If you want step-by-step instruction on how to use LinkedIn, consult LinkedIn’s online help system or check out LinkedIn For Dummies, 4th Edition, by Joel Elad (Wiley).
Building your Company and Career pages
On LinkedIn, you can create a Company Page to showcase your organization, its products or services, its culture, and other attractions. You’re allowed a base level of customization at no cost. Enter the standard info — about the company, location, website address, industry, company size, and so on. You also have the option of adding a banner and a logo. You can further customize your content, look, and feel by upgrading to a premium account.
After you’ve created your Company Page, click the Careers tab and customize your Career Page. Again, LinkedIn allows you a base level of customization at no cost. For additional customization options, you can upgrade to a Silver or Gold Career Page, each of which provides additional features, such as a clickable banner, customizable modules, analytics on who is viewing the page, direct links to recruiters, video content, and more.
LinkedIn recently updated its Company Page format to make it even more employer brand friendly. Now you can upload photos, feature executives and key employees, and even highlight employee-contributed blogs from the LinkedIn Publisher platform.
Posting regular status updates
Posting regular status updates is key to promoting your company’s corporate, customer, and employer brand on LinkedIn. Posting compelling, relevant content builds engagement and community and raises the visibility of your Company and Career pages. You give your followers a reason to engage, share, and return for more, regardless of whether they’re currently looking for a job. This engagement fuels discovery and helps draw new followers to your page and ideally to your jobs.LinkedIn has dedicated significant resources toward building more robust employer branding capabilities into its platform. It has released several branding resources to help organizations in this effort, so be sure to search for its most recent resources.
Video in particular is a great way to highlight your culture and shine a spotlight on your employees. You can also include links to employer branding campaigns you have on other networks.
Measuring and optimizing engagement
Analytics and fine-tuning are crucial to any social media strategy. Without analytics, you have no real sense of whether your efforts are making an impact. This is where LinkedIn adds value by providing real-time engagement analytics directly beneath each post. This indicator enables you to see what kind of content interests your audience most and adjust accordingly.Click the Analytics tab of your Career Page to access valuable data and insight into your audience — including clicks, likes, comments, shares, followers acquired, and engagement percentage. These metrics are useful tools to help you continually recalibrate and refine your content.
Another interesting widget in the analytics dashboard is the “How You Compare” dashboard, which reveals how your follower count compares with that of other organizations. This metric gives you some perspective on how you’re doing on LinkedIn and may point the way to some best practices you’d be wise to emulate.
Having employees update their profiles
Today’s candidates are savvy shoppers. They’re researching companies and colleagues before, during, and after the interview process. What will they discover when they view your employees’ LinkedIn profiles? That answer may determine whether they pursue your company or head to greener pastures.Your employees are brand ambassadors; help them shine by providing training and guidance on creating a compelling professional LinkedIn profile that reflects positively on your organization. If you have a culture video or other employer brand collateral, ask employees to embed it in their Experience section. In their Current Experience section, have them describe what they do and why they enjoy it. These subtle additions can pay huge dividends when candidates research your organization.