Having a company page on LinkedIn can provide many benefits for your business. LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 722 million members. This gives your company incredible exposure and branding potential. However, creating and maintaining a company page does require an investment of time. In this article, we’ll look at the pros and cons of creating a LinkedIn company page to help you decide if it’s right for your business.
Pros of Creating a LinkedIn Company Page
Here are some of the key benefits of having a LinkedIn company page:
Increased Brand Awareness & Exposure
A LinkedIn company page gives your business a presence on the world’s largest professional network. This allows you to get your brand in front of LinkedIn’s 722+ million members. Your page also has the potential to appear in LinkedIn search results, further expanding your visibility.
Recruitment Opportunities
Over 90% of LinkedIn members are open to new job opportunities. A company page allows you to get your business in front of active and passive job seekers. You can promote open positions, showcase your company culture and highlight employee success stories. This makes LinkedIn an excellent recruitment channel.
Lead Generation
Company pages have a “Follow” button that allows members to follow your page and receive updates. These followers can be potential leads and customers for your business. Company pages also allow you to use targeted ads to reach LinkedIn members by location, job title, skills and more.
SEO Benefits
Optimizing your LinkedIn company page can improve your search engine rankings. Pages allow you to include company descriptions, employee profiles, content and other information search engines use for SEO.
Customer Engagement
Your page provides a place for customers to learn about your brand, products/services and culture. Current and potential customers can also follow your page to get updates. This allows you to build relationships, showcase thought leadership and humanize your brand.
Competitive Benchmarking
Researching competitor pages on LinkedIn can provide useful intel on their content strategy, follower rates, employee counts and more. This enables you to gain market insights and improve your own page.
Cons of Creating a LinkedIn Company Page
While company pages offer many benefits, there are also some potential drawbacks to weigh:
Requires Time Investment
Creating and managing a company page requires an ongoing time investment. You’ll need to optimize the page, post content regularly, respond to comments/messages, monitor analytics and more. This workload must be factored into someone’s responsibilities.
Content Creation Needed
To maximize the impact of your page, you need a steady stream of high-quality content. This may require developing a content strategy, writing blog posts, creating visual assets and more. Content creation can become a significant undertaking.
Employee Resources Required
An engaging page should highlight key employees through profiles/content. This requires time from your team to create profiles and participate in content creation. Some employees may be hesitant to participate as well.
Measuring ROI Can Be Difficult
While a page offers many potential benefits, precisely measuring the ROI of your LinkedIn presence can be challenging. This makes it difficult to quantify the tangible impact on sales, recruiting, etc. Tracking analytics helps but falls short of directly connecting efforts to revenue.
Requires Ongoing Maintenance
A company page requires diligent maintenance. You must keep information like employee counts, descriptions, contact info and content updated. If not maintained, your page can quickly become outdated and ineffective.
5 Key Questions to Assess if You Should Create a Page
Here are 5 important questions to ask when determining if creating a LinkedIn company page aligns with your goals and capabilities:
1. Do we have the resources to properly maintain a page?
Managing a thriving page requires dedicated resources – make sure you can commit someone to handling this before getting started.
2. Are our products/services relevant to LinkedIn’s audience?
Ensure your offerings align with the professional/career focus of most LinkedIn members.
3. Would we utilize LinkedIn’s advertising and recruiting tools?
If you plan to use LinkedIn for advertising, job posts and candidate targeting, a page makes those features more accessible.
4. Can we create enough high-quality content to sustain the page?
Frequently posting engaging, useful content is key to growth. Assess if your team has the bandwidth for content creation.
5. Would a page support our overall marketing and business development goals?
Evaluate whether an investment in LinkedIn aligns with current sales, branding and growth objectives.
Tips for Creating a Highly Effective LinkedIn Company Page
If creating a page makes sense for your business, here are some tips for maximizing its impact:
Showcase Company Culture
Content that provides insider looks at your culture attracts job seekers, builds your brand and engages followers. Share photos, videos and employee spotlights.
Leverage Employees as Thought Leaders
Develop thought leadership content through employees. They can publish long-form posts, Q&As, videos and more.
Optimize SEO on Your Page
Include target keywords in page optimizations like: company name, description, employee profiles, content, etc. This boosts search visibility.
Promote Live and Virtual Events
Share events, webinars and conferences on your page. These are great content assets and engagement drivers.
Curate Content from Other Sources
Repurposing and curating external content expands your reach and saves content creation time. Just ensure you add context and commentary.
Use Analytics to Guide Efforts
Lean on page analytics to identify your best content, opportunities to improve, follower demographics and more to refine your strategy.
| Content Type | Best Practices |
|---|---|
| Blog Posts | – Optimize with target keywords – Include relevant multimedia – Publish consistently (2x/month minimum) |
| Industry News | – Commentary on relevant news events – Share company perspectives – Quickly capitalize on timely stories |
| Thought Leadership | – Executive perspectives on industry trends – Q&As with product experts – Advice and insights for professionals |
Conclusion
Creating a LinkedIn company page can provide tremendous brand visibility, recruiting, lead generation and engagement benefits. However, realizing those benefits requires an investment of resources to create content and properly maintain the page over time.
Carefully evaluate whether you can commit those resources before moving forward. If creating a page aligns with your goals and capabilities, the tips in this article will help maximize its impact. With a strategic approach, a LinkedIn presence can become a valuable asset in connecting with professional audiences.