I am often asked, “Do I need a company page on LinkedIn?”.   In all honesty, if you are a small enterprise, and you have no intention of selling your business in the future, then my answer would be no, just stick with your personal profile.   If you have a business that is more than just one person, and you are perhaps thinking of selling your business in the future, then your LinkedIn Company Page can be a valuable asset.

The good news is that the company pages on LinkedIn are a lot less complicated than creating a Facebook page, but there are still some key elements that people tend to miss when putting their page together.

In this blog I am going to cover:

• How to get started with a new page.
• What key features to add to your page
• How do I grab a unique URL for my company page?
• Should you add showcase pages?
• What is a careers page?  (for you recruiters out there).

How to get started with a new company page on LinkedIn

In my opinion, LinkedIn developers had no idea where to add the “create company page” link once they removed the company page feed with the new design in early 2017.  Creating a new page can be found in two places, but it is not obvious.

Option #1 – Click “work” – from here you will see lots of other LinkedIn services.  Page down, and then page down some more!  Right at the bottom, you will find a little tab that says “create company page”.  It’s as if LinkedIn had no idea where to put it, so they just plonked it anywhere that they could find a space.

Option #2 – Is to simply visit  https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/setup/new/ (If you can remember that!).

From these pages simply follow the on-screen wizard.

Key features for the LinkedIn Company Page

I am not going to go through absolutely everything here, but I will cover the areas that most businesses tend to miss out when we critique a company profile.

• Overview banner.  Many businesses still have the blue LinkedIn default banner.  If you are creating a business page then it is essential that you have consistency in your brand.  Make sure that the images are in-line with your Facebook cover photo, your Twitter header and your website.   At the time of writing this blog, the overview banner is 1536 x 768 pixels.  LinkedIn often play with the sizes, so please make sure that you check your page at least once every six months.
• The avatar (profile picture) should hold your logo only.  No team photos, please!  The avatar is now square and was changed earlier this year.  Horizontal avatars are no more!  If you have not changed yours in the last 6-12 months then I urge you to hop over to your page now and make sure that it looks ok.
• Remember to link your featured groups to your company page.
• I also rarely see businesses adding their specialities or keywords to the summary/company description.
• To make edits to an established page go to manage page > overview.

How do I grab my unique URL for my Company Page?

Do you remember when you created your company page that you were requested to select a unique URL for your business?  (See image below)?  Well, even if you did select a name, you can not see it anywhere online.  Neither can you edit your URL or grab a vanity URL if your page has been established for a while.  I am not really sure why they ask you to select a name in the first place?  Perhaps it is a well-kept secret to LinkedIn’s developers?  If you do know the answer to this then please comment below!

Should you add showcase pages?

A showcase page is a sub-domain of your main page.  Businesses tend to create showcase pages for the different sectors of the organisation or the different target markets.

Before you add showcase pages then consider the following:-

• For each showcase page, you will need to add content at least a few times a week.  Creating content for your main page is time-consuming enough, let alone thinking of additional content for your showcase pages.
• Getting followers for a company page can be challenging.  You will need to implement a strategy of producing regular content, sharing this onto your personal profile, adding links to your other social media channels about your showcase page.  Making sure that you are not diluting the traffic for your main page is essential so be careful with your distribution strategy.

What is a Careers Page?

If you are working in the recruitment industry then you may consider adding a careers page to your main company page.  There are many features for a careers page, which includes a jobs feed, adding videos and photos, benchmarking against your competitors and the analytics look fabulous.  BUT, there is a catch.  The careers page is not free.  In fact, it goes into the thousands (yes, that is not a mistype!) of pounds.  Unless you are a huge corporate company with bags of cash, then I would not waste my time looking into careers pages.

Summary:

Company pages are not very exciting.  You can brand them up, add regular content and that is about it.  You can not add events, or files, or polls, or even venture outside of your page to talk to other pages (unlike Facebook).  When LinkedIn do eventually decide to put some money into the Company pages then I will be the first one to sing about it from the rooftops, but at the moment they are a bit naff.