Having a company presence on LinkedIn, especially if you are B2B, is crucial. The numbers speak for themselves - over half a BILLION professionals are on LinkedIn, and there are over 30 million company pages. But only a handful of those pages is successful. Why? Because there are common mistakes made by lots of companies that hinder success. Read on for three of these mistakes and how to correct them so that you can join those few doing it right.
Mistake #1: Lack of Strategy
Knowing what and when and how to post on LinkedIn can be confusing and overwhelming. Audience engagement is crucial to a successful LinkedIn campaign, but what does that mean? Who exactly is your audience anyway? When is the best time to post? And how often? When business owners and employees tasked with managing LinkedIn company pages don't take the time to answer these questions and others like them, a few things can happen:
inconsistent posting
lack of reach and engagement
too many promotional posts
interpretation of brand left to the public instead of being defined by the company
social media activity gets dropped when there are what seem to be more pressing matters happening in the business
Solution: Create a realistic strategy and stick to it. Answering the following questions is a good place to start.
Who is my audience?
ANSWER: those who would benefit from your goods or services
How many times a week should I post?
ANSWER: at least once a week, no more than once per weekday
How often should I post promotional items?
ANSWER: Less than 20% of the time
What are some other things I can post about?
ANSWER: interpretations of industry news, holidays, company values, employee highlights, company community involvement, etc.
How far ahead should I plan content and write posts?
ANSWER: Varies based on the company, but at upLinked we write posts weekly, usually in one sitting
Follow upLinked for an example of what a LinkedIn company page should look like!
Mistake #2: Duplicate company pages
Every company should have just one official LinkedIn company page. How do companies end up with more than one? Maybe the business is large and has multiple divisions that have each created a page. Or maybe someone made a company page for a specific product. Or various employees took it on themselves to create a company page, which resulted in multiples. Whatever the case may be, if there is more than one LinkedIn page for a company, confusion ensues.
Solution: Pick which page you want to keep (probably the one with the most followers), and then create posts with a schedule announcing the deactivation of the duplicate page. For example, you could create variations of the following to put up twice a week for three weeks on the page that you are closing:
For the sake of clarity, we will be closing this duplicate page on [DATE]. Please follow our official company page at [LINK].
If you created company pages for products, you should also deactivate those pages following the instructions above. Create a showcase page for the product and then create a schedule with posts similar to the one above asking followers to follow your new showcase page. See Adobe's LinkedIn company page for a great example of one that utilizes showcase pages effectively.
A few things to note on showcase pages. Followers are not shared between your company page and your showcase pages. These followings must be built separately. Also, it's possible that you may lose a few followers along the way while deactivating pages and getting everything to a central location, but the lack of confusion overall that results from doing this is worth rebuilding some of your follower base.
After you've posted a few times about deactivating a company page, it's time to actually deactivate it. From your company page, click the Admin Tools dropdown in the upper right corner. Click "Deactivate Company Page" and follow instructions from there.
Mistake #3: Miss out on connecting employees with your brand on LinkedIn
This one is big. Your employees, whether you have just one or 10,000+, are your biggest asset. They inevitably have a larger network than you do, and it makes sense to provide them with information on how to best utilize LinkedIn, both personally and as an employee. If you don't do this, you miss out on a HUGE opportunity for LinkedIn success.
Solution: There are lots of ways to help your employees with this, but here are just a few.
Provide training on how employees can get the most out of LinkedIn.
Encourage employees to interact with (like, share, comment) content from your company page.
Give employees ideas of engaging content they can post.
Provide a few minutes each workday for employees to be active on LinkedIn.
Start a LinkedIn Group for your employees to share information and interact.
ABOUT upLinked
UpLinked, LLC simplifies LinkedIn for companies through education, coaching, and management services. To learn more, contact our owner, head writer and content creator, Michelle White.