How to Have a Great LinkedIn Page--For Your Company and For Yourself

Updated from post originally made Nov. 9, 2012.
We are all familiar with LinkedIn as a professional social network frequented by hiring managers and job seekers. According to its own website LI has over 187 million members in over 200 countries at the end of September 2012. Closer to home, many of us have our inboxes filled with updates from our network, LI advertising offers and new products like the ability to follow thought leaders on the network. They will also be updating personal profiles; more about that in a moment

Given the importance of LinkedIn to individual professionals, the growing importance of LI company pages should not be a surprise. A word of warning: LinkedIn updated company pages in October, so be careful of dates if you look for advice. HubSpot has an ebook that gives advice on how to use the new format. As good marketers, they use their own revised LI page as an example throughout. Take a look at the main Dell page (they also have specialized ones) as a corporate example and Sprout Social as a small company. The pages are long, so you really need to look at them on the site to see all they offer. You can see from the screen shots that they allow news postings and welcome me as a job seeker (no thanks, folks) and links to product info.

http://us.linkedin.com/company/sprout-social-inc.

http://www.linkedin.com/company/dell/products

According to HubSpot, the key elements of the overview page include the ability to:
• Use the same kind of cover image as Facebook, Twitter and G+
• Post jobs
• Add products or services with detailed info and links
• Create various versions of product pages for target segments and geographical regions.
• Use LI ads to promote your page
• Get detailed analytics on followers, page, employees and leads.

This is powerful content. In addition the ebook suggests that maintenance should take no more than 10 minutes per day—hooray! They advise no more than 3 posts per day, which is a shout-out for relevance. @TomMartin recently complained about the amount of crap being retweeted. I’d add that people retweet stuff that is too old to be useful. You don’t want to populate your LI company page with that. I’d also be careful about how much you post because the pages get very long.

Social Media Examiner has good tips for optimizing the pages, which includes featuring blog posts that have been well received. That’s another vote for careful content curation.

LinkedIn has become key to recruiting for many companies and an important source of leads for many brands. That makes a good company page a must for large to mid-sized corporations that wish to reach quality potential employees and qualified potential customers!

 Also in October LinkedIn announced new personal profile pages. Given the activity we've seen lately, it's not surprising that endorsements are prominently featured. There also are sections that are new (to me at least); for example a section for Volunteer Experience and Causes.

 The new personal profile pages have been in beta since October, but they're now beginning to roll them out to all users. I got an email this morning about changes that would automatically be made to my profile. They're not eliminating the SlideShare presentation I have there; they are just moving it.

So it behooves us all to check changes on our profile pages and to take advantage of opportunities offered by the new profile page.