Categories
LinkedIn

LinkedIn Company Page Best Practices for 2022

“A LinkedIn Company Page is a valuable business asset, once it becomes valuable to your target audience. Otherwise, it’s just another onsite space you feel obligated to feed.” @TLBurriss

LinkedIn Company pages are used by well over 54 million companies. Many are complete pages, however, there are quite a few that are naked or built to resemble the typical website about page, poorly focused on their target audience.

Additionally, most LinkedIn pages are used as dumping grounds for company marketing content that again, is all about the company and their glorious products/services, with little to no thought of what their target audience really wants to see.

A LinkedIn page can be a venue your target audience visits frequently, if what they find there is of interest and of benefit to them.

To grow a LinkedIn page that ranks up near the top of the list where your target audience wants to visit, we have to be purposeful about how we manage these pages.

Here are some best practices, sprinkled with some tactics, you can use to build a respected and often visited LinkedIn page and a growing page following.

  1. You need to be clear to yourself about who is your target audience. The more focused you are on these humans, in the specific roles, industries and business types, maybe regions, the more valuable your LinkedIn page will become.
  2. You must understand the language your target audience uses. This will help you to use the words that resonate with them through out your LinkedIn page and the content you share on your page.
  3. Don’t think of your LinkedIn page as end point. Rather, consider it a member of the team and have the page engage on content relevant and meaningful to your target audience, in respect to what your business does. (Tactic – learn to use your actorCompanyID to engage on content across LinkedIn.)
  4. Feed your LinkedIn page on a regular basis . Follow the 90/10 rule. 100% of the content you share on your LinkedIn page must be broadly relevant to what you do and to your target audience. 90% of what you share on your LinkedIn page should not be about your business or products. This allows for up to 10% of the content you share on your LinkedIn page to be about your business, products, offerings, deals, team and events. (Tactic – I recommend a 5-4-1 ratio, share 5 unique and interesting pieces of non-company content and engage 5 times as the page, for each piece of company branded content you share.)
  5. PSA (Pay Serious Attention) if someone touches your content in any way, either directly on your LinkedIn page, or through the LinkedIn newsfeed, you must engage back with them in some meaningful way.
  6. Feed your audience diverse pieces of content. Too often business pages will lean toward using a content type they are the most comfortable curating and/or creating. However, as your LinkedIn Page followers grow, they all do not want the same type of desert. They want text stories, images, native videos, documents, links to great content, Youtube videos, maybe LinkedIn Live Events, mixed in with a little bit of motivation and inspiration along side a pinch of posts about your people and your business.
  7. Don’t bust through these steps over the next few months without consideration for how are you going to sustain them. I see this all the time, a LinkedIn Page manager (or team) will start throwing stuff at their page and because they don’t see rewards in a few months or even 6 months or a year, they give up. Your LinkedIn Page is a long term asset which will participate in creating results only if you keep up feeding it in the style I presented above.

Now, let’s discuss some tactics you can use to encourage your target audience to discover and follow your page as well as to engage on your content. What I share below will work, only if you also follow the 7 tips above.
Ready?

  1. Periodically grab the public URL of a post from your LinkedIn Page and share it outside of LinkedIn. Maybe on Facebook or Twitter. Maybe in a Quora Answer or Post. Maybe share it on your website and/or in your blog or newsletter. These posts are 100% publicly accessible. The reader only needs to be logged into LinkedIn to engage on the post and to follow the page.
  2. See tip #5 in the first set of ideas above. This is important for follower growth as well.
  3. Create a monthly process of inviting your target audience to follow your LinkedIn Page. Here are a few ways you can do this:
    1. Use the Invite Follower feature as a Super Admin of the Page. You can invite up to 100 of your LinkedIn Connections to follow the page each month.
    2. Add key client facing employees to be Super Admins of the LinkedIn page for 2 weeks, never longer. Coach them on how to use the Invite Follower feature so they can invite up to 100 of their own LinkedIn Connections to be page followers. Then remove them as a LinkedIn Page Admin. Repeat this step next month with another key client facing employee.
    3. Grab a compelling piece of new content from your LinkedIn Page and share the URL thru LinkedIn messaging to your target audience. Ask them to read it and if they like what they read to follow the Page.
    4. Share the previous tip with your client facing employees and ask them to send out 5-10 targeted invites each month. Repeat the request to them every other month. We don’t need to overwhelm them with these tasks.
    5. Engage on 3rd party website content and when filling out the comment contact information use the LinkedIn Page URL as the website. Do this 5 times a month to build backlinks to your LinkedIn Page. This will help to increase the SEO ranking of your LinkedIn Page so it can be found by your target audience.
    6. Engage on your client’s and other relevant content, and when appropriate @Mention (tag) your LinkedIn Page in the comment. Strive to not hijack the conversation, but to add value to it.

Feeding your LinkedIn Page with content your target audience is looking for while building a highly focused and relevant following is important if you want your LinkedIn Page to become an important asset to your business and of value to your target audience.


What ideas do you have that could make your LinkedIn Page be of value to your target audience?

BTW – have you taken a look at my Quora Space – Master LinkedIn as a Business Tool? I built it to help you with the questions you and your team need to be answered about LinkedIn. Please take a look at the Space and consider joining us. It’s priced pretty reasonably – it’s only $3 per month or $25 per year. I promise value.

/Teddy

Categories
LinkedIn

Executing a LinkedIn Page Follower Campaign

Creating a Following of relevant LinkedIn Members for your LinkedIn Page (sometimes called Company Page) is an important step. Having followers increases the opportunity your page content will be viewed, consumed, and even appreciated by the right people on LinkedIn.

The best makeup of Followers should include:

  • Your target audience – the people in the roles of companies who could use your product or service.
  • Influencers – the people who know your target audience and may introduce them to you.
  • Consumers – the people who can benefit from your product and service and could become Influencers or your Target Audience.
  • Business Partners – people who provide similar products and services and who could become Influencers.
  • Employees – the employees of your company who rally behind your products and services.
  • Your Tribe – business/personal friends who care for you and your business. You never know who they may know.

Creating a LinkedIn Page and building a strategy & execution plan to provide great content for your followers is only part of the process.
You will need to create campaigns to continually grow your followers.

Here are a few ideas you could use to grow your LinkedIn Page Followers:

#1 – As with any other social media presence, a consistent process of providing content your target audience and their influencers find useful is the best way to create followers. I call this “Feeding your LinkedIn Page”. You have to feed it consistently in order for it to thrive.

#2 – Share your LinkedIn Page content across multiple online sites, where your target audience may show up.  LinkedIn Page content is fully public and can be shared and viewed by people who are not currently logged into LinkedIn. However, they can not engage on the content unless they are logged into LinkedIn.

Note – you can only share LinkedIn Page content as a LinkedIn Member. You can not do this step as the Admin (via the admin page)

Routinely pick one of your LinkedIn Page posts that got a good level of engagement. Share it on your Facebook Business Page, on Twitter, in your latest company ’newsletter’, on Quora, on your blog, in a comment to a relevant social post, etc. Invite your employees and/or Tribe to do so, where relevant and appropriate.

Anyone who sees a LinkedIn Page post, who is not yet a follower of your page, will see the +Follow Icon on the post. When you share the post, use an editorial statement that encourages the consumption of the content and potentially clicking the Follow button.

#3 – Invite your LinkedIn Network to be Page Followers. 

As a Page Admin, you can invite targeted members of your LinkedIn Network to Follow your LinkedIn Page. You’ll find this option on the Admin toolbar under Admin Tools, or in the right side column labeled “Invite Connections to Follow” Currently (09/03/20), you can send 100 invites per LinkedIn Page (across all Page admins).
Be very purposeful to invite the best LinkedIn Connections relevant to your page. If you have fresh content on your page when you send these invites out you’re more likely to get your invites accepted.

#4 – Give business development employees Admin rights so they can use the Page Follower Invite feature. It’s not unusual that the LinkedIn Page Admin does not have a LinkedIn Network filled with the business’s target audience.

An idea I have been exploring is to make your key business development employees Admins of the Page in order for them to invite their LinkedIn Network to be page followers.

This will take some planning to execute effectively.

Here is a task list to consider for this process:

  1. Schedule a day that works for the business developer to do this work.
  2. Have them build a list of up to 100 LinkedIn Connections they would like to invite.
  3. Invite the business developer to be a Page Admin from the Admin Tools option of your LinkedIn Page.
  4. Provide a quick training session showing the business developer how to use the feature.
  5. Give them time to execute this process for up to 100 invitations.
  6. Once they are done, remove them as a Page Admin.
  7. They will be able to see who they invited who has not accepted from their Sent Invites page
  8. Ask them to Withdraw any unaccepted invites 1 month later. (This will allow for another employee to invite them later)
  9. In the next month (when available invites go back to 100), repeat this step for the next business developer.

#5 – Introduce the value of your LinkedIn Page through other business communications.

Sharing the URL to your business page, as well as telling stories about how your use your LinkedIn Page to help your target audience, with an invite to follow the page is another useful tactic to create Page Followers.

You could share this in your newsletter, in blog posts, and even in routine messaging to your tribe, clients, prospects, and even employees. Be creative in this tactic.

#6 – Share your LinkedIn Page thru Blog Post commenting. As you find content relevant to your business you could comment on the article and use the LinkedIn Page URL as the Web Page entry for the comment. This can help to get others to find your LinkedIn Page as well as aid in the SEO ranking of your LinkedIn Page.

#7 – Create a private POD of LinkedIn Members who care for and/or are interested in your company products/services. This could be as small as 5-10 clients, prospects, peers, business partners, employees, and friends. As you share content on your company page invite this group (via email or messaging) to review and engage on the content with their perspectives or ideas. Encourage them to engage on each other’s comments on the post as well. Ask them not to always use the Like or Share option. A Comment or comment reply is more impactful for content reach. Ask them not to comment with simple statements like “Thanks” or  “Good point”, etc. Engagement should be meaningful. Be appreciative of your PODs involvement, maybe even to the level of sending them SWAG (trinkets) to thank them for helping to drive more views of the content.

#8 – Ask your POD, and others to share your LinkedIn Page Posts and to @mention target audience, peers, and even target companies to pull them into the conversation. Encourage them to pay attention to any and all engagement they solicit in their posts.

#9 – Simply mention your LinkedIn Page to people in conversation. Add the URL to your email signature, on your website, in all of your marketing content, etc.

Growing a relevant Following to your LinkedIn Page is just one step towards getting value from using LinkedIn as a business tool.

Do the work, reap the rewards.

/Teddy