Over 31 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’re 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 see how I help companies grow their business, make more money, and attract great talent. You can also view testimonials of my many satisfied clients.
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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 profiles. 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. Share with them one succinct paragraph to be included in their profile’s About section (formerly called the Summary section) and two or three more detailed paragraphs to be included in their job description for their current job at your company.
5. Add media to current job experience entry. Give them videos, slide shows, photos of your best work or products, customer testimonials, etc. that they can display on their profiles 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 every employee’s 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.
This is simple to fix. The employee simply edits that job entry and selects the correct company page when LinkedIn autofills as (s)he is typing in your company name.
7. Sharing, “liking” 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 I think you’ll agree that’s a good thing.
For additional LinkedIn company branding ideas, be sure to download my FREE eBook 10 LinkedIn Mistakes Companies Make and How to Fix Them Before They Damage Your Company’s Reputation by clicking here.
Start by creating a dynamic company page, but take it further by getting your employees on board. Then get ready to watch your LinkedIn results soar.