25 Tips to Build Your LinkedIn Following

By Chris Horton,

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 130 million members following over 1.9 million companies worldwide.

A LinkedIn Company Page provides an ideal platform to tell your story, engage with followers, and share career opportunities. It helps humanize your business, giving visitors a chance to learn about the people behind your organization. It also provides an efficient way to speak to millions of professionals through word-of-mouth recommendations and trusted testimonials.

Oh yeah, it also generates leads.

A Company Page gives your business an opportunity to showcase your products and services, as well as to seek out opportunities with millions of business professionals who are also consumers. With this kind of B2B and B2C reach, it’s no wonder LinkedIn dominates Twitter and Facebook for online lead generation.

In a recent study of over 5,000 businesses, inbound marketing industry leader HubSpot found that traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate, at 2.74%, almost 3 times higher (277%) than both Twitter (.69%) and Facebook (.77%).¹

Sound Interesting? Here are 25 tips to build up your LinkedIn following:

1. Set-Up a Complete User Profile- People form connections with people, not companies. Flesh out the details of your life, such as past experience, education and skills; be sure to add yourself as an employee or member of your company.
2. Add your Photo- People are more likely to connect with you and your company if they can put a face to a name.
3. Customize your Public URL- You should edit your profile so that your LinkedIn profile URL looks like http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname. To do this, click on “edit” next to your public profile URL, and then “edit” once again on your public profile settings page.
4. Activate Company Page Status Updates- Make sure to add yourself as admin so you’re able to edit your page and publish status updates.
5. Company Overview- Create a Company Overview description, adding the most important information first (the first 8 lines are visible before being truncated).
6. Insert Landing Page Link to Overview- Don’t miss out on an easy lead gen opportunity. Link to your website homepage, about us page, blog, or a targeted offer such as an upcoming webinar.
7. Add Company Specialties- Optimize your page’s internal SEO. Help people searching for companies like yours within LinkedIn find you by clarifying exactly what you do.
8.  Link to Company Website- Leverage the vast LinkedIn community by making it easy for your target audience to find your website.
9. Ask for Recommendations- Endorsements from colleagues, partners, and clients highlight your experience and underscore your credibility.
10. Include Products/Services- The “Products” section of a LinkedIn page provides an opportunity to link to and explain each of your products and services. Ask existing customers to “recommend” your products.

Tips 11 - 25 and complete business2community article