Tips for businesses on LinkedIn

For organizations in the B2B world, as well as some in other areas, LinkedIn can be hugely beneficial. While it doesn’t make sense for every business or nonprofits to invest resources in it, for many it does.

Here are some tips for organizations to utilize the platform.

Improve Your Team’s Profiles

Just as your staff represent your organization in person, they’re also representing it online. You want to make sure that they look their best, so your company or nonprofit looks its best!

Set aside 30 – 60 minutes one week, maybe on a Friday afternoon, and have everyone work on their profiles at once. By all doing it at one time, you’ll be able to ask each other questions, and get suggestions from one another. You may even find that a second session the next week makes sense as well.

Create a Company Page

So many organizations don’t have a Company Page on LinkedIn. Instead of an official corporate representation, they rely purely on the profiles of those on their team.

Invest a couple hours in creating a Company Page for your organization. There are some great guides online on how to do this. While LinkedIn does have some requirements, start by logging into LinkedIn, going to Interests > Companies, then clicking on the Create button.

Schedule Updates Monthly

You can appear more active on LinkedIn than you actually are by scheduling multiple updates. You write them in one session, then schedule them using a tool like HootSuite or Buffer.

Plan a time within the next month to spend 1 – 3 hours on it. During that time, set up an account on one of those tools, write a month’s worth of updates, and schedule them. Generally every other day, daily, or twice a day are all good options.

And you can do this both for your individual account, as well as your new Company Page.

Block Out Time

Actually block out time in your calendar on a weekly basis to use LinkedIn. During that time, make new connections, like and comment on the statuses other people share, and reach out to your existing connections to see who you should connect with in person.

Consider a Paid Account

Finally, consider upgrading to one of LinkedIn’s paid accounts. Among other benefits, you’ll have a slightly larger listing in the search engine results. You’ll also get a badge next to your listing, and on your profile page. For some people, the ability to message people they’re not directly connected to is a useful benefit as well.

Do some of these basic activities for a period of several months, and see if there is any benefit in continuing. Remember, LinkedIn isn’t for everyone, but you won’t know until you actually try.