting for images that have text as well as pictures (such as presentations or infographics) will work well engaging visitors on your page.
What’s the best time to post on LinkedIn?
Timing is everything, but do remember that the best time for one brand may not be best for yours; it all comes down to the specific audience you want to target and build a brand with.
Analyzing analytics can make it far easier for you to know when to post compelling content, and consequently help with better results. This is really the only way you can fully determine the best time to post on LinkedIn.
Best Company Pages on LinkedIn
We have discussed how to best optimize your company page, increase follower numbers, and boost engagement, but what about some examples of companies walking the walk?
These are the brands we think are doing it right and why.
Deloitte
Deloitte is fantastic at offering native video content that positively promotes its work culture by featuring real employees. They also provide a whole host of informative materials (written by Deloitte employees) in their Life tab, which is on their page for prospective staff to educate themselves with.
TED Conference
Why is this page the most followed LinkedIn page worldwide? Because of the authentic way it establishes itself as a thought leadership channel for professionals — which as we have mentioned before is key to a brand’s success. The TED Conference page fully understands what its audience wants — regular video content, and it does exactly that on a daily basis.
Unilever
What do we think Unilever does well? Unilever absolutely delivers on providing informative, engaging videos that are concise, have short run times, and come with captions for those watching without sound. As previously mentioned, LinkedIn has stated that only a third of people watching on mobile use sound, and approximately only half for desktop.
EY
EY builds brand identity by using its key figures from the company to build a connection with its audience and ultimately establish trust and reputation. They are also highly creative with their use of video and post regularly with insightful and informative resources.
Hays
Hays is one of our top company pages as it makes consumption of content super easy for LinkedIn members — lots of PDF content that is uploaded directly onto their page. They are also great for posting high-quality video content (as well as a mixture of other resources) and being a leader in thought-provoking initiatives.
Conclusion
Whether it is a startup or an established international corporation, one thing is clear, if you want your business to flourish, creating a LinkedIn business page is crucial to remaining relevant, as well as building your brand, trust, and boosting overall levels of engagement.