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Millions of individuals use LinkedIn to help forward their careers, but businesses are failing to see the opportunities available to them. City CV CEO Victoria McLean offers some advice.

Making the most of LinkedIn

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to share content. Moreover, 59% say LinkedIn is generating leads for their business. However, many companies are missing the huge potential of this powerful network. Over 562 million professionals use the platform to cultivate their own career development. Yet many are unaware that the power of LinkedIn extends beyond personal branding. You can also set up a LinkedIn company page for marketing, brand building, lead generation, thought leadership and recruitment purposes.

Just building a company page doesn’t mean you’ll automatically attract followers. You’ll need to be pro-active to boost your chances of success. If your LinkedIn for Business strategy needs a makeover, here are my tips to up your game.

Set up a detailed company page

This is essential to grow your audience and drive business results. According to LinkedIn’s own figures, completed company pages generally receive twice as many visitors than those with incomplete pages. And, organisations that post at least monthly usually gain followers six times faster than those that don’t.

You can also add up to 10 Showcase Pages (sub-pages of your main company page). This allows you to highlight specific areas of your business, such as a particular brand, project or charitable trust.

Don’t ignore your employees’ profiles

Businesses are missing a trick if they’re not ensuring their individual employees have up-to-date and dynamically written LinkedIn profiles. This not only helps position the individual as a subject matter expert, but it also reflects well on you as a business. To strengthen your brand and build a strong identity, it is vital to have unified profiles for your whole leadership team at the very least.

You know that potential customers, clients, business partners and new recruits will check out your website. Now they’ll also check out LinkedIn. Incomplete or badly written profiles will put people off.

I recently worked with an architectural firm on improving their sales strategy.

They had been losing out on bids and approached my company to write the profiles for each of their project directors. These were the profiles clients were most likely to view during the pitch process.

We interviewed each director and created compelling, keyword-rich profiles highlighting their areas of expertise, with specific examples of how they had added value in previous projects. As a result, they saw a significant uplift in profile views and in the number of bids they won.

Optimise your profiles

Individual and company profiles should have well-structured and up-to-date written content that makes good use of keywords. Professional headshots will avoid any potential embarrassment with employees using inappropriate pictures. Enriched content, such as videos and presentations, can also be uploaded to both company and employee pages.

Encourage your employees to connect with your company’s LinkedIn page

If your employees share updates from your company page, you effectively tap into their networks and expand your reach. This is the best way to start growing an audience. According to LinkedIn, employees have, on average, 10 times more first-degree connections than a company has followers.

When employees add their position at your company to their own profile, LinkedIn will normally spot the connection. It should link their profile back to your company page. This makes it easier for potential customers to identify your employees and connect with them.

Promote your company and your employees as sector experts

The best way to do this is to publish valuable content. When you post articles or company updates, your posts appear in your followers’ news feeds. You can also share relevant blogs or news articles from third parties to show your interests and potentially foster important connections with other thought leaders.

If you want to showcase more detailed expertise, encourage your leadership team to publish articles on the LinkedIn publishing platform - LinkedIn Pulse. This can help boost your company’s presence on the network and establish your team as thought leaders or industry experts. Remember, you can make the posts more engaging with images and videos.

Join LinkedIn groups

Actively participating in industry or interest-led LinkedIn groups is a great way for executives to network with other professionals, especially those outside of their immediate circle. It can also attract views to your company page. You can use the Search function to find relevant groups or set up your own.

Understand the LinkedIn algorithm

The LinkedIn algorithm rates and ranks your profiles and posts based on the quality of your account, your network and the content you share. It measures user engagement through the number of likes and shares. Users can also mark your content as spam or hide it from their feeds, so it’s important to ensure the content you share is relevant.

LinkedIn provides analytics to help you see what kind of content your followers are most likely to engage with. You can also access information about your follower demographics, and track activity on your company or individual page.

Above all, remember that LinkedIn is a professional platform that allows you to create a powerful network, build credibility and learn from established experts in your field. It’s a valuable tool to attract clients and new employees. It’s definitely worth taking the time to ensure you’re using every opportunity it provides to boost your marketing and recruitment strategy.