Does your business have a LinkedIn company profile? If not, it just might be time, especially if your company is a B2B!
Last month, LinkedIn expanded its Companies program (still in Beta, meaning it's still in the testing phase) to allow companies to include specific details about each of their products and services. For example, say that you have a Widget business and you offer five different types of Widgets. For each of the Widgets, you can now include the following:
- The industry to which your product/service pertains
- A title and copy description
- A photo
- Elements (bullets) of the product/service you want to highlight
- A direct hyperlink where more information can be found- likely your website
- A video from YouTube
- Current promotions
- The LinkedIn employee whom interested parties should contact regarding that particular product/service
- A disclaimer
In my opinion, these capabilities have been a long time coming; a network that prides itself on professional networking shouldn't stop at the individual who works for that company. With these new elements, businesses can now grow a following on LinkedIn (yes, there are now Follow and Share buttons), showcase their diverse products/services, display promotions and company blog posts, and assign employees who are on LinkedIn to particular products. The latter is very intriguing to me, as it offers a built-in solution for companies (especially big ones) to manage incoming leads originating on LinkedIn.
In addition to the new business elements available for display to any LinkedIn user, the Companies beta also offers up a nice serving of Analytics. Although not nearly as in depth as a dashboard such as Google Analytics, graphs of metrics such as company profile visitors, page views, member counts and click-throughs are available in a few quick clicks.
I recommend you look into the new capabilities for businesses on LinkedIn, and that you talk to (convince!) the decision maker in your office that implementing this solution should, at minimum, increase your company's visibility on an established professional network. It certainly can't hurt!