Improve your organization’s presence on LinkedIn

If your organization provides professional services, it can benefit you to look good on LinkedIn. The platform definitely skews toward the professional services industry, but even if you’re in another industry, it can still be a great tool.

Since I do a lot of work with companies and nonprofits that provide professional services, I’ve helped a lot of them with their presence on LinkedIn. LinkedIn seems to put more emphasis on personal profiles, which means it’s fairly simple to outperform your competition there.

Of course, simple doesn’t always mean easy. Some of the tips I’ll share are quick, one-time activities. Others require an ongoing commitment of time or money if you want to hire a digital marketing company to help.

Improve your team’s profiles

If you have other team members at your organization, have them go through and improve their profiles, too. They’re not just representing themselves online; they’re representing your organization as well. One of my interns actually began working here without an active LinkedIn page. Needless to say she has one now!

Have your entire team set aside 30 to 60 minutes one week, and you can all work on your profiles at once. That allows you to collaborate and ask each other questions. You may even find that a second session makes sense.

Create a Company Page

Does your organization have an official, centralized presence on LinkedIn? Try searching for your company and see if a Company Page shows up. If not, it’s time to create one.

Fortunately, it’s a fairly quick process that will probably just take a couple hours. LinkedIn does have some very specific requirements about who can and can’t create a Company Page. Start by logging into LinkedIn, clicking on the Work icon in the top right, and then clicking on Create a Company Page at the bottom of the drop-down menu.

Schedule updates monthly

This is definitely a commitment that most organizations don’t make. On a monthly basis, write a batch of updates then schedule them to be published the following month using a tool like Hootsuite. Plan one to three hours a month to find articles online that appeal to your ideal client, then use those as a basis for your updates.

At the minimum, you should publish updates every other day. Depending on how important your services are to your ideal client and how often they think about them, you might share once or even twice a day.

Build your Company Page following

Most organizations don’t invest any time in building their following on LinkedIn, so it can be fairly easy to build a relatively large audience.

If you have a decent number of connections through your personal profile, reach out to them and ask them to follow your organization on LinkedIn. You should be able to get at least 10% of your connections to follow your organization. The best I’ve seen a client do is 33%.

Link to your Company Page

Consider sharing the link to your LinkedIn Company Page with others. You can put it on your website, include it in your email signature, add it to your newsletter, and even put it on other social media platforms.

Make sure your staff shares it as well. They should have it in their company email signature, and they should be sure their profile links to it correctly in their experience section.

Taking advantage of these tips to improve your organization’s presence on LinkedIn will likely put you miles ahead of the competition. In fact, chances are good that they’re not using LinkedIn for marketing at all!