According to the latest LinkedIn data, 50 million+ businesses are listed and each created a company page on the platform across the globe. These businesses can be ranging from SMB, startups to multinational corporations.
With more than 706 million members, LinkedIn has become a platform that businesses cannot ignore especially with its high quality member base. More and more brands are using LinkedIn as a platform and as a tool to market, network, connect, and sell. If you are interested in finding out more about why they invest their time and effort onto LinkedIn, you can refer back to my previous blog for more details: 7 reasons why 50 million+ businesses created a LinkedIn company page.
But today, I am here to help guide you take the first step to start leveraging LinkedIn as a tool for your business which is setting up the page. Therefore, I have broken down the whole process into 6 simple steps that you can follow to create and kickstart your first LinkedIn company page.
So what exactly is a LinkedIn company page?
Before you start following the first step, I feel it is necessary to explain what a LinkedIn company page is. Just like how you upload your resume and input all your skills and experience on your personal LinkedIn profile, a company page is like your LinkedIn resume that represents your business.
You can use it to showcase everything about your business from your product, vision, values to even the culture and employee life. Basically it acts as the general face of the business and a destination for your target audience to find out more about your company in all aspects.
Below are two great examples of how some brands are leveraging it:
Example 1: Microsoft leveraging its key executives to share their opinions and views on the future of technology and the vision/direction of where the business will be heading towards.
Example 2: Amazon thanking its employees and showing appreciation to their hard work during COVID-19 time.
Step 1: Create the page
So now is the time now to create your first LinkedIn company page. First of all, the button to create the LinkedIn company page is actually not that obvious and might be difficult to find at start if without guidance.
You will need to go to the top right of the page and click the 9 dots “Work” icon. A window will slide in from the right and list out a list of additional free and paid solutions that LinkedIn offers. For this guide, we will focus on the company page so just go to the bottom of the list and click the “Create a Company Page” button.
Anyone can create a LinkedIn company page as long as you have an active personal LinkedIn account. This is a free feature and you do not have to be a premium member to do so at all.
Step 2: Select your page type
Once you click the “Create a Company Page” button, next thing they would ask you is to choose a page type. There are 4 page types available for selection and below are their definitions:
- Small business: For businesses that got fewer than 200 employees
- Medium to large business: For businesses that got more than 200 employees
- Showcase page: Need to have an existing LinkedIn company page and your objective is to create a child page that falls under the parent company page
- Educational institution: For educational related industries such as schools and universities
You can go ahead and choose the page type that best describes your business. Majority of the businesses out there will go for either “Small business” or “Medium to large business”. And for this tutorial, these are the two page types that we will focus on guiding you through the process. These two page types actually have no differences when it comes to the setup process since you have another chance later to select the number of employees for your business.
Showcase pages are usually needed for multinational corporations that have different business or product lines under the parent company. So they create different child pages and content for the different types of targeting audiences they got. And for Educational institutions, the information you need is slightly different to the other page types and it has some additional features such as having an alumni section.
For this blog, we can just choose between the “Small business” or “Medium or large business” page types.
Step 3: Input the basic information about your business
Next, you would need to start inputting the following basic information about your business. After you upload your logo and input your tagline, you can have a quick preview on the right of the page.
- Name (The name you want to be displayed to the LinkedIn members)
- LinkedIn Public URL (URL will automatically generate from your name but you have the option to edit it)
- Website
- Industry (Can only choose from the list LinkedIn provides)
- Company size (Can only choose from the list LinkedIn provides)
- Company type (Can only choose from the list LinkedIn provides)
- Logo (300 x 300 px is the recommended size)
- Tagline (One line to describe what you company does or the vision of the company within 120 characters)
Step 4: Additional information to make a stellar LinkedIn company page
After filling in the basic information, now you can basically see what your company page will look like to the public. To get an even more accurate view, you can even click the “View as member” button on the top right to see how your page would look.
To make a stellar LinkedIn company page, it requires some more additional information from your business and the beauty about LinkedIn is that it will show you how completed your page is and list out what you are still missing by hovering over the tick icon on the far right.
And here are the main elements:
Cover image – banner image above your logo
- Recommended cover photo size is 1536 x 768 pixels
- This image appears above your logo and it acts as a great opportunity for you to showcase the vision or mission statement of your business to anyone who comes to your page. Give them an idea about what your company and brand stands for.
Company Description
- By clicking the edit page icon on the right of your logo, you can just go to overview and input your company description.
- This description will be shown when people click the “About” tab from your page to find out more about your business. Description is the first thing they would see and you have up to 2,000 characters to leave an impression about your business and the products/services that you offer or the problems you are trying to solve
Location:
- Location is pretty simple. You can just input where the headquarter is based or you can input multiple key office locations in different regions or continents if you want to.
Step 5: Optional details:
Adding call to action button:
- Apart from having a follow button as the primary action for your company page visitors, you also have the option to add a second button beside it. You basically can just go to the button section and choose the most suitable button name for your case and paste the destination url that you want them to go.
Hashtags:
- You can also add up to 3 hashtags that you want to follow closely. These can be general hashtags in the market that your audience is actively following and using. Or these can be hashtags that you created specifically for your business.
- By adding them, you can see the number of followers that each hashtag has got and allow you to go into those communities to interact with your audience. You can like, comment or even share the trending content from the hashtags.
Featured groups:
- This is for you to also put previous LinkedIn groups that you set up before as part of your company page. So members have the option to join those groups when they come visit your page
Manage languages:
- LinkedIn members can choose to set their preferred language as the default for their interface and profiles. And your company page also has this option to showcase your company name, tagline and description in different languages if you want to
- Let’s say someone from France went to your company page and they are using French as the default language for his profile, if you also input a French version of company name, tagline and description, he would see everything in French which is the language he prefers. If not, everything will just be displayed in English even for profiles that are using a different language as default
- If there is a few regions that matter to you more as a business and preferred localisation, suggest you might want to consider translating your information and adding those languages in.
Step 6: Publish your first content and start inviting your connection to follow you
At the final step, your LinkedIn company page basically is all ready to go. Now you just need to start publishing your first content and get people to follow your page.
Your first content:
You would want to have a few updates within the page before you start pushing it out. Because eventually members follow company pages for relevant news, updatesor industry insights that can be value-added to their professional lives. If your page is empty, very unlikely they would want to follow you as there is just no incentive in doing so.
When you first start, you can just simply start off by posting about the business such as your vision and mission, latest product news, any latest PR etc to kickstart the page. To further grow the page, you would require a content strategy which is something that takes time and effort to do so and will not happen overnight. I will further cover this topic at a later blog but here is a quick guide to give you more ideas on what you can also post on your company page
Your first followers:
To get your first initial 100-200 followers, it is always good to start off with the connections you got from your personal profile. LinkedIn provides an option for you to invite your connections to follow your company page but with a strict restriction of 100 invitations per month shared by all admins of the page.
I know this might not be a lot but at least this is something to get you started. And in terms of how to further grow your follower base? Once again, this will be a topic that I will cover but you can look at these 21 tips that you can apply right away.
Conclusion
As you can see, creating and getting a LinkedIn company page setup is pretty simple with 6 steps needed. However, setting up a company page does not mean it will bring instant success for you as a business. Just like setting up a website or ecommerce store doesn’t bring you more sales or revenue right away.
You will also need to input some time and effort into promoting it and make it a success. Is it hard? No, it is not if you know what you are doing and have a process. And that’s what we are trying to do here. Give you all the guides and steps needed instead of you wasting your valuable time and try figuring it on your own while you can learn right away what are best practices from us instead.
Lastly, what I am glad to see is that you have taken the first step which is crucial. So what comes after is the second, third and fourth steps which we will also be guiding you through the process to make LinkedIn a tool that can bring you prospects and businesses.
You can always reach out to us to fast-track your growth! Have a chat with us!
