3 Steps to an Optimized, Visually Stunning LinkedIn Company Page

LinkedIn isn’t just a helpful tool for people searching for jobs. It can also allow you to improve your company’s reputation, clearly convey your goals and culture, engage prospective buyers, and keep existing customers up-to-date. This guide will show you the ins and outs of optimizing your LinkedIn Company Page.

 

By now, most business professionals understand the importance and value of LinkedIn.

For expansion-stage managers and executives, it can be a fantastic place to network and engage peers, as well as an ideal forum for recruiting top level talent. And for sales and marketing reps, it can be a phenomenal prospecting and lead generation tool. In fact, as OpenView’s Ori Yankelev wrote in a post earlier this year, if you’re a sales or marketing rep at a B2B technology company and you aren’t active on LinkedIn, then you’re not really doing your job.

This post is not intended to belabor the usefulness of LinkedIn on an individual level, however. Instead, our goal here is to illustrate why it’s important for your business to place greater emphasis on its LinkedIn company page, and optimize it in a way that appeals to top talent.

The reason?

As Barclay Jones director Lisa Jones writes in a post for the Undercover Recruiter, when it comes to talent acquisition, your LinkedIn company and careers page may be more important than your business’s website. That’s because LinkedIn now has over 200 million users, each of whom are becoming increasingly reliant on the site as a source of career and networking information.

The reality is that when you reach out to candidates, prospects, or customers, they will likely look at your LinkedIn company profile to find out more about your business. The question, however, is whether they will like what they see when they get there.

3 Ways to Make Your Company’s LinkedIn Profile Pop

While creating an engaging, stunning LinkedIn profile may seem daunting, it’s really not that difficult. There are some basic elements that should be included on your page, as well as some design touches that can make it stand out from the rest.

As you begin to think about how to redesign your page, there are four things to keep in mind that will make it that process much simpler:

It’s Social Media — Be Social!

While LinkedIn is not as consumer-focused as Facebook, it is still a social networking site. As such, your goal should be to get your target audience (potential employees and customers) to visit and interact with your page.

For that to happen, however, you need to give people a good reason to go your company’s LinkedIn profile in the first place. Here are two simple tips that should help you do that:

• Let customers provide reviews of your products and engage in a dialogue about your brand
• Challenge customers to create videos that discuss your products, provide an incentive for doing so, and feature the winning videos on your company’s LinkedIn profile

Deliver Important Information about Your Company

As OpenView talent specialist Carlie Smith points out, one element that is absolutely critical to include on your LinkedIn page is a list of company details, goals, and updates, as well as a very concise mission statement.

To do that, it is important to list your company’s:

• Industry
• Size (number of employees)
• Location (headquarters)
• Specialties
• History
• Career opportunities and job postings
• People (founders, executives, and lower level employees)
• Products and services

This should go without saying, but you should also include a link to your website, as well as links to other social networks you are active on.

Ask for Recommendations and Feature Them Prominently

In the products and services section of your page, it is imperative to have recommendations from your network. These recommendations could come from previous customers or employees, but the idea is to give viewers of your page a deeper understanding of your company’s strengths from people who have actually experienced them. You can ask people in your network for those recommendations or wait for them to recommend you, but it is absolutely critical that you have something to fill this space on your page.

Importantly, with the new look of LinkedIn, recommendations are featured even more prominently than they were before. The recommendations box is now highly visible on the right side of the products and services page, which naturally draws a viewer’s eyes to it.

Remember: Keep Your Profile Up to Date

As soon as anything changes within your company, make sure to update your LinkedIn profile.

You want candidates to see that you are on top of things and that you frequently visit your LinkedIn page. By keeping your company page up-to-date and relevant, potential candidates (and customers) will likely get the sense that your business is active and moving in the right direction.

3 Standout Examples of Stunning LinkedIn Company Profiles

Of course, it’s one thing to simply tell someone what they should be doing differently and quite another to actually show them. With this guide, our goal is to do both.

Below are three examples of LinkedIn company pages that achieve each of the things we discussed above, and go well beyond them to create a social networking experience that is truly top notch.

Taproot Foundation

Along with featuring multiple recent job openings and easy-to-navigate tabs to read more about the organization, the Taproot Foundation’s LinkedIn page has an excellent description of what it does and boasts 14 recommendations under its “Foundation Services” tab.

Zipcar

Visitors to this company’s page are greeted with a nicely branded header, a well-organized feed of updates and content, and a careers tab that includes a brief video about Zipcar’s history, culture, and mission.

Monetate

This page has many of the same features as the previous two examples, but its update feed is rich with a wider variety of content. From blog posts and articles, to reports and infographics, Monetate makes it easy for prospective customers and employees to understand what it does and why they should care.

Ultimately, the elements that make up your LinkedIn page will likely vary based on your goals and the audience you are trying to target.

For instance, if your company’s LinkedIn page is primarily leveraged as a recruiting tool, then you’ll want to include information and content that speaks directly to the needs, questions, and concerns of that audience. If you are using LinkedIn as a prospecting or lead generation tool, you may want to consider tailoring information and content to appeal to those buyers.

Additional Resources for Optimizing Your LinkedIn Company Page

• How to Boost Engagement on Your LinkedIn Company Page by Social Media Examiner
• Tips for Using the New LinkedIn Profile Layout by Emprove Performance Group (video)
• Building Your LinkedIn Company Page for Business Success by LinkedIn and Hubspot (webinar)

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What are some of the best LinkedIn company profiles that you’ve seen? What have you built into your company page that’s made it a particularly effective recruiting or prospecting tool?

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