LinkedIn Company Pages: 7 Features To Make Your Page Even Better
LinkedIn has been an essential element of any B2B marketing strategy for some time, but it’s become even more essential in 2020 after the pandemic postponed so many in-person events and meetings. 96% of B2B content marketers now use LinkedIn, even more than Facebook (82%), according to new research from The Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs.
LinkedIn Company Pages are playing a larger and larger role in marketers’ social media strategies, too. To support this, LinkedIn has upgraded several features in Company Pages over the last year – features that make Company Pages more valuable than ever before.
Here are the improvements marketers need to know about.
Post updates targeted to specific audiences from your LinkedIn Company Page.
Does your company serve multiple buyer personas? Most do. But up until now, any time a B2B marketer published a post on LinkedIn, they’d be showing that post to their entire audience. There was no way to segment audiences or to target posts so only the right persona would see them.
That’s changed. Marketers can now post targeted updates from their company page. The targeting can be quite specific, too – marketers can segment their audiences (the followers of their LinkedIn Company Page) by:
- Language
- Job function
- University
- Seniority
- Region
- Location
- Company Size
- Industry
There are two limitations to this feature:
- Your Company Page must have at least 300 followers, and each targeted audience you define for a post must include at least 300 followers.
- You can’t notify employees about a post with a targeted update.
According to LinkedIn, “targeted updates will only display in corresponding members’ feeds. All updates, targeted and non-targeted, will appear on the Page’s feed.”
Here is how to target an update on a Company Page for a specific audience:
- Start a post like you normally would from your LinkedIn Company Page.
- Click the pulldown menu right below your Page’s name in the next window.
You’ll see a new pop-up like this.
- Choose “Targeted audience.”
- Make the selections you want for your audience in the next window. Just remember, you’ll need at least 300 people in your new audience.
- Click “Save” and then create and publish your post as usual.
Unfortunately, that limitation of needing at least 300 people in each targeted audience can be a real problem if your page doesn’t have a lot of followers. But there are several new ways to fix this.
Invite your connections to follow your company page.
So you want more followers for your LinkedIn Company Page, do you? No problem. How about inviting some of your existing 1st level connections?
LinkedIn makes this extremely easy. All you have to do is go to the Admin view of your company page and look in the right column. The invite box and three suggestions will be in view.
Every month your Page will be given a certain number of invites. The invites do not accrue, so you need to use them up by the end of every month. Your invites get used as follows:
-
- Every invitation you send requires one credit.
- If an invitation is accepted, your Page will earn the credit back and that credit will go back into your quota for the month.
- Your Page’s invitation credits renew on the first day of every month.
There are a few other limitations and rules around inviting people to your Page. Here they are, per LinkedIn’s help page on the subject:
- Only page admins with fewer than 500 connections are able to invite all their connections via a ‘Select all’ option. Admins with more than 500 connections need to manually select who they want to invite.
- Only company pages with fewer than 100,000 followers can invite members to follow via the option
- If an admin has less than 3 connections, they won’t have the option available
- Only one invite per member can be sent
- Page admins can only invite 50 new people per day
This is definitely something to put on your (or someone on your team’s) monthly do to list.
According to LinkedIn, “We’ve seen that once Pages gain 150 followers, their opportunity for growth becomes exponential.” So with even two months of careful work using your invitation credits, an organizations’ content and company could gain a lot of visibility.
Add the LinkedIn company plugin to your website and other pages.
This is another way to build the following of your LinkedIn page, and it couldn’t be easier to do. Just add a button.
Like this:
This can be added to the footer of your website, for example, or even to the footer of your email messages. The instructions to make your custom Company Page follow button are here.
Start publishing live.
Live videos are mostly talked about in the context of LinkedIn profiles – profiles for individuals. But companies can apply for them, too. The application page is here. Note that if you have a LinkedIn Marketing Solutions representative, you should reach out to them directly to talk about enabling LinkedIn Live for your Company Page. But if you don’t have a Marketing Solutions representative, use the online application form.
Derek Edmond recently wrote about LinkedIn Live, its benefits, and its requirements in his blog post, B2B Video Marketing on LinkedIn: How to Embrace Video in Your Content Strategy. Just to pique your interest, know this: LinkedIn Lives get 24 times more engagement than other content formats on the platform.
Customize the URL of your Company Page.
LinkedIn company pages often do well in the search results, especially if you customize the URL of your company page with some good keywords. And it’s amazing how many great keywords are still available for LinkedIn Company Pages’ URLs.
Of course, you’ll want to include your company name, but you can also put in one or two high-value keywords as well. You might even want to skip your company name in the URL (it’s well-optimized on the page itself) and just go for your primary keyword.
Like this:
Here is how to customize the URL of your Company Page:
- Go to the Admin screen of your Company Page.
- Click the “Admin tools” drop down menu in the upper right-hand corner of the page.
- Click the option for “Edit public URL.” You’ll see a screen like the one used for the “marketingwriter” URL example shown above.
- Enter whatever keyword or words you want in your Company Page’s URL.
- Click save. And you’re done.
Get more detailed analytics.
Company Pages recently got a boost in analytics capabilities. You can now:
- Export data about your Page’s followers.
You can choose the time frame for the data you export. The export file will also break out your Page’s follower data by when they followed your Page, their location, job function, seniority, industry, and company size.
- See nice charts about different attributes of your audience from within the “Analytics” tab of your LinkedIn Page.
Like this:
Use Content Suggestions to surface the content getting the most attention in your industry, your company, or among your Page’s followers.
You now have a really nice content curation tool within your LinkedIn Company Page. The “content” tab will show you which articles, videos, or other pieces of content are getting the most interest in your industry or among your followers.
This tool becomes especially interesting when you start filtering by Industry, Location, Job Function, and Seniority – all the same variables we’ve been seeing across other tools within LinkedIn Pages.
Unfortunately, the Content tab will limit you in the same way as other tools within your Page. You’ll need at least 300 followers in each setting (say, within the “Writing & Editing” industry in the example above) in order to see content selections.
Even with those limitations, this is a great way to tap into the content trends in your industry and to find excellent content to share or comment on. And it’s yet another reason to build up the following for your Page.
What’s Next For LinkedIn Company Pages?
Given how focused LinkedIn is on business, it only makes sense that they’re investing more in Company Pages. This is the perfect way for the platform to continue growing beyond its old (and outdated) perception of being “just for resumes.”
Watch for more lead generation and lead nurturing features to be added to complement Company Pages in the future. Account-based marketing, for example, is widely-used among B2B marketers, and Company Pages would be an excellent foundation for a few new ABM features.
One other feature we’d all love to see is the ability for Company Pages to publish articles to LinkedIn Pulse. Right now, only individuals can publish articles to Pulse (aka LinkedIn Articles). That’s been a disappointing limitation for a platform that’s making such great strides in so many other aspects of B2B content marketing.