Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Is Your Company on LinkedIn? It Should Be.

Stop what you're doing right now and do a search for your company on LinkedIn. Does your company have a company page on LinkedIn? If not, make sure you send your head of marketing, social media, or HR a note and tell them that Brenda said you NEED to get your company on LinkedIn. It's free to do so and fairly easy to do.

Here are the instructions from LinkedIn on setting up a company page: http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/710

Keep in mind that there are a few requirements you need to have before setting up a company page, as outlined here: http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1594

At a high level,

  1. You must be a current employee of the company to set up your company page.
  2. Your email address must match your company. Ex: my work email is bmeller@walshcollege.edu and my company's webpage is www.walshcollege.edu 
  3. There cannot be a company page already created using that web address, such as subsidiaries or franchises. 
  4. You must be rated "intermediate" or "all star" by LinkedIn. 
  5. You must have "several" connections says LinkedIn. Once upon a time I heard the minimum was 50 connections. This may have changed. 

WHY HAVE A COMPANY PAGE, you ask?
Several reasons. 

  • People aren't going to your website to learn about your company as much as they used to. Sorry, but it's true. Now, people find information on your company on social and professional networking sites, which tend to be more current, active, and visited frequently.
  • It's free to set up a company page on LinkedIn. Really.
    "Your competition has a company page
    on LinkedIn," says Brenda Meller. 
  • You can set up product descriptions on LinkedIn through your company page and ask your customers to recommend those products. 
  • You can post on behalf of your company: news, announcements, general messages, etc. 
  • Every Fortune 500 company has employees on LinkedIn. I.e., it's kind of a big deal.
  • LinkedIn provides you analytics for people who "like" your page. Again, this is free. (I'm big on free)
  • Because your competition is on LinkedIn. Don't believe me? Go ahead and check. 
  • Because I think it's a smart thing to do. I call 'em like I see 'em. 
Like this post? Please click to share on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or wherever your network may be found. And then send me an invite to connect: www.linkedin.com/in/brendameller and mention this post. 

2 comments:

  1. On the company profile there are some interesting pieces of information...


    LinkedIn Company Profile

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for sharing this article. Having an LinkedIn profile is very important as this helps to increase your chances of getting hired as most of the companies hire new employees through LinkedIn.
    linkedin profile help

    ReplyDelete