How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Profile Page

Last week, I wrote a blog post about the release of LinkedIn’s company status updates and their importance in a company’s social media marketing campaign.

This week, I will share some ideas on how to make your company’s LinkedIn profile page more engaging for users, customers, applicants and potential buyers, as this will draw more attention to your company’s status updates and maximize the reach of your LinkedIn company page for recruiting and marketing purposes.

Here are 10 tips on how to spice-up your company profile page to increase its reach and visitor engagement for marketing and recruiting purposes:

1. Create a reason for applicants, customers, potential customers and users to come to your profile page, so that you can increase its reach. To do so, develop overview, careers and products & services tabs and make sure each one is optimized for its target audience by embedding your targeted long-tail keywords in each tab. This will improve your page’s ranking in Google and LinkedIn search results, which will increase the reach of your company’s profile.
2. Feature descriptions and videos for each of your company’s products and services on the products & services tab. See HP’s Company Profile Page for an example of how to do this effectively.
3. Leverage the social aspect on your product & services tab by allowing users to make recommendations and provide live testimonials of your products and services. Dell’s LinkedIn company profile page provides an excellent example of how to integrate this information into the products & services tab.
4. Supplement these recommendations with feature product case studies and videos of live customer testimonials. Customers and users always like to hear about other company use cases and this is a perfect environment to share this information with them.
5. Let your employees help brand the career tab by sharing stories about your company culture and their experience. This is a really powerful way to communicate the culture and employee experience to applicants because each testimonial is linked to a live LinkedIn Profile, which verifies the accuracy of the story. Accenture’s LinkedIn Company Profile Page provides a great example of how you can tie employee testimonials into your careers page.
6. Encourage your employees to sign-up for LinkedIn, so that followers, applicants and visitors can get a better sense of the type of people that work within your organization. Not only will this ensure that the LinkedIn company statistics are an accurate portrayal of your company but it will also improve the quality and fit of incoming candidates. These candidates will be able to evaluate whether or not they would fit in with your organization before they apply. It will also help establish the credibility of your organization for potential customers as they will have the opportunity to review employee backgrounds and learn about the company culture.
7. Feature employee activity and top company content on the overview tab. This  will allow applicants, followers and visitors to get a better sense of what your employees are interested in, and also increase the reach of each employee’s status updates and your content. This will increase the exposure of content and employee involvement in LinkedIn Groups and LinkedIn Answers. See Google’s Company Profile Page for an example of how to do this effectively.
8. Cross-promote your page. Customers, users, potential buyers and applicants will not know you have an active page unless you tell them. Be sure to promote it in your LinkedIn User Groups, Facebook Company Profile, corporate Twitter feed and on your corporate website.
9. As with any corporate communications, it is important to establish a uniform message to employees, customers, users, potential buyers and applicants. Forgetting this important point can undermine an entire marketing or recruiting campaign and actually damage a brand, customer acquisition and customer retention rates.
10. Don’t make your company profile page a mirror image of your product, service and careers pages on your corporate website. If you do this, there will be no reason for customers, applicants or future customers to visit your LinkedIn Company Profile Page. You want to offer them something new on this page that is not offered elsewhere. Making your page social by enabling customer recommendations and employee testimonials will differentiate your LinkedIn Company Profile Page.

By spicing-up your LinkedIn Company Profile Page, your company will improve the reach and effectiveness of its LinkedIn marketing and recruiting campaigns. This is a high priority for any unbranded startup or expansion stage company because LinkedIn has established itself as a top recruiting website and corporate directory. Ignoring this opportunity to showcase your company and its products and employees could seriously hinder the effectiveness of your company’s recruiting and marketing campaigns.

If you are just getting started with LinkedIn Company Profiles, I recommend reading Mashable’s article on how to build a LinkedIn Company Profile Page. Similarly, if you are interested in learning more about social media marketing strategies, I recommend reading my blog post on LinkedIn Search Engine Optimization (SEO).