Can a business join LinkedIn?

If you’ve used LinkedIn for any time, chances are pretty good that you’re familiar with your LinkedIn profile. People who sign up for a LinkedIn account get a profile that shows their profile photo, background photo, summary, work history, and more.

But that’s really set up for individuals, not businesses. Can a company or nonprofit join LinkedIn?

Create a LinkedIn Company Page

Yes, a business can join LinkedIn. It works very similar to Facebook, where you personally have an account and a profile, but you have to create a separate page for your business or nonprofit.

On LinkedIn, that’s referred to as a Company Page. And if you want your organization to be on LinkedIn, you need to create a Company Page for it, not a new LinkedIn account.

Fortunately, it’s a pretty quick process to create a LinkedIn Page. LinkedIn has some excellent documentation on the Company Page creation process that they keep updated.

LinkedIn business login

“But Tim,” you may be saying, “I really like the personal account’s capabilities. Can’t I create a new business login and just use a profile instead?”

Many years ago, we worked with a client who also liked the capabilities of LinkedIn accounts more than the Company Pages. We let him know it was against LinkedIn’s terms of service and could be pulled down at any point. He finally compromised and decided to run both an account and a Company Page for his business.

Fast forward a year later, and LinkedIn caught him. We checked on his LinkedIn account one day, and it had been deleted. Fortunately, he still had a personal account and the Company Page we had encouraged him to create.

So yes, you could create an account for your business rather than a Company Page. But it’s against LinkedIn’s terms of service and they will most likely delete it.

LinkedIn for business marketing

Of course, creating your Company Page on LinkedIn is the just first step. Here are a few quick tips for making the most of your business presence on LinkedIn:

• Fill in all the data about your organization
• Set a Public URL that’s consistent with your website and other social media platforms
• Create a Custom button
• Add all your locations
• Post consistently, utilizing LinkedIn’s Content Suggestions if needed
• Be proactive about building your following, using the Invite connections functionality or our more effective LinkedIn follower and lead generation system
• Invite new LinkedIn connections to follow your Company Page as well
• If you manage an associated group, make that a featured group on your page
• Monitor the analytics both on LinkedIn and through Google Analytics
• Make sure everyone on your team links to the new page correctly in their Experience section
• Add the link to your Company Page to your website
• Add the link to your Company Page to your email signature

LinkedIn marketing agency

If all of that sounds overwhelming or you just want to hire professionals to help, we do offer LinkedIn marketing services. Feel free to reach out to get a quote and see if we would be a good fit for you.