Right now, online networking is the most important tool we have to stay top of mind with clients, prospects, employees, alumni, the media, recruits and others who are interested in updates about your company and its people.

In many ways, your LinkedIn company page is a second company web site, and as LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network where many people go directly for information and research, it may be even more important than your actual web site.

Your company page gives you a platform to post information about what you do and promote important news, insights, events and services. It's one of the most powerful online marketing tools for companies of any size if you consistently post and engage with your followers.

In order to maximize your LinkedIn company page, you'll need to do three things:

1. grow your company page followers,
2. drive awareness of your page, and
3. post content that helps and educates others.

Regardless of how many followers you have, you have to keep them engaged with helpful posts or they will lose interest and your shares won't appear in their news feed. You can do this by regularly posting helpful, non self-boasting content to provide value to your followers.

Here’s how:

• Get the basics down first. Before you even think about diving into the advanced tips below, make sure that each section of your company LinkedIn Page is completed. Your motivation for doing this: company pages with complete information get 30% more views. Your must-do basics include adding a cover image, profile photo, ensuring your web site and contact information is completed as well as the “about us” section – more on that later.
• Optimize your company page for SEO. Did you know you can optimize your LinkedIn Page for search? Doing so will ensure your page is fully discoverable on major search engines like Google. Here’s how to do it: 1) Identify and use the right keywords and 2) write a strong about us section and 3) post regular updates to your page (we will discuss this more later). Consistent fresh content gets indexed and helps the search engine recognize your page as active and valuable source of information.
• Encourage follows. Add the LinkedIn “Follow” button to a prominent place on your website – add to your home page and include social media share buttons on all news, events and publications to facilitate easy sharing of your content by others.
• Be strategic about promoting the page. Create a link to your company page in employees’ email signatures, client alerts, invites, e-newsletters and blogs.
• Engage your employees. Your employees are your strongest brand ambassadors in growing your company page following. Encourage them to spread the word with friends and colleagues by liking, commenting and sharing posts and tagging your page in updates. If you have a new company page, this is an essential step toward getting off the ground. Also, ensure that your employees are linked to your company page (by adding their current role with your company in the “work experience” section), because each time your employees make new connections on LinkedIn, the new connection will be prompted to also follow your page.
• Training is key. Offer a social media training for all employees on how to like, comment, and share posts. I find doing desk side training whether in person or virtually (especially now) to be very helpful in encouraging others to be one comfortable with posting to LinkedIn on their own.
• Leverage your employees. Send your employees your company’s key social media posts on a weekly basis to encourage them to share the posts with their individual networks. Let those mentioned in a post (by using the @ sign and their name) know each time the marketing team posts an update related to them as well as their practice to LinkedIn along with suggested introductory text to accompany the post when they share it. Increase your followers from your employees. Your employees are normally one of your major followers. Encourage them to share your post updates as their following will also see your activities. The result is that you boost your “views” potential which leads to an increase in probability of additional followers.
• Get creative with your posts. Reuse and repurpose each piece of content into at least three posts by pulling out a statistic or a quote from the post. You can also repurpose event PowerPoints and informative PDFs as posts. Substantive documents like these help position your brand as a thought leader. Create an editorial calendar to keep track of your posts.
• Use @mentions to your benefit. Highlight employees, key leaders and clients by putting the @ sign in front of their names – this tags them in the post and provides a link to their LinkedIn profile – this has a two-fold benefit of enhancing their visibility and bolstering your relationship with them.
• Engage your community. React and comment on your Communities Hashtag feeds to help put your page in front of new audiences. You can also respond to posts and group discussions from your company page (but lawyers, note to never offer legal advice).
• Share video and visual content. Make sure your posts include eye-catching visuals. You can easily create these yourself using Canva. Unique imagery and especially videos stand out more on feeds, helping your brand (and company page) get noticed. LinkedIn data shows that custom image collages drive heightened levels of engagement on the platform, so consider uploading a series of photos from events or photos of your employees.
• Encourage employees to participate in LinkedIn Groups. In current market conditions, LinkedIn Groups have never been more important to meet new people and promote your brand. When your company’s subject matter experts participate as members of these mini-communities, it can create awareness for your brand while also demonstrating its authority on key topics.
• Create an employee advocacy program. Create a formal structure around your company’s employee engagement engine. There are many tools that make it easy for your employees to share content and promote your page (just remember to share content during peak times in the target user’s time zone).
• Encourage your partners and leaders to @mention your page. The most prominent figures in your business serve as important voices, and they often have large professional networks. When they discuss and link to your company’s LinkedIn Page, it helps drive traffic and followers.
• Promote engagement of your posts. When followers engage with your content by reacting or commenting on it, you broaden the reach of that content to a wider audience (oftentimes outside of your first-degree followers). Develop a plan to encourage substantive comments on your company page posts and comment with something equally valuable.
• Analyze your competitors’ company pages. I have always found competitive research to be a very useful tool in refining my strategy in every area of marketing, and LinkedIn is no different. Make a list of your top competitor firms and keep abreast of what they are posting so you can be in the know about what they are posting but more importantly, identify the content gaps and provide something your target audience won’t find elsewhere.
• Post and share job listings. LinkedIn is one of the most powerful job hunting tools today. By posting your jobs on your LinkedIn page, you will increase visibility for your company while attracting new talent.
• Strategically use hashtags. One of the most powerful ways to gain new followers and extend the reach of your posts is to use relevant hashtags. To find the right hashtags, look at your competitors, use the # sign in the main LinkedIn search bar for research and use online tools such as Hashtagifyme and Ritetag to help you find the right hashtags. Also, when you associate your LinkedIn Page with relevant hashtags in the Communities Hashtags, you can react/comment on conversations from your company’s perspective.
• Adjust your content based on analytics. Page administrators can access a robust set of analytics, which provide demographic information about your followers and visitors, as well as engagement data for your updates. Use these insights to learn what’s resonating vs. what’s not with them, and align your content with your audience’s needs.
• Place a LinkedIn follow widget on your website and blogs. Display your social channel buttons on your website as well as your blogs. This will enable visitors to easily share your content to their social channels.
• Regularly post great content. Maintaining a steady stream of new content on your company page will give it more visibility on member feeds (pages that post at least weekly see a 2X increase in engagement according to LinkedIn). Regularly publishing high-quality content boosts your visibility on LinkedIn, increasing engagement. How to do this? First, keep your audience interested with timely information so they visit your page for new content. Second, when your followers share your content or comment on it, their connections will often see the activity in their feed. This increases visibility to potential followers. Note – there is no secret sauce to this – some people may see your content and others may not. The final step is to share your content in as many relevant groups as possible.
• Invite others to like your LinkedIn company page. Page administrators can invite their first-degree connections to follow their company page in batches of 50 at a time. Note, there’s no way to know who accepted your request and who didn’t and a big pain point for me with LinkedIn is that it doesn’t currently enable you to see your actual followers. Some things to note:
  • Only page administrators with fewer than 500 connections are able to invite all their connections via a ‘Select all’ option. Administrators with more than 500 connections must manually select who they want to invite.
  • Only company pages with fewer than 100,000 followers can invite members to follow via the option.
  • If an administrator has less than 3 connections, they won’t have the option available – a workaround is to add multiple administrators, especially a well-connected rainmaker.
  • Only one invite per member can be sent and note that LinkedIn members have the capacity to opt-out of receiving company page invitations through their settings.

Try some of these LinkedIn company page tips and watch as your followers grow. Just always keep in mind that the key to a successful LinkedIn company page strategy is to provide a steady stream of value-added content to your followers – this should be your guiding principle with every post you create, including writing it in a client-centric way – regardless of current market conditions, but especially now.

Stay safe.

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Stefanie Marrone helps law firms effectively tell their stories and find their unique voices. Over the last 18 years, she has worked with some of the most prominent and innovative law firms in the world, developing and executing global revenue generating business development and communications strategies, including media relations, branding, and multi-channel content marketing and social media campaigns. She is very passionate about using social media for lead generation and brand building. She has a diverse range of experience in both Big Law and mid-size/small-law firms. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow her latest writing on JD Supra as well as her blog The Social Media Butterfly