With 590 million users, LinkedIn is the massive social network for professionals. Instead of sharing updates about your vacation and personal life, LinkedIn is the social network for sharing your professional life: including new jobs, company news, business-related content, and more. As a first stop on the job search for many the more than 40 million students and recent college graduates on LinkedIn and home to more than 100 million high-power company decision makers and executives, LinkedIn is the social network that brings professional networking to our devices. As a vital piece in your digital marketing strategy for how people interact with you and view you as a business, LinkedIn is imperative to include in your social marketing strategy. That’s why Responsival - the experts of content marketing in Pittsburgh - have created a guide for setting up your business’ Linkedin profile for the final edition of our “Setting Up Your Business for Social Success” series. Let’s get started!

Creating Your LinkedIn Business Profile

Much like Facebook, you must have an existing personal LinkedIn profile in order to create a LinkedIn business profile. Since LinkedIn business profiles function differently from personal profiles - have different profile features, can launch career listings, and cannot initiate connections - it’s important that you list your business under a business profile and not a personal profile.

However, there are several hurdles to get over before this can occur, including:

• The business must be listed under your career experience on your personal profile
• Your personal profile must be rated intermediate or all star (and at least 7 days old)
• Your personal account must be associated with a company email domain
• Your business must have a unique company email domain -- and this domain cannot be used more than once to create a company profile, which is where Showcase Pages come in to play (don’t worry, we’ll get there)

Once you reach all these criteria, you can finally create business profile. To do this, click “Work” in the top right hand corner and then “Create a Company Page +”.

From here, you’ll be prompted to choose one of four page types:

1. Small Business: <200 employees
2. Medium to Large Business: >200 employees
3. Showcase Page: Since you can only have one company associated with a company domain, you create Showcase Pages to talk about products under your umbrella company. For instance, Microsoft has Showcase Pages for Office, Surface, Windows, and their other products.
4. Education Institution: for Schools and Universities

Once chosen, you’ll be prompted to fill out basic profile information like the company name, website URL, industry type, and more.

Once this information is completed, you have a LinkedIn Business Profile created! Next, you must complete your business profile using best practices.

Completing Your LinkedIn Business Profile Using Best Practices

Though creating your LinkedIn profile is relatively easy to do, there are certain portions of your profile that are quite unique from other social media platforms. Building these portions of your profile involves the use of best practices:

• Profile Image: It is VERY important to use your business’ logo on LinkedIn for brand recognition. The idea size is 300 x 300 pixels and in PNG format.
• Header Image: Like other platforms, your header image allows a bit for freedom than the profile image, but due to the nature of the platform, professional and refined images should be used. Most companies use a graphic that is complementary to their logo.
• Tagline: Your business’ tagline is arguable the most important aspect of your profile. In just 120 character, you want to spark interest and trust in people looking at your profile so people choose your business over competitors. For us at Responsival, it should look something like “Delivering stunning, responsive websites to business all over the US.”
• About Us: Your About Us is vital in letting the world know who you are and what you stand for as a business. From you about us, people should be able to answer the questions: Who are you? Where are you based? What do you offer? What are your values? What is your brand voice? How can people contact you to learn more?

Getting People to Follow Your Business’ LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn, unlike other platforms, does not allow a business profile to like or follow other accounts, meaning your archaic “follow 4 follow” strategy is out the window on LinkedIn. Instead, we recommend starting with two primary forms of follower growth.

The first involves encouraging employees to include you in their current work experience (which they should be doing already). Additionally, they should be encouraged to promote the business’ objectives, missions, events, and updates on their personal pages --- which, again, they should be doing anyhow. As they share information about their company, their connections are likely to engage with your business.

The second strategy involves sharing - and ideally creating - your own high-quality content related to your business and your followers. SInce most people interact with other users and businesses on LinkedIn, this is a great way to spark interest in your business, start conversation on your profile, and create value for your followers. If you need help writing content to share with your followers on various social media platforms, look no further than Responsival: the experts of content marketing in Pittsburgh.

Dummy Posts: Getting Started with Posting on LinkedIn

Now that your profile is built, it’s time to start posting. Like other platforms, you don’t want people to click on your profile to learn more just for you to bring nothing to the table for them to read or interact with. The best companies post on LinkedIn about once or twice a day with content pertinent to their industry, followers, and business itself.

We recommend launching 5-10 dummy posts - the first few posts so you have content out in the world of LinkedIn for new followers to read - right after creating your profile. Here’s some topics for sharing content on LinkedIn:

• Industry-Related News: sharing important news within your industry shows that you are engaged and knowledgeable on your industry itself
• Back-End Updates: LinkedIn is the perfect to share information about what’s going on behind the scenes in your business. Show what company culture is like by sharing pictures from a company barbeque, employee profiles, volunteer opportunities, and achievements the company makes. This is especially important if you are using LinkedIn to recruit applicants because a positive company culture is one of the most important aspects for millenial job applicants.
• Rich Media: People are more likely to engage with and share content with images or videos. Not to mention, professionals love a good infographic, which you can easily make on sites like Canva to gain more traction with your posts.
• Original Content: If people follow your business’ LinkedIn page, they are clearly interested in what your company takes part in! Take advantage of this by posting original content about your industry and practices.

So what do you think, if your business ready to take on the professional online social network? If you need help getting started or taking your social networks to the next level, get in contact with the experts of content marketing in Pittsburgh, Responsival, and learn how we can help your business grow.