For several years, LinkedIn has been one of the most successful professional networks on the World Wide Web. The social network already has more than 500 million users worldwide, about 160 million members in Europe, and about 14 million users in the Dutch region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland). LinkedIn is not only used for professional networking. The platform gives you many opportunities to better present your own company and share important content. In this article, we want to tell you why a professional company's presence on LinkedIn is successful and how you can successfully interact with your company's page.

 

What is LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social media channel that focuses on linking professional contacts. Your career and your professional network are certainly at the forefront here. For this reason, you will not receive any personal contributions from other users. This limitation of content from Facebook, Instagram is very important. Because LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to communicate with companies, potential employers, and employees or partners. Seriousness and professionalism are therefore very important here.

 

Whatever the content, LinkedIn works just like any other social network. Here, too, contributions can be posted, shared, liked, and remembered. Each user can create a profile, publish the most important information about himself and his professional career, as well as list qualifications and interests. External websites can be accessed, groups can be created and follow each other. Since the focus here is on members' careers, users can upload their resumes directly and express their preferred job ideas in the general profile settings.

 

The Right Membership For Your Company

In principle, the basic version of LinkedIn is free. But you have to choose a paid account depending on how many functions you want to use. There are premium memberships that give you different add-ons. So it is worthwhile to think about what you want to achieve initially with LinkedIn. Would you rather use recruitment tools? Do you focus on lead and customer acquisitions? Or is it about industry insights and the early development of your business? Thus, check all possible premium memberships in advance so that you can find the right one for you.

 

7 tips for your content strategy

To make your profile attractive to users, you need to publish good content on a regular basis. But which content works particularly well here? And what should be the high quality and professional contribution? To get these questions out of the way, we've outlined seven tips for effective content strategies.

 

Build High-quality Network

Before you really start, you should build a high-quality network. Network with industry experts, partner companies, and other companies that match your content. Bloggers, journalists, and just interested people also add value to your network. Because the more people who follow you who are not consistent with your target group, the more you will lose. Through a network that is genuinely interested in your contributions, you can enter into better dialogue. There can be a productive exchange, which means your content can be further shared.

 

Optimized Posts With Added Value

The more you know about your network, the more you can align your posts with interest. This is because the LinkedIn algorithm primarily evaluates and ranks posts according to their relevance to users. And for that, the platform is based on the specific interests of the user’s network and his profile. So, you should always remember: each contribution must add value for the user and be ready according to their needs.

 

Rich Media

In order for your post to really be seen and clicked on, you have to make it interesting. It is well known that images and videos work much better than just text contributions. So make sure your posts are just annoying stock images, interesting pictures that arouse interest and let the user “stop” while viewing the news feed. Attract attention, especially videos or moving pictures, and let your followers stay in your posts. So try to create high-quality video material. There are some software and apps that you can use to make your posts more interesting in general.

 

Regular Value Ensured Content

Activity on your profile is especially important, so you should post content regularly. There is no formula here for the perfect frequency. If you publish too little, your profile can literally "collect dust" and very few people will respond to your post. On the other hand, you shouldn’t overdo it and fill your network with news and contributions. But you can post something once a day to always have new and fresh content in your profile.

 

Employees As Multipliers

It doesn't matter how big your company is - try to grow your employees to network with your company profile. You can act as a multiplier and brand ambassador. If they respond to your contribution, it strengthens trust and encourages discussion. If your employees share the company’s contributions, they will be visible to a wider audience. On LinkedIn, your employees can point you and your company to an employer and their respective positions in the company. Your company page will link to the relevant user page and encourage your employees' friends or acquaintances to stop by your page.

 

LinkedIn Groups

Just as you can set up a group on Facebook, you can also do it on LinkedIn. This group, where interested teams and expert staff can exchange ideas, can easily be integrated into your company’s website. But you can join an existing group as a company. LinkedIn even shows you the appropriate group, where you can share your skills with other users. Use this opportunity to realize yourself as an active, agile, and modern company and as an industry expert.

 

Design The Page That Need More Focus

As mentioned earlier, you can create a showcase page. These are also called showcase pages and have the task of highlighting specific topics or areas of your company. If users are initially interested in a specific area, they will find separate information on the focus page. Here you can create special articles on this subtopic and address the product or service in a much more targeted way. If you have several topics at the same time, you can also create ten focus pages at the same time. But also note here: the site should be updated regularly with high-quality content. 

You can see again the most important criterion in this video, which was published on the official LinkedIn YouTube channel.

 

Use LinkedIn Ads for your company

You can use ads on LinkedIn to increase your reach. Here, but, a distinction is made between different types of advertising depending on what effect you want to advertise with. Here is an overview of the most important display types.

 

Sponsored Content

Sponsored content is basically a LinkedIn post ad. Here you can choose between display format single image ads, video ads, and carousel ads.

 

Direct Sponsored Content

Unlike sponsored content, directly sponsored content does not appear as an update on your company page or focus page before it appears like an ad. Still, it looks like a normal LinkedIn post. So you can create ads for a specific target group and test different versions without looking at your own company's website.

 

Message Ads

With message ads, ad messages are sent directly to LinkedIn users' mailboxes. According to LinkedIn, this should be more of a conversion than it would be in the case of email. The problem here is that users can unsubscribe from message ads.

 

Text Ads

In the desktop version, text ads appear to the right of the LinkedIn feed. It contains a short title, the text of an ad, and a small square image.

 

Dynamic Ads

These ads also appear on LinkedIn on the right side of the screen and therefore look like text ads. The difference here is that each ad is personalized and automatically adapted to the viewer's profile.

 

LinkedIn Audience Network

Through the LinkedIn Audience Network, it is possible to address the desired target group on websites with thousands of partner apps and sponsored content.

 

LinkedIn for business: is it worth the effort?

In the end, LinkedIn is only successful for companies that want to reach their target group through them. If you already know that you can’t address partners or customers with partners here, then it makes little sense to you. But if you know that you can reach your target group through social networks and through LinkedIn, then this is definitely worth it. Not only can you use LinkedIn to improve your reputation and establish yourself as an expert, but you can also build valuable leads and customers. But, you should be aware that you need to invest a certain amount of time in creating good content. Make sure your channel is regularly maintained and that questions and comments are answered by you or your staff.