5 LinkedIn Features to Promote Your Company

While Facebook and Instagram get a lot of the social media marketing attention, LinkedIn quietly and steadily reaches business owners and professionals, utilizing many of the powerful communications tools of their social network counterparts while focusing on a highly targeted, motivated audience. If LinkedIn isn’t in your social media marketing mix, you may want to take a look at it and leverage some of its features to promote your company.

While LinkedIn encourages more business-oriented content, any company can market what they do and sell to LinkedIn users. Keeping the audience in mind, here are some of the features most useful for marketing your business on LinkedIn.

1. Set up your own professional profile. Everyone on your team should have a professional profile on LinkedIn. Your individual presence gives you access to all of the LinkedIn tools and helps humanize your company. You can post to your own news feed, message your contacts on LinkedIn, and even blog through LinkedIn’s blogging feature.
2. Set up your company LinkedIn Page. Similar to Facebook Pages, LinkedIn offers this free presence for your company. People can follow your Page and you can post to it similarly as you would to a Facebook Page. Once it is set up, link to it from your personal LinkedIn profile and have your team members do the same. Also ask your team to follow your Company Page to start building your audience.
3. Post content to your Company Page with multimedia. Using photos and videos creates more engaging posts on any social network, including on LinkedIn. Keep your business-minded audience in mind when posting to your company page. Think: less personal or casual content and instead try to be relevant to the professional with more business-oriented content.
4. Use LinkedIn self-service ads. Sponsored Updates (boosted content from your Company Page), Sponsored InMail (LinkedIn’s direct email feature) and text ads (appearing on the side of a LinkedIn page, not a mobile ad) are LinkedIn’s advertising options, all managed through their Campaign Manager tool. Choose your preferred format, upload your ad content, and select your pricing option.
5. Add a follow button on your website. In the same way you add other social media icons such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to your website, you can also add an icon or follow button to your site to encourage people who use LinkedIn to follow you there.

Check your LinkedIn Analytics regularly to see how your LinkedIn marketing efforts are working. If you are not paying for ads, you can access your LinkedIn Company Page analytics as well as analytics for publishing on LinkedIn through your personal profile. If you are paying to advertise, analytics for your ads are available through the LinkedIn Campaign Manager tool.

While LinkedIn may not be featured in the news media as much as other social networks, business-minded people are using it for professional networking, job searches, and to promote their own businesses, so it is an ideal forum for getting the word out there about your own company. Creating a polished presence on LinkedIn and including it with your overall social media marketing strategy makes sense for any company looking to do business.