Benefits of Company and Showcase Pages on LinkedIn

April 24, 2017

LinkedIn continues to play its part as the biggest professional social network worldwide. In our last LinkedIn blog, we looked at the best ways to make your LinkedIn account work the best it possibly can for you, with steps on how to achieve the ever-important All-Star status.

There are several off-shoots to the basic personal profile, as LinkedIn grows, develops and offers even more services to its repertoire. Today we will look at a couple of ways you can use your LinkedIn account for your business with extra page options to sell your services and promote your business to build relationships with other businesses and professionals.

Let us start first of all with the Company Page. If you are looking to market and build awareness of your business, a LinkedIn Company Page is definitely something you should look into, if you haven’t already.

There are many benefits to running a Company Page on LinkedIn, here are some of the important ones:

• A Company Page gives the chance to showcase your company, offering the opportunity to promote your important news – new staff appointments, industry updates etc.

• Research has shown that 50% of members are more likely to buy products from a company that engages with them.

• The Company Page can be run by various employees, registered as admins who can in effect act as ambassadors for the company.

• These admins can then Like and Respond to member comments, thus engaging your audience. Don’t forget to ask your employees to engage with the Company Page, ask them to add the Company Page into their email signature, share pots and cross-promote on any other social channel they use.

• By connecting their Profiles with the Company, employees updated ‘Experience’ will attach to your Company Page through a clickable company logo. As your Employees become active in the industry sectors you want to do business in, so the chance increases of people clicking through directly to your company homepage.

• Your website may not have a blog and somewhere to ‘share news’. If this is the case, you can use your Company Page in this way. Likewise, you may have a News section on your site but have low traffic to it. Sharing the content on your LinkedIn profile helps your content to reach a wider audience. Also, consider sharing your customers’ products and services, this will help forge trust between you.

• The content becomes highly shareable – whenever you share an update and the post is liked or commented on, the post will then show up in the news-feeds of their connections.  This will all help with your Search Engine Rankings. When thinking about content to share – make sure you are getting across the point of the story easily and that you are grabbing your reader’s attention fast; make sure that you writing is easily digestible and not long-winded, social media acts fast and the most shareable content is that which is easy to share and easy to read.

• 6 out of every 10 LinkedIn users are interested in industry insights; 53% in company news; 43% in new products & services – so use these as the foundation for your updates. You can target posts specifically to reach a certain audience based on “All Followers’ or to a “Targeted Audience”, whether that be based on geography, industry and company size etc.

• Your content is measurable as LinkedIn provides analytics on each post – try and test different pieces of content to see which works best for you and which your connections are most interested in.

• You can set up Notifications when your company is mentioned from a personal account. This gives you insight into what others are saying about your company.

• Your company will be easily found on LinkedIn, as will your team members (business development and sales directors, for example).

 

Secondly let us take a look at Showcase Pages, launched in 2013. These are essentially an extension of a Company Page and exist primarily to sit alongside the main page with options to ‘Showcase’ or compliment the various elements of your business. They overtake the previously listed Products and Services tab in Company Pages that have since been removed by LinkedIn. Ten Showcase Pages are allowed per Company Page and will be listed on the right hand side of the Company Page.

Here are some of the benefits of running your own Showcase Pages:

• These are ideal for highlighting and promoting different aspects of the business – for example, new product launches, a page for case studies etc. If your company specialises in a range of different services or products, or even different sub-brands, Pages are an ideal way to segment the different areas of the business (see the example below from global company Adobe, who run 5 Showcase Pages alongside their main Company Page).

• Showcase Pages are ideal to clearly separate messages for each audience, so the different client persona’s can benefit from this. As a result you can then create a tailored message for each of your audience, specific to their needs and preferences. This allows for the creation of distinct identities per Page and targeted messages in a detailed manner.

• You can use a Showcase Page to share Company or Sponsored Updates, so that fellow members can follow the aspects of the business they are interested in.

• Showcase Pages can be found easily in the same way as your Company Page.

• You can set up each Page as an individual entity, with a banner image specific to the particular brand, product or service.

• Showcase Pages will be displayed in LinkedIn search results, meaning your company and its’ sub-brands will be more discoverable, helping your SEO in the long-run.

• Showcase Pages are slightly different to Company Pages in that they do not run sidebars down the right hand side of the page. This means that there will be no competitor advertisements directing your readers to other websites, as there are on the Company Page.

• Your readers will be able to follow only the Pages that are of interest to them, instead of all Company information on a Company Page. As a result, you will be able to see what is working well on each page and which services the most popular among your LinkedIn community.

• Showcase Pages also offer Analytics information, the same as a Company Page. So you can again see which posts are working the best with the greatest engagement, so you can work to replicate that content across other Pages and channels.

• Bear in mind that Showcase Pages, much like Company Pages need to be updated regularly so will increase your content workload. Ensure the content is unique to the brand or product and you will fulfil the function of addressing specific audiences.

If you would like us to help you build and develop your social channels, drop us a message today.