Are you proud of your company’s LinkedIn presence? Do you visit your company page (or personal profile) just to marvel at its beauty?
Almost certainly not. And that’s okay. Most LinkedIn profiles and pages leave something to be desired.
Your presence on the world’s most popular digital social network doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to effectively serve your purpose and be a helpful draw for visitors. So use these six simple strategies to get it into shape and on the right track.
1. Make It Easy for Page Visitors to Find You Elsewhere
This sounds simple enough, but many LinkedIn users don’t follow through. Take inspiration from the LinkedIn company page for Yieldstreet, an alternative investment platform (and just one of the thousands of LinkedIn company users doing it right) by:
- Clearly linking to your company website “above the fold” (so that page visitors don’t have to scroll much or at all to find it)
- Embedding external multimedia (podcasts, videos, and such) in your LinkedIn feed
- Having your employees like and follow your company page
- Listing your business or headquarters address and providing a general phone number for good measure
- Displaying other social media handles or reposting content originally shared by those handles where appropriate
The key here is to see your LinkedIn page as more than a digital networking platform. It’s more like a hub for your enterprise’s entire digital presence.
2. Actually Complete Your Profile (Really)
Pay attention to LinkedIn’s admittedly annoying nudges to complete your profile. You can take things in baby steps, completing one section at a time until you’re finally done.
Of course, you’re never really done building out your LinkedIn profile, as we’ll see. But at least you can get to a point where you have no more static sections to flesh out.
3. Create a Custom URL for Your Personal and Company Pages
Creating a custom LinkedIn URL is super duper easy. In fact, there’s just no excuse not to do it.
Here’s an advanced tip for entrepreneurs eager to be more closely associated with their growing brands on LinkedIn: that custom URL of yours should include not just your given name but your company name as well. Think “sara-smith-growco” rather than simply “sara-smith-12823”.
Go one step farther and make a “custom URL” rule for every new LinkedIn page you create for new subsidiaries, divisions, or business lines. Leave no LinkedIn URL behind, you might say.
4. Share at Least One Piece of Content You Find Useful Every Day (No Need for a Long Explanation)
If you find it useful, your audience probably will as well.
This is part of a broader approach to social media once known by a specific ratio (the 4-1-1 rule) and now as a more general guideline: post about yourself less than you post about others. Or, to say it slightly differently: keep the self-promotion to a minimum.
Why handicap your self-promotional capabilities, you ask? Because self-promotion should be incidental to value-added social media conversations. If you’re sharing truly interesting, informative content that relates to your industry and areas of expertise, your audience will reward you just as you’d hoped they’d reward your overt self-promotion.
5. Publish at Least One Longer Piece of Content Every Week
LinkedIn is more than a place to share. It’s a place to publish.
Yes, really. It’s likely that your LinkedIn page receives more organic traffic than your company blog, and it might rank higher in organic searches for your company name too. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of that kind of visibility?
Clear out space on your calendar to publish at least one long piece of original content on your LinkedIn page each week. Link out to this content from your blog (don’t simply repost it or you could cause duplicate content issues that penalize your blog’s search position).
6. Target 50 Engagements With Influencers in Your Industry Each Week
This sounds like a lot until you realize “engagements” can mean everything from one-sentence check-ins (“Loved the new post — keep up the good work!”) to simply “liking” a share or status.
You do want at least some of these engagements to be substantive and compelling because influencers tend to field a lot of outreach on LinkedIn (often filtered through one or more underlings). But volume is a big part of the game.
Be More Than Another Face in the Crowd
You can do even more to make the most of your LinkedIn presence. Like spending at least 30 minutes each week prospecting for new followers. Or making a point to do something (anything) related to LinkedIn maintenance every day.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. If you’re able to take care of these six big-picture items, you’ll be well on your way to a LinkedIn presence you can be proud of.
And that’s something to celebrate.
