In today's digital age, a company's LinkedIn presence extends far beyond just a Company Page. To truly capitalize on LinkedIn, companies need to focus on strategic branding and optimizing all their employees' individual profiles.
Why is this critical? Because LinkedIn is increasingly becoming the platform where potential customers, partners, and talent evaluate your company. When people visit your employees' profiles, those profiles reflect your overall brand. A consistent, professional presence allows you to shape perceptions, build trust and credibility, and highlight your company culture.
So where to start?
Here is an essential framework for creating a stellar branded presence across your entire company on LinkedIn
1) Create Visual Cohesion
Profile Photo
- Use consistent profile photos that include your company colours/logo. This identifies employees as part of the same organization.
- Ensure backgrounds, poses, and photo styles align across the company.
- Make sure they all have profile photo visibility set as public. It is critical for leaders who are the face of an organization not to have their profile headshot set as private by mistake.
Your headshot appears in many locations on LinkedIn, other than your profile. So, make sure people can recognize you instantly.
- Face should be the majority of the photo.
- Eye contact and a smile are better
- Customer-facing dress code
- If you plan a photoshoot, ensure employees can check and approve their photos so they willingly update their profile with their new headshot photo.
Profile Hero Banners
- Create multiple LinkedIn profile banners within the same design style.
- Banners can vary depending on geographies, teams, or target audiences
- Employees can choose and upload the one they like and is most relevant to them
- 1584 (w) x 396 (h) pixels
- Add slogan/keywords
- Add a call to action or website
- Test readability on Mobile
- Keep bottom left corner free for photo on mobile PC or mobile app
Featured Sections
- The featured sections of your employees can offer a very visible ad display to show a specific message and drive traffic to any landing page of your choice.
- white paper to download
- jobs on your career page
- newsletter to subscribe
- free demo booking
- webinar replay
Think of it as an ad banner displayed on every profile of your employees.
You can measure profile views across your organization; you can embed a trackable link in the featured image link and measure the click-through rate and the conversion from LinkedIn profiles.
- URL of the destination (website page, landing page…)
- Image: 600 (w) 400 (h) pixels with a Call to action button or text (think of it as a banner ad)
- Title: 42 car max for 1 line or 80 car max for 2 lines
- No description for direct link click
Rich Media in Current Experience
- You can ask employees to upload rich media in their current experience section. It will be an extra opportunity to grab the viewer’s attention by showcasing media, links, videos, presentations, and images about your company, culture, jobs, customer testimonials or products & services.
2) Align Messaging
- Provide employees with one or few headline templates they can use in their profiles to reflect consistency and your brand values in profile headlines.
- Same for your company description in their about section and their current experience description
- About sections and current experience should highlight company achievements, stats, and capabilities.
- Ask employees to add the company website or blog in their contact detail section.
3) Increase Discoverability and visibility
Be found with Keywords
- Make sure the one keyword that drives the most traffic to your website other than your brand name is the main keyword that your employees have optimized their profile with.
- their headline
- their about section
- their current experience
- in other sections of their profile
The keyword should appear in:
Your employees should be on the first page of search results
- when searching for your company name
- when searching for the specific keyword
- their headshot photo and headline are the keys to increasing visits from the search result pages.
Active employees will generate more views and earned media
The more employees post on Linkedin and engage with other profiles and other posts, the more their content and profiles will have views.
- Employees need to be more active
- More employees need to be active
- Employees need to be efficient on Linkedin like:
- networking effectively
- commenting on high-visibility posts in their industry
- posting with basic knowledge of copywriting, dos and don’ts while understanding how the Linkedin algorithm works to increase the reach and engagement of their posts
- Basically, they have jobs to do so they should be as efficient on Linkedin as possible.
With a strategic approach, you can build a powerful branded presence on LinkedIn for your entire company, not just sales teams. Consistent, compelling profiles shape perceptions and convey your reputation and culture.
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