Linkedin Best Practices for Growing Companies

LinkedIn is a platform full of possibilities, allowing you to significantly expand your network but also to get in touch with your target audience. In the last decade, LinkedIn has grown into the most prominent professional network platform in the world. It has allowed companies to advertise and spread more awareness about their business. It has also allowed individuals to find new jobs or expand their brands. In order to get the most out of the platform, you should know some of the LinkedIn best practices. 

When it comes to LinkedIn, you should pay attention to the different aspects of the platform. There are best practices for every type of engagement on the platform. That’s why we cover a wide variety of ways to engage on the platform and list the best practices for all different ways. 

Following best practices will help you get the most out of the platform, and allow you to quickly expand your network and create more awareness for your company. In the end, it all comes down to adding value to other people’s lives and the different ways of engaging on the platform allow you to do that. 

LinkedIn Best Practices for Profiles

Your LinkedIn profile is shown in many places on the platform. LinkedIn even gives you a ton of advice on how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out within these different places. 

For example, to show up in search results often, it is important to use the right keywords on your profile. This will ensure that you rank high on the search results page, meaning more people will see your profile. But there are more ways to stand out with your LinkedIn profile.

In this section we cover:

1. Why you should use a great profile picture

2. What to use for your LinkedIn cover photo

3. Turning your job into a description

4. How to explain what your company provides

5. How to write a summary

Use a good profile picture

Your profile picture is a great place to show people who you are. Put on a smile, it goes a long way. Wear professional clothes and take a well-lit photo.

A good profile picture is of high quality (not pixelated) and shows your face. There’s no need for a busy LinkedIn background, a team picture (which makes it hard to see who you are), or a full-length photo. A good picture of your face is all that’s needed to stand out from the crowd.

Use the right LinkedIn cover photo

LinkedIn cover photos can be really helpful when it comes to spreading your message or making people aware of what you are offering. You can use the LinkedIn cover photo to tell more about your company, products, or services. 

By using a good background image that includes a headline about your product or service, profile visitors will instantly see what you have to offer. You don’t need many words, a sentence or two is enough. The standard LinkedIn cover photo doesn’t show much about you, but using a custom cover photo will make it easier to stand out on the platform.

Describing what you do

The way your profile is shown on search pages and in sections such as ‘people like [name of person]’ is just with a single picture and your current role at your company. It’s important to optimize this, as it is usually the reason why people check out your profile. For example, if you’re the CEO of the company, you can use “CEO” as your role, along with something like “CEO at Anyleads - We make lead generation easy”. This doesn’t just show people what you do at your company, it also shows what your company does. It will help you stand out to use LinkedIn as a lead generation platform.

Some other examples for great Linkedin roles:

Talk about experience and expertise

On your profile, you have an entire section in which you can talk about what you currently do at the company you work with. This is the perfect place to talk about all the different ways that you are helping people with your products or services. It also allows you to tell others who your target audience is and why people should check out your website to learn more. 

You should see LinkedIn as another landing page for your company and it’s important that you know how to use it to draw in more visitors to your website. In turn, this will result in more potential customers. Describe what you do at the company and how people can contact you outside of LinkedIn. 

Your summary is the way to draw more people in

You can add a personal summary to your LinkedIn profile. This is a great place to drop several keywords related to your role and your company. In case someone is looking for someone like you, you can stand out by using the related keywords. Check out our article on the best LinkedIn summary examples for more inspiration when crafting your own.

Example: if someone is looking for a CTO and you run a platform where companies can find a CTO, it is smart to use the keyword “CTO” in your profile summary multiple times. LinkedIn’s algorithm will see that your profile is about CTOs, which means that it will show your profile when people are searching for this exact keyword. 

Always link to your company page

Though LinkedIn mostly runs on personal profiles, it also helps to link to your company profile on LinkedIn. By adding the company profile page, visitors on your page can click through to your company page where they can find more information about your company. 

LinkedIn Company Pages - Best Practices

Image source: HubSpot

LinkedIn company pages allow you to describe the products and services that your company sells. You can write status updates about your company, which will then show up on the personalized news feed of LinkedIn users who follow your page (or on news feeds of LinkedIn users that are connected to someone that follows your company page and engages with your content). This means that your company page is a great way to drive engagement on the platform and draw more people to your website.

In this section we explain:

1. How to use keywords on your company page

2. Why add a logo

3. Why add a cover photo

4. How to post engaging content

Optimize your LinkedIn company page with keywords

Keywords aren’t just important on personal pages. They also help people find your company on the platform. It’s important to use keywords that your target audience might use when they are looking for products or services that your company offers. 

Using these keywords in the company profile will help LinkedIn to understand what your page is about and will include it in the search results. By adding the keyword and related keywords, the page will get more views in the search results, allowing you to attract more visitors to your website. 

Add your company logo to your LinkedIn company page

Just like on your personal page, LinkedIn allows you to upload a profile image to your company page. A best practice here is to simply add your company logo to the company page. Adding your logo will create better visibility for your company and increase brand awareness. A visitor might not check out your website today, but if they see your logo again in the future it might draw them in and check out what products and services your company offers. 

Add your unique selling points to the company’s cover photo

LinkedIn cover photos are a great way to talk about your company and tell your visitors what your company is all about. Adding a sentence or two to your cover photo will show visitors your unique selling points, which will then entice them to check out the entire profile page and draw them to your website.

Don’t forget to add a link to your website/landing page on the company page

Though LinkedIn has all kinds of ways of optimizing your company page, it is not completely customizable. It’s hard to turn visitors on your company page into leads or customers because the platform doesn’t provide any ways to do so. Instead, you should send visitors to your website, where they can learn more about your company and sign up for your product or service.

Some extra best practices for your company links:

• Add a UTM_parameter to the link to understand traffic sources in your Analytics platform

• You can use a dedicated landing page for LinkedIn traffic with a special offer

• Avoid using link shorteners in your company URL as they look less professional

Post engaging content to your company page

As mentioned above, LinkedIn shows your company page’s status updates to your page followers. These posts will show up on their news feed. But you can also increase the engagement and views of these updates, which allows you to pop up on LinkedIn users’ news feed outside of your follower network as well. 

When one of your followers likes your status update, it will show up on the news feed of all the connections of that specific follower. So, in short, if your followers like your update, you have the potential of showing up on hundreds of other news feeds as well. 

By posting engaging content often, you can significantly increase your brand awareness. If you want to learn how to write engaging LinkedIn posts, check out the next section.

LinkedIn Posts Best Practices

Because the LinkedIn audience is made up of professionals, it’s important to create professional and engaging content that will draw people in. By learning the best practices for LinkedIn posts, you can see what types of posts work best and how you can utilize LinkedIn’s algorithm to show up on thousands and sometimes even tens of thousands of news feeds all around the world. 

In this section we explain:

1. Why short valuable content works best

2. How to add links to your posts

3. Why videos work well

4. How to get engagement on your posts

Keep it short but valuable

When it comes to great LinkedIn posts, you should keep it short yet make sure you put a lot of information in that brief post. Most people scroll through their news feed and don’t have time to read long posts. The average attention span on LinkedIn is - just like other social media platforms - pretty short, and catch their attention by standing out in the first seconds is extremely important. 

That’s why you should start with a simple sentence that will draw people in and create enough curiosity to click the ‘read more’ button to check out the rest of your post. LinkedIn updates with three short sentences and a lot of white space work really well on LinkedIn. 

Post URLs in a comment, not in the post

The LinkedIn algorithm works in a very specific way and it’s important to understand the workings of it in order to get the most out of the engagement on the platform. Status updates with URLs score significantly worse than posts without URLs. But, if you want to draw people to your website, you do want to include URLs in your posts. 

That’s why you should add your URL in the first comment of the post, rather than in the status update itself. LinkedIn doesn’t really like the direct linking in the status update so your post will have less visibility. But if you add ‘check the link in the first comment’, you will still be able to get people to check out your website or blog post. 

When it comes to URLs, you want to:

• Make sure your URLs look clean so no long links

• Use a link shortener in some cases (as it allows you to track engagement)

• Add a UTM_parameter to the link to track the traffic source in your Analytics platform

Videos do extremely well on LinkedIn

In the last few years, we have seen a big uprise of video content all over social media. They are easy to digest and are often a lot more entertaining than reading. Videos on LinkedIn usually have a high engagement if they really speak to the target audience. 

Creating short videos - about 15 to 30 seconds long - will help you provide a lot of interesting information and not take a lot of time from your target audience. This means they are also more likely to click the ‘like’ button or comment on your post. 

Some ideas for videos:

• Create a video with the latest trends in your market

• Summarize an interview with your company’s founder

• Record a short audio message and add images with text overlays

Let people engage with your content

A high engagement rate on your LinkedIn status update means that it will be shown on more news feeds. LinkedIn’s algorithm looks at the average engagement rate of a video and will show high performing status updates on the news feed first. If you can tap into the strength of the engagement, you are much more likely to spread your message on the platform.

This all starts with a simple trick: if you have something great to share with your target audience, such as a whitepaper, rather than linking them to a landing page, you should ask them to comment on your post. Comments have a high value when it comes to engagement. The connections of the people that comment on your status update will also see your post on their news feed. You can then personally message the people that commented on your post with a link to your whitepaper or send the PDF directly on LinkedIn. 

Best Practices for Sharing Articles on LinkedIn

Whether you are linking to your blog posts on your website or want high engagement on the articles you post to Linkedin’s content platform, Pulse, you want to make sure that you get the best results. 

In this section we explain:

1. Why images are important

2. Why you should use LinkedIn Pulse

Always include an image in your post

Images are essential when it comes to drawing people to your content. The featured image of your article can make or break the total engagement and the number of visitors that the posts attract. 

Creating a customized featured image is often better than just using the standard image that your website provides as a featured image. This is because you can customize the message in the featured image to speak to your LinkedIn audience. 

There’s a small bias to LinkedIn Pulse

When it comes to getting results on your website, it is smart to just host your blog posts on your website and link to it directly through your own posts. But LinkedIn’s algorithm has a small bias towards attracting people to articles on its own content platform. 

This isn’t rare. Social media platforms would often rather keep their users on their own platform instead of linking them to different destinations on the Internet. So, it can be useful to publish the article on LinkedIn Pulse rather than your website. You can also choose to republish the blog posts from your website to LinkedIn Pulse once it has been indexed in Google. If you do not wait for Google to index it, Google might think your blog posts were directly copied from LinkedIn, meaning the LinkedIn Pulse post will show up in the rankings instead of your own post. 

Pay attention to the LinkedIn post best practices

Sharing content such as blog posts comes down to following best practices. Try to get a high engagement rate by making people comment on the post so you will show up on more news feeds.

Best Practices for Connecting with Other Members

LinkedIn is the perfect platform to connect with your target audience or people that you are interested in. Sadly, the world of LinkedIn connections has turned into a giant cloud of SPAM. People don’t really try to make a personal connection anymore, it’s all about trying to connect to as many people in your target audience as possible without actually paying attention to how you approach these people. But, if you want to see great results, you should do the exact opposite. 

When it comes to turning your contacts or potential leads into LinkedIn connections, you can use the LinkedIn email finder.

In this section we explain:

1. Why you should pay attention to who you are adding

2. Why you should use personalized messages

3. How to avoid being too commercial

Pay attention to who you are adding

If you use any LinkedIn automation tool, you can collect a lot of different LinkedIn profiles and add them automatically with any message that you want. But, it’s important to know who you are adding. 

When it comes to boosting your connections on LinkedIn, quality beats quantity. There’s no need to add thousands of connections when none of them would be interested in the product or service that you are providing. You want connections that will engage with your content, that might check out your website and who can become your potential customers in the future. 

Make sure you understand the person you are connecting to on LinkedIn to improve the conversion rate of connection requests. When you use LinkedIn automation tools, you should definitely pay attention to the quality of the people you are adding.

Some questions to ask yourself before adding someone:

Connect with a personalized message

Personalized messages will significantly improve your results on LinkedIn. Most LinkedIn users get several new connection requests a day and most of them don’t include a message. Yet, if you add a personalized message describing why you want to connect with them, you will see that more people will accept your connection request. This will then result in more connections for your LinkedIn account, resulting in more potential engagement on your content. 

Some examples for your personalized message:

Do not immediately sell your services

It might look like a great idea to approach dozens of LinkedIn users a day with your newest product or service. Yet most people on LinkedIn already get several commercial messages a day and it’s easy to just ignore those. 

Instead, you want to build micro-relationships on the platform. Don’t instantly go for the sale just like you wouldn’t try to immediately sell something to someone in the first sentence of a meeting. People buy from people and companies that they like. Adding connections on LinkedIn is the perfect first step for that.