LinkedIn Best Practices

LinkedIn was launched in 2003, acquired by Microsoft in 2016, and now has over 700 million users. The social media platform just went through its first major redesign in four years last week. At the same time, they introduced Stories and third-party integration with Zoom, Blue Jeans by Verizon and Microsoft Teams for video chats. While Linkedin’s growth has been driven by offering social networking, premium memberships and advertising, these new features are an indication the company is looking to appeal to a wider demographic. Many people consider LinkedIn to be the premier social media platform for business.

But, are you and your company taking advantage of all LinkedIn has to offer? 

All these changes led us to do this deep dive on the platform and update LinkedIn best practices to share with our audience.

Company Page

If you are setting up a Linkedin Company page for the first time, it is very important to fully optimize and promote it. If your company already has a Company Page, it is important to periodically review the page for outdated information, new content opportunities and platform format changes.

• Take the time to fully update all the static content and imagery on the Company Page. According to LinkedIn, fully completed pages get 30% more views which means that there are many uncompleted pages. Using the proper SEO-optimized keywords on the page, the page views could be even greater than 30%.
• On your company website, create an icon and link to your LinkedIn company page.
• Make sure employees tag the Company Page in their profiles.

Please check out and follow our Company Page.

Showcase Pages

Showcase Pages have been around for years but many companies do not take advantage of it. This is unfortunate because a showcase page can be a powerful tool to cultivate and segment your audience. Once created, Showcase Pages will be listed under ‘Affiliated Pages’ on your main company page. Showcase Pages can be created for many reasons:

• a new product or service
• to cultivate a segment of your audience
• for a geographic region (e.g. a sales office in another country)

Showcase pages operate just like a regular company page except for two differences.

1. There are no employees tied to a Showcase page so instead when someone goes to a Showcase Page, they will see who in their network is already following the page.
2. The hero image on Showcase pages is very narrow which can be both an opportunity and a challenge to find an appropriate image.

Here is an excellent article about setting up showcase pages including best practices and tremendous Showcase Page examples from companies like Adobe, Microsoft, and Salesforce.

Content

We recommend our clients post engaging content on LinkedIn including a variety of content posts types — branded and unbranded; with and without links; and more photos and video than without. The LinkedIn algorithm does seem to penalize content with links, so we recommend posting any links in the first comment if possible. We recommend posting 3-5 times per week on Linkedin — posting more often just drives down impression share. LinkedIn statuses can be up to 700 characters long on company page posts and 1,300 characters for statuses on individual accounts.

Articles

Individuals and company pages can both post regular status updates, but individuals have the advantage of posting Linkedin Articles. This is a blog-like interface that can use HTML, graphics, and links. LinkedIn Articles are a great way to gain thought leadership on the platform. We recommend aiming for between 1,500-2,000 words though the character limit is approximately 120,000 characters. The headline title is critical — make it concise, engaging, and between 40-49 characters.

Stories (New)

Linkedin is currently rolling out its Stories feature for both individuals and company pages. Now your employees and company pages will all soon have the opportunity to post video and photo narratives. Stories have become a major engagement engine on Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. Stories is an interesting feature for LinkedIn, but it is too early to tell if it will be widely adopted by the business crowd. The first take reaction on Twitter using the hashtag #linkedinstories was decidedly mixed. We are not fully recommending it as best practice, we believe that it is worth trying it out and see if you get engagement.

Content Suggestions

Content Suggestions are available for company page owners to see what content is trending by certain parameters like industry, geography and position title. This can be a very useful tool as LinkedIn is recommending what content is engaging and relevant to your audience.

Events

LinkedIn Events recently returned to the platform after almost a decade. LinkedIn Events provides companies with a formalized way to promote their events as opposed to the content feed.  Both organizers and attendees can invite connections to attend an event if the event is public, private events need the permission of the organizer. Download the LinkedIn Events On-boarding Guide to maximize your results.

Groups

There are thousands of LinkedIn Groups on the platform for just about every topic available. Being active in a Linkedin Group is a great way to learn from others and potentially find new customers. Starting a Linkedin Group for a company can be a great way to develop a community.  However, if a group is very successful, it can be a very large time commitment to manage and moderate.

Profile URL

Many users do not realize that they can change their Linkedin profile URL. So instead of your name plus random characters, e.g. https://www.linkedin.com/in/korbin-dallas-x4s5j21b213/ you can have something branded, e.g. https://www.linkedin.com/in/osartor/.

Conclusion

Please remember to bookmark this post, as we will continue to update it with revised recommendations. If you have any recommendations or suggestions about this post, please share them in the comments. Good luck!

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