How to Use LinkedIn for Business

In the world of social media LinkedIn is undoubtedly the most business oriented platform, and there are a substantial number of features that can help businesses of any size thrive using LinkedIn.

Create a LinkedIn Business Page

The first step is to create an effective page for your company. Navigate to “LinkedIn Pages” and begin creating a profile for your business. Adding as much detail as possible will help people locate your business and will increase engagement with your brand. 

Relevant details include:

Logo: Adding a high quality image of your logo will help users identify your brand and will make the business page appear more reputable.

Description: Adding a clear description helps describe what makes your business unique and can encourage website visits.

Hashtags: Adding relevant hashtags to your business and industry will allow users to search and find your business more easily.

Custom Button: The custom button function allows you to refer LinkedIn traffic to a source of your choosing. This can be anything from the homepage of your website, to a contact form, to an email newsletter sign up. 

Invite Connections

Once you have created your LinkedIn Business Page you can gain an audience in a variety of ways, one of which is inviting your personal connections. All Business Page Admin’s have the ability to invite their own personal connections, which can be a great way to quickly grow the number of page followers. Additionally, make sure to leverage your own marketing channels to spread the word about your page. This includes letting your audience know on other social channels, email, IPM, etc.

Posting Content

Once you have your LinkedIn page up and running it is important to figure out exactly what content to post. It can be tempting to post the exact same content you produce for all other social channels, but it is more effective to tweak your content based on what LinkedIn users are looking for. 

Here are some content buckets that work well on LinkedIn:

Thought Leadership

Brand/Company Updates

Product Launches

Polls and Questions

Blog Posts and Relevant Articles

Additionally, the media in your content makes a difference, as it does on all social platforms. If you are already social media savvy, you know that photos and videos perform better than posts that only include text - the same is true for LinkedIn. Make sure you diversify your content and experiment with different strategies to find what works best for your LinkedIn audience.

Notify Employees

On LinkedIn, your content gets shown to additional people based on the level of engagement. Thus, it is important to gain as much engagement as you can on every post. One excellent way of doing this is by leveraging your employee network. On LinkedIn, you have the option to “notify employees” when you post an update. This can encourage your employees to like, comment, and share the post to jumpstart your engagement and get your post seen by more people. One important note is that you should only use this feature occasionally, so that you do not overload your employees with content.

Join LinkedIn Groups

Much like Facebook, LinkedIn has a variety of groups that are applicable for many different industries, business models, and general topics. Having the Admin of your business page join and contribute to various groups can be a great way to learn more about topics that can help improve your business, network with other professionals in your space, and gradually spread awareness about your company. Joining LinkedIn groups can be a great way for small businesses to network, learn, and expand their online presence.

Create a Showcase Page

Showcase Pages are a unique LinkedIn feature that are perfect for highlighting “your unique brands, business units, or initiatives.” This can allow your audience to follow a certain aspect of your business even if they don’t follow your business page. Launching a new sustainability initiative? Expanding your product line? Creating a whole new affiliate brand? A showcase page is the best way to highlight any number of new projects!

Dive into Analytics

Once you have fully optimized your LinkedIn page and post strategy, taking a look at statistics is the best way to optimize your LinkedIn strategy for business. Analytics can allow you to identify larger trends and pinpoint what content works best for your company. 

LinkedIn provides you with metrics broken down into the following categories:

Visitor Analytics

• Page views

• Unique Visitors

• Custom Button Clicks

• Visitor demographics

Update Analytics

• Reactions

• Comments

• Shares

• Impressions

Follower Analytics

• Total followers

• New followers

• Follower demographics

Competitor Analytics

• Total/new competitor followers and engagements

Employee Advocacy Analytics

• Recommendations

• Reactions

• Comments

• Shares

• Employee metric breakdown

LinkedIn Jobs

LinkedIn is an amazing source through which you can hire for new positions open at your company. Posting to LinkedIn Jobs will allow potential candidates to search and find your job, and receive mobile notifications about your open positions through the Recommended Jobs feature. 

When creating a new listing, make sure you fill out all relevant information, including the title and descriptions of the position, and how you would like all candidates to apply. 

Once you have created a new position, you can choose to promote it in order to increase the number of applications you receive. This is a good option for companies looking to hire quickly, or stand out in a competitive market.

Share to LinkedIn from Issuu

Have you already created outstanding content on Issuu that you want to share to LinkedIn? Simply open up your document and post directly to LinkedIn from our share module. Or create a story with Issuu and share that to your social channels in a mobile-optimized format.

Check out our other blog posts to learn how to use Facebook for business and Instagram for business!