We’re continuing our Deep Dive series on optimizing your brand across social media platforms, and today we turn our eye to LinkedIn. (Be sure to check out our tips on optimizing your brand on Facebook and Instagram!)
Unlike other social platforms, LinkedIn began as a professional tool with businesses in mind. Not only is it far-reaching, with over 744 million members and over 57 million companies, but it’s the most trusted social media site, meaning establishing a LinkedIn presence for your brand can go miles in building credibility with both your audience and potential B2B collaborators.
But, just because LinkedIn is business-minded, doesn’t mean you can’t have fun using it. Injecting your brand’s personality into your business’s LinkedIn page can help you attract your ideal audience (and employees) and stand out from your competition. Here are our tips for optimizing your brand on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Page Design
As with any other platform, your first task on LinkedIn is designing your business profile.
Start With the Basics:
Profile Picture
LinkedIn company pages with a profile picture get 6 times more visits than pages without them. Keep things simple by formatting your brand logo to fit LinkedIn’s photo specifications.
Banner Image
You have more room for creativity when it comes to your LinkedIn banner image. Try a design that reflects your brand. If you’re a small, team-oriented company, consider using a group photo of your employees. Larger companies can take advantage of brand recognition—for instance, Sephora’s LinkedIn banner is composed of the black-and-white stripes that make their physical storefronts and merchandise bags instantly recognizable. Use your company core values as inspiration for more ideas.
Complete Your Page
Make sure you fill out the remaining fields to attract the widest audience and optimize your page’s SEO. These include your company’s address, industry, and size. We also highly suggest creating a custom URL to make it easier for both clients and other brands to find you.
Stand Out With Showcase Pages
LinkedIn’s Showcase pages are a unique and versatile feature that allow you to highlight one specific area of your business, and are a terrific way of speaking to specific segments of your audience. Examples of Showcase pages include:
- Individual brands within a larger company
- New or featured products and services
- Live events or conferences
- Charity efforts
- Your brand’s core values
Showcase pages are generally underused, so creating at least one (your company can have up to 10) will help you stand out from your competitors. Keep in mind, however, that each Showcase page may have a distinct set of followers from your company page—so you’ll need to update them just as frequently as you do your main page.
Attract + Recruit With Career Pages
If you’re looking to recruit top-notch employees for your brand, take advantage of LinkedIn’s Career page options. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Meet the Team
A great option for smaller companies, a Meet the Team section allows you to showcase your employees’ individual talents and interests. Not only will your team members appreciate the shout-out, but it can help attract new candidates who will be a great fit for your team. Plus, it’s a great way to humanize your brand and build an emotional connection with your audience.
Employee Perspectives
In a similar vein, you can post leadership articles written by your employees to demonstrate your company culture in action.
Employee Statistics
Highlight your team’s diversity by listing the different languages your employees speak, or solidify your core values by listing the causes your employees care most about.
Employee Testimonials
This is a great place to collect and display positive experiences your team members have had while working with you, which go miles in encouraging new candidates to apply.
Explaining the LinkedIn Algorithm
LinkedIn’s professional veneer doesn’t make it immune to that notorious aspect of social media: the algorithm. Luckily, the LinkedIn algorithm is fairly straightforward—with some careful planning, you can ensure your company’s content is reaching the consumers, collaborators, and candidates you want.
The LinkedIn algorithm has two main sorting mechanisms:
- Relevancy. LinkedIn wants to ensure its users see content that’s meaningful to them. Posts relevant to a user’s specific interests will take priority over both recent posts and posts from the user’s personal connections.
- Engagement. The LinkedIn algorithm ranks posts based on how likely the user is to share, comment on, react to, or otherwise interact with them. The higher a post’s potential for engagement, the sooner the user will see it.
There are a few easy ways to boost your company page both for LinkedIn’s algorithm and for general SEO.
Keywords are essential not only for directing users to your company page, but for ensuring your posts are included in their feeds. Your profile headline and “About” section are strong places to include relevant keywords for your industry.
Hashtags were introduced to LinkedIn in 2018, and are another great tool for helping the right people find your company. Keep in mind, however, that using hashtags on LinkedIn is different than using them on other platforms. For instance, on Instagram, you can (and in many cases, should) use up to 30 hashtags per post. On LinkedIn, you’ll want to keep it to 2-5 hashtags per post—any more than that and you’ll run the risk of appearing unprofessional.
Finally, updating your LinkedIn company page frequently can go a long way in moving your content higher in both individual users’ feeds and on Google search results.
Your LinkedIn Page in Action
Now that you have a well-designed company page and an understanding of LinkedIn’s algorithm, let’s go over some practical strategies for optimizing your brand’s presence on the platform.
Posting on LinkedIn
LinkedIn may not offer the sheer variety of post types as the likes of Instagram and Facebook, but you still have plenty of options when it comes to optimizing your brand.
Text posts are the bread and butter of LinkedIn. Generally, keep your brand’s copy short and engaging, and break up longer posts with paragraphs or bullet points. Include 3-5 hashtags in each post to help boost it in the algorithm—but keep them relevant and professional. This isn’t the time or place to hop on trending Twitter hashtags!
Images and videos are extremely effective on LinkedIn. In particular, videos see five times more engagement than any other content type on the platform—and with both live and prerecorded options, your brand has plenty of opportunities to create eye-catching video content.
Other multimedia post options include PDFs, PowerPoints, and SlideShares. Utilize these options to share the key resources of your brand, such as your core values, mission and vision statements, and more.
Targeted advertisements are a powerful tool for optimizing your brand on LinkedIn. We could write a whole separate article on this topic—but for now, check out these examples!
For optimal engagement and algorithmic placement, your brand should post on LinkedIn at least once a week—but more is better!
Brand Engagement
In social media optimization, we normally think of “engagement” in terms of getting your audience to engage with your brand. LinkedIn is unique in that it offers just as many opportunities for your brand to engage in conversation not only with your audience, but with other companies. This can open the door to valuable B2B collaborations. Try joining LinkedIn groups relevant to your business and industry—for instance, a “Small Business” group, or a “Financial Advisors” group—to discuss hot-button issues and to expand your professional network.
Something to keep in mind, however, is that your brand’s commenting history and other engagement activity is visible to other LinkedIn users. Although it’s business-oriented, LinkedIn isn’t immune to the politics and controversies that seep into social media. So, if your brand chooses to speak up in socio-political debates, make sure you do so in a way that reflects the values you want your brand to show to the world.
Analytics
One final gift LinkedIn gives to brands looking to optimize their social media strategy is their analytics tool. You can use this collection of data to see how well your company page’s posts performed over a certain time period, and to help hone your strategy so you’re reaching your target audience and standing out from your competitors.
New Opportunities to Connect
LinkedIn is an ingenious marriage between professional networking and social media. Here you can take advantage of unique opportunities to connect with an audience of consumers, potential employees, and even business partnerships all in one place. With a little practice, your brand can stand out in this digital sea of companies—and even have fun doing it.
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