A LinkedIn® Company Page is more than a place to publish company updates. Managed properly, it is a public representation of your organization: a place where customers, prospective employees, partners, suppliers and other stakeholders can understand who you are, what you do and how your organization participates on LinkedIn®.
This lesson establishes the purpose of the Page before we move into administration, optimization, content, audience growth and measurement.
Start with the organization, not the posting schedule
It is easy to inherit responsibility for a Company Page and immediately ask what to post and how often. Those questions matter, but they come later. First decide what role the Page should play for the organization and the people you want to reach.
For an established B2B organization, that may include strengthening reputation, making the organization easier to understand and discover, supporting recruitment, providing useful expertise, maintaining visibility with customers and prospects, and creating a credible organizational presence alongside the profiles of employees and executives.
A Company Page is not a personal profile
People and organizations behave differently on LinkedIn®. An executive can build relationships and express an individual point of view through a personal profile. A Company Page represents the organization. Its content, responses, positioning and administration therefore need to work beyond any one employee.
The strongest approach is not to choose between people and the Company Page. It is to understand the different role each plays and how they can reinforce one another.
Decide what success should look like
A larger follower count can be useful, but it is not a strategy. A Page followed by the right customers, employees, partners and industry participants may be considerably more valuable than a much larger audience with little connection to the organization.
Your objectives should reflect what the organization actually needs. Depending on the business, useful objectives might include reaching a relevant professional audience, increasing awareness within a particular market, demonstrating expertise, supporting recruitment, creating engagement around important subjects, or generating appropriate inquiries and opportunities.
Do not make every objective a lead-generation objective
Some interactions with a Company Page will contribute to commercial opportunities. Others build familiarity, confidence or understanding long before somebody is ready to contact the business. That does not make them worthless.
Company Page management works best when you recognize both immediate actions and the longer-term reputation the organization is building through repeated exposure.
Your task
Before continuing, write down the three most important things your organization needs its LinkedIn® Company Page to achieve. Then identify the primary audience associated with each objective.
Keep this list. We will use it later when deciding what to publish, who you want to attract and which measurements actually matter.