LinkedIn Company Pages are a great way to brand your business, and share key content, information and updates with a targeted audiences. All employees who list your company on their profile are automatic followers of your company, and others may choose to follow your Company Page at their option. When you post great content to your Company Page, your followers engage with the updates and share it with their networks which amplifies your reach and serves to build your following even more. People who follow your Company Page tend to be very 'sticky' too. In fact, statistics have shown that:
64% of followers will follow your company forever.
However, most companies fail to take advantage of the full value of Company Pages. This article provides you with 6 tips to unleash the potential of your Company Page, and make it more attractive and useful to your followers. By taking advantage of these suggestions, you can begin building and enhancing high value relationships with your LinkedIn followers.
I managed the AppleOne LinkedIn Company Page from January 2012 to June 2014, and this page was named one of the 10 Best LinkedIn Company Pages of 2013. Under my stewardship, the number of followers grew by more than 7x to over 28,000. In addition, the page was averaging 100,000 impressions per week and was on target to hit 5 million impressions for 2014 when I moved to another position. I was constantly testing new approaches and ways to build engagement, and the tips outlined in this article are based on my direct experience.
Click here to read the blog post on the top LinkedIn Company Pages for 2013
It is important to post interesting content that followers will find useful for their every day job or career, or that educates or entertains them in some way. You do not want every message on your Company Page to advertise your products or services because that would only serve to annoy or turn off your followers. For instance, out of five weekly Company Page posts, only one or two of the posts would be a link back to the company blog or website. For the rest of the Company Page content, I use Feedly's RSS feeder to keep track of more than 75 different blog and news feeds. I scanned the headlines on a daily basis, and select the top 12 articles to post on two different Twitter accounts. From this subset, I selected the best articles to share on the LinkedIn Company Page.
Readers are bombarded by countless messages every day so your posts need to quickly grab the reader's attention from among all of the content they are seeing on all of their social networks or information sources. Ask a thought-provoking question, tease the readers with a snappy tidbit or give them some reason to want to read the post. Don't forget to include a shortened URL at the end of your headline to link to your content (my favorite is Hootsuite's ow.ly URL shortener, and there are several other options to chose from as well).
By default, if you paste a URL into a status update, LinkedIn will suggest a clickable postage stamp-sized photo from an image at that page. Alternatively, I have found that it is far better to upload my own image which usually with the content's title superimposed over the picture. Sometimes I use an image from the actual article or other times, I create my own using Canva. An uploaded image will be about 350x210 pixels compared to the standard 180x110 pixels which is a difference of nearly 4x. In an experiment I conducted this year, we were able to gain 87% more Impressions, 132% more Clicks and 39% more Interactions on identical posts.
Most companies are still struggling with empowering their employees to engage regularly with their LinkedIn company page. At AppleOne, we had over 1,500 employees on LinkedIn, but only a small percentage were engaging with our content. We averaged 41 interactions on our status updates during the first 6 months of 2014 which would be less than 3% engagement per post assuming all of the interactions are from employees. Companies need to do a better job of explaining to employees that they are an essential part of the marketing team and highlight how critical their participation is to the overall company success. Training employees to Follow their company page, and regularly Like and Share content will greatly boost interactions and engagement.
It is always important to monitor your results to see what is working and what is not working, and then adjust accordingly. The Admin Analytics page for Company Pages provides a lot of great information. Generally, I would check the Analytics several times per day and I kept very detailed weekly trend data. From January to June 2014, I know that the AppleOne posts averaged more than 19,000 Impressions, 192 Clicks and 41 Interactions each. I also determined that the best engagement occurred from Tuesday to Thursday, so I always posted what I thought was the most powerful content on those days.
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