Practical guide using LinkedIn for SMB (part 3): Creating a LinkedIn Page

by Lili Petkova | Aug 02, 2012

Another tool to generate quality leads in the long-run

You’re probably asking yourself:

Why do I need a company page on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn offers companies the opportunity to have pages so that users can find them and follow the information they share. The page is another channel for publishing company news and updates, a way to promote products and services and even a way to find applicants for job openings in the company. For SMBs, LinkedIn pages are a good opportunity to build their presence in more online channels and to increase their brand awareness. But not only this – if you put in some additional effort, you can find potential customers, partners or even future employees. Creating the page is completely free and is in fact an easy process – the hard part, which is vital, is to maintain the page with consistency and patience in order to achieve the desired results.

Building a LinkedIn community is as easy and as hard as building a community in any other social network. You will see results in terms of sales and profit mainly in the long term. Your current employees can promote your page by showing where they work, on their pages. Every LinkedIn connection they have is able to click on the company and be led to your company page. If they find your information interesting, they might follow you. With LinkedIn pages you can promote your products and services; users can learn about them and even recommend them. Recommendations, as you know, are the hardest thing to get, but are the most valuable thing to have. Recommendations sell your products to new clients.

What exactly is the benefit gained from LinkedIn pages? Let’s imagine that I’m a marketing specialist connected to other marketing specialists on LinkedIn. I see that one of my connections is recommending a company offering Bluetooth devices in shopping centers as part of a marketing campaign. Because I value the professional opinion of my connection, I read the recommendation, which includes the service description and information about the company and other products and services they offer. I decide I might be interested in working with this company and so I connect with them for possible future projects. So, let’s go and take the first step to start generating these quality leads – let’s create your company page together and start managing it!

How to create a company page in LinkedIn?

Your LinkedIn page should look professional, because you’re presenting your company to professionals, right? Take your time when creating it. A LinkedIn page can be created by following a few easy steps:

• Go to the Companies tab on your LinkedIn profile and then on the right side, click the Add a company tab
• Enter your company name and e-mail address

• Confirm your request by responding to the e-mail that you’ll receive
• Fill in your company’s information in the Overview tab – logo, description, company specialities, type, size and industry, etc. Do your best with the description part, as users will only start following your updates if they understand exactly what your company is doing and how it can benefit them. Explain who your ideal customer is (who you are working with) and how you are working with them. You can post your updates and news from this tab.
• Careers tab – here you can post openings in your company. When you have an opening, post it here. LinkedIn is the place where professionals often look for jobs, so why not try to find your next employee here? Good idea, but this feature is paid (the price differs depending on the country), so it’s probably better to wait and think about it in the future when you have followers and you’ve built some serious presence on LinkedIn. When just starting, spending money on job posting doesn’t make much sense.
• Products & services tab – here you can post descriptions of your key products and services and collect recommendations from users. Go to the Admin tools at the top right of your page and click “Add a product or service”. Fill out the requested information – category, name, picture, description, etc. You must do the same for every product and service you want to publish. Add pictures and videos to your products if possible – and use the opportunity to include rich media! Include call to action phrases in the description of your products to help you generate leads (for example, “Free trial for 15 days here!”), and also include a link to your website.

• The Overview, Careers and Products & Services tabs are visible to all LinkedIn members. The Followers statistics, Page statistics and Insights tabs are visible only to administrators. From these tabs, you can gain an understanding of who your followers are, who is viewing your page and what content appeals to them. You can see how many clicks your products and services get. You’ll see the impressions and engagement percentage of your updates. Use these tabs to improve your page activities and updates.

How can I manage my company page successfully?

Before you can really benefit from your LinkedIn presence you should build your community and have some followers. Otherwise your updates won’t be visible to anyone. Add a Follow button on your website that links to your LinkedIn page, so that you can attract new followers. Encourage your employees to show where they work and link up with your page. Do mailings to your existing customers to encourage them to follow you on LinkedIn. Send an announcement to your personal LinkedIn connections. But don’t try to get just any followers – try to get relevant followers; quality is better than quantity. The more relevant the followers are, the more opportunities you have to reach potential customers and influence your target group. If you can invest some money in advertising, advertise your page on LinkedIn to get more followers.

You should engage with your community. Share interesting updates – not only about your business, but also other information that might be useful and interesting to your followers. Monitor and analyze your community. Understand what works for them and what they are interested in.

Collect recommendations! They’re hard to get, but you can ask your existing happy customers to recommend your products and services. You can ask them from the “Request Recommendations” module on a specific Product page. Be aware that you can request recommendations only from your connections, so you should add your customers to your network first.

Not using LinkedIn pages as a part of your online presence can only be a missed opportunity for your business. Creating a page and posting information about your company on LinkedIn can only bring you good – so create it and start updating and building your LinkedIn professional community!