There have been a whole raft of changes throughout the LinkedIn site over a number of months now … and they’re not finished yet!

One area that has seen a host of changes has been the Company Pages which have been continually developed in a variety of different ways. Having started out as a simple profile page for companies, it has now becoame a key tool for companies both large and small, providing an important additional resource from a marketing and visibility perspective.

Hopefully, you have the key elements of your own company pages in place already but here are some elements that I’d advise to take a quick check over to make sure that you are using them to best effect.

1. Get a banner in place on your Company Pages homepage
The whole Company Pages section has been given much more visual impact in its latest rework and one key element here has been the graphic that you can – indeed must – add at the top of the ‘Home’ page. What you put there is of course up to you but taking your website branding and imagery, and then re-creating here might be a sensible start point.

2. Use the Company Description field to full effect
This text area was extended when the ‘graphically enhanced’ profile came into effect last year and was also relegated to the bottom of the page, so you now have considerably more space to play with than before. Use it! Also remember that the first 25 – 30 words will appear in the pop up box on the individual personal profiles of your staff so make sure it delivers a punchy opening message.

3. Have more than one “Designated Admin”
The ‘Designated Admins’ are those people who are able to edit your Company Pages. I’ve had a number of companies recently who have wanted to update their pages only to find that the one person who had admin rights had now left the company. Don’t fall into the same trap and make sure you have at least a couple of people as editors – hey, you might even get an additional perspective in what you put out there.

4. Add both versions of the company logo
There are two images / logos that you can add onto your company page – one rectangular that appears at the top of your page and the other one square. Do make sure that you add in both – otherwise, if you are missing the default square one, then as you put out the updates from the company, you may find that LinkedIn has rather squashed the logo that sits alongside it.

5. Plan how to increase the number of Company followers
There are very few companies able to attract followers just by putting up a page – just like your website, it’s something to promote which will pay dividends when you start to benefit from the push marketing opportunities that it offers you. Get a plan together – this is a free targetted marketing opportunity you can’t afford to miss.

6. Introduce your Products and Services successfully
Use the two key elements on your products and services homepage present the items there to best effect – at the top, use the banner(s) (you can have up to three) to reinforce your branding and messaging before then letting the text introduction tell people what they are going to be seeing below and to introduce the benefits that your products / services can offer them.

7. Add contacts on the individual Products page
One of the calls to action open to us from the individual products page is to introduce the key contacts within our company to the people who have alreday been attracted by our product or service. So make sure that you have filled the three slots available to you with their names (and LinkedIn connects to their profiles) so they can be reached for further information.

8. Link through to the relevant landing page
The other key call to action is the link back to the relevant page on your website. Don’t just send them off to your homepage – make sure that you send them to the page on your website containing the information that they’re interested in and which backs up what they’ve already seen and been attracted to on LinkedIn.

9. Create custom homepages for key audiences
Remember that your Company pages offer an important customisation option allowing you to create up to 30 targeted versions of your products homepage. Focused introduction text, specific images, optimal ordering of individual products – all of these are available for you to define and automatically deliver to a series of defined target audiences, whether that might be according to job function, industry or geographic area.

10. Get and display Recommendations
Social Proof is at the core of getting your company’s credentials out there in front of the right people – having recommendations for your products and services from people who your prospects already know is key and hugely important. Make sure that you encourage people to recommend your products where appropriate – build it into your follow-up mechanisms.

We’ve only touched on the elements here that we can build into the company pages and perhaps the key element of integration with the other marketing tools that you have at your disposal. But for now, getting the elements above in place as a start point and then build from there.

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Mark White, LinkedIn trainer

My passion is helping companies and individuals to use LinkedIn more effectively - what I mean by that is use it to develop new business, find a new role, to market yourself, your company and products ... whatever your reason for using LinkedIn is!

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With the new personal profiles on LinkedIn, graphics and visibility are becoming more and more the order of the day.

One aspect of this is the company logo which now appears next to the company name of where you have worked within the Experience section, highlighting the company and its branding. All well and good if it’s where you work now, I’m sure you’ll agree. However, what about for the places you used to work?

Again, in lots of cases, not too much of an issue – in fact, showing that you spent ‘x’ number of years at one of the big players in your sector will probably serve you well. But there will be circumstances where the company in question is perhaps a competitor – showing you worked there still shouldn’t be an issue, but marketing them through having the logo appear? Not so high on your wish list.

If you want to avoid that then, because the logo is pulled from the Company Page, all you have to do is break that link. So, on your ‘Edit Profile’ page, scroll down to the ‘Experience’ section and click on the ‘edit’ icon next to the past position in question. Click on ‘Change Company’ at the top and then type in the name of the company again – but don’t click on its name in the list which appears below. Finally click ‘save changes’ at the bottom.

Now, you can show that you worked at the company and display all the experience you gained with it, but without having to market their competing brand in the process.

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Mark White, LinkedIn trainer

My passion is helping companies and individuals to use LinkedIn more effectively - what I mean by that is use it to develop new business, find a new role, to market yourself, your company and products ... whatever your reason for using LinkedIn is!

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Well it looks like LinkedIn’s new profile for our personal accounts is being rolled out to the next phase of people and speeding up a little in the process, so I felt it was time to give a bit of a lowdown on it and what you are going to need to do.

By the way, for those who are coming along to the Public workshops in January, don’t worry it will all be included there! As a very quick aside – lots of new locations and a special offer to launch them with on the 2013 Public Schedule – you can find details here!

This is quite a long post, so feel free to dip in and out of the areas of most interest to you.

There’s good and bad to report

On with the details! To start with, I have some good news and I have some bad news – as ever, in this type of upgrade, LinkedIn does like to give with one hand and take away with the other, so it would seem appropriate to start with a quick summary.

The bad news first: the Applications that many of us have lovingly tended on our profiles and which have proven to be such a boost in a variety of key uses have been abandoned in their current format. (Read on for ways you can still get some of them). In addition, there has also been the abandonment of other elements on the site which have now disappeared such as the Events and the Polls options.

And the good news? Well, the profiles are a lot more visual in nature which is designed to make them more engaging and, along with that, we have a ‘rich media’ option which allows us to embed a variety of files and formats and which replaces in part some of the applications and makes the addition of video a much simpler process. I also consider that the re-instatement of the ‘Updates’ section showing our latest activity is a good step because of the additional marketing options it offers.

What’s new then?

More Graphic – The first thing that you are likely to notice is the much more graphic feel to the page with logos appearing next to your current and past jobs and a series of graphic representations of your network in the right hand side bar.

Commonalities – One element here that I think will prove to be useful are the elements that you have in common with people – now it graphically shows which Groups you have in common, which Skills you share as well as Interests and also Location. This should help identify at a glance – along with the Shared Connections section which has also be made more visual – if there are major overlaps between you and the person whose profile you’re looking at. Ideal for the ‘points of reference’ when and if you decide to send your personalised invitation to connect.

Profile sections – The main body of your profile has also been divided up differently with a series of different sections divided up into areas which include:

1. Activity (ie. your latest updates and activity on the site)
2. Background (containing Experience, Education, Skills, Projects etc.)
3. Recommendations (the full list, although 2 appear at the bottom of each position in the Experience section)
4. Connections (if you haven’t hidden them)
5. Groups
6. Following (Companies & Thought Leaders that you follow which is new.)

The order that these main sections appear in seems to be fixed but you can move the elements around within the ‘Background’ section, where to be honest most of the ‘meaty’ content sits, so that in fact gives a good deal of flexibility there. You can also still choose the order that your ‘Current Roles’ appear in as previously which is helpful.

NB. I should add that it is still good to think about the order here and adjust the display accordingly just as you hopefully were doing on the old format.

Activity & Updates – Right at the top, straight after the overview section containing your photo, LinkedIn have re-instated the ‘Activity’ section which used to appear in past re-incarnations of the profile. This will potentially allow you to highlight particular articles or events that you wish to push and it will be interesting to see if LinkedIn gives us the ‘Featured post’ option here as they have on the Company Updates page. As a final point of note, you can now also send out Updates directly from your profile page rather than the homepage.

Recommendations – the recommendations get both sides of the coin – they are highlighted much more and you get two which are prominently displayed at the bottom of each position that you have with a link to additional ones. There is also a photo of the person leaving the recommendation which in itself brings then to life. However, the main Recommendations section containing all of them has been relegated further down the profile page and below the Endorsements which of course sits as part of the Skills and Expertise element with the ‘ Background section.

So what gives with the Applications?

Well a lot, to be honest, are just being abandoned – or at least it seems that way. Certainly, the Events section disappeared on 26th November and the Polls section (other than those available in the individual Groups) also seems to have made an unannounced exit – both these apps are understandably missing from the menus (though you can access the Polls via your Settings page, rather bizarrely). Likewise the Reading List from Amazon is no longer available together with ManyMoon and GitHub.

The others seem to be available still to varying degrees of satisfaction, though in some cases I’d be loathe to call it a real replacement. Blogs – a topic as many of you will know that is dear to my heart – seem to no longer be able to be displayed although you can link up WordPress blogs using their Jetpack plugin though that isn’t really a solution. The fate of the others is outlined (with some useful links) in the Help Center files on LinkedIn here.

Rich Media Solution

The solution that LinkedIn has given is what they call Rich Media which is actually good in terms of what it does but, if I was going to gripe, does still lack the variety of opportunities and control that having the different applications offered. We also lose the ability to connect multiple accounts to a single external source which I found (such as a blog or box.net account) which allowed greater cohesion across a team or company.

However, focusing on the positives, it allows us to add media links to images, presentations, videos, and documents directly on certain areas of our profile such as the Summary and Experience sections. This means that with individual files, it becomes very easy to highlight elements that you may have on YouTube or Presentations that have created to promote the organisation or demonstrate your area of expertise.

If we take Box.net as an example, you can still link in your Box.net application to a certain extent as you are able to link and display specific files from your account. Personally, I don’t find this as neat as the previous solution and it really doesn’t pander to those who kept multiple files as an information resource – it does nevertheless offer a great deal more flexibility.

The information directly from Box.net states that to add files held in Box.net you should:

“copy and paste the file’s direct link in the LinkedIn professional gallery on the page. Find the direct link by previewing the file as you normally would in Box, selecting File Options > Share > Get Link to File and then clicking on Direct Link to generate the URL. Paste it directly in the LinkedIn professional gallery. Repeat the same steps for other files you’d like to add to your profile.”

Others follow a similar format but will often need to be hosted so a blog might take on an additional role in that capacity.

There is a list of the types of files that you will be able to incorporate into your profile in LinkedIn’s Help section here.

What should you do in response

So how are you going to incorporate all of this into making sure that your profile – the thing that needs to make a great first impression on your behalf and market you & what you do – really works for you at all levels?

Well, here are some initial thoughts:

1. Remember to get the basics right: the core elements remain the same and so a good ‘Professional headline’, an expanded Job Title and then good, focused and compelling (and keyword sprinkled) text for the Job Description and Summary sections will set you off in the right direction.

2. Keep Active: with the Activity feed now up front and visible, it’s a good place to ensure that you use it as the marketing tool it is, not just for push marketing out to your connections but also with a latest activity at the top of your profile for all visitors to see.

3. Get Rich Media-ed: sorry about the grammar, but the sentiment is there! It’s always been important to use all of the elements at your disposal to stand out and with the Slideshare and Box.net options essentially sidelined, make sure you are using the Rich Media options in their place and customise the titles to suit your business purposes. Get people to stop and look at your content and Profile!

4. Recommendations: make the first two recommendation against each job your best / most relevant ones because these will then be highlighted directly below the Job Description text. Extra visibility so extra impact. You can change the order they appear under each position from within the Recommendations section.

5. Skills & Endorsements: it is also sensible to ensure that your Skills and Expertise section (with the Endorsements in tow) is working positively for you as this is now included in the Background section. While not keen on it myself, people are using it and taking notice of it, so it’s important to make sure you benefit too. [My full thoughts on the Endorsements issue here]

6. Think about Interests: although I’m not usually one for getting masses of personal stuff in here, with LinkedIn highlighting the Interests that you admit to (!) and that you have in common, now might be the time to beef up these and help people to get in touch.

Summing Up

There’s a lot of good stuff that LinkedIn is doing here. They are trying to make the site more engaging and to allow us the users to do the same – I’ve always said that you need to stand out (in a good way) on LinkedIn to succeed here and we now have additional tools at our disposal to achieve that.

I’m disappointed by the loss of the Applications as the individual opportunities and level of functionality that they offered I felt were really worthwhile. However, it is what it is and we need to make the most of what we have available to achieve our aims for being on the site.

Personally, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on how to achieve that here on the blog, on LinkedIn and also in the workshops in 2013 and beyond … I hope to see you in one of those venues.

Author information

Mark White, LinkedIn trainer

My passion is helping companies and individuals to use LinkedIn more effectively - what I mean by that is use it to develop new business, find a new role, to market yourself, your company and products ... whatever your reason for using LinkedIn is!

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There has been a tendency over recent weeks and months for LinkedIn to try to encourage more social interaction on the site via a number of different elements that they have been building in.

The updates on our homepages are now accompanied with bigger images (sometimes even with the right sizing!), changes to LinkedIn Today have opened up additional avenues for us to share information and be seen doing it and the ability to follow the new ‘Thought Leaders’ section has also encouraged this spread. All of this has allegedly been with the goal of getting more sharing going on … though I don’t supposed it has harmed the ‘time spent on the site’ stats either!

Anyway, so much for all the enhancements, but what exactly are our options when it comes to interacting and sharing things that we find on LinkedIn. And, specifically, what do the links at the bottom of an update (for example) actually allow us to do?

Like

Firstly, the ‘like’ option on LinkedIn has absolutely nothing to do with the Facebook and the much vaunted ‘like’ function there. On LinkedIn, when you click on the ‘Like’ link that sits below the various updates, then this immediately (ie. there’s no ‘do you wish to continue?’ type of message) forwards that update out to all of your 1st level connections where it will appear in their update stream on their homepage. For those Twitter users amongst you, it essentially achieves the same as a retweet.

As an aside, if someone has already seen the original message, then they don’t get the whole message again but rather your name gets added at the bottom to indicate you have liked it. Only those who haven’t already received it see the whole message … which can help save embarrassment if multiple members of a company or team ‘like’ a key update.

Comment

Does what it says on the tin really. Clicking on the ’comment’ link allows you to comment on someone’s update – this sends a message back to them and also pushes the comment and the initial update out to your 1st level connections again.

If there is a tried and tested way to develop a conversation, then this has to be it. Leave a comment to respond to someone’s post and add something to the topic – in doing so, you reinforce your relationship with the person or take the first steps in establishing one. In addition, you share something that you clearly find of value, plus your own take on it, with not only those you know but also all the others who have received the post … a little bit of content marketing sent out in the LinkedIn world if you want to look at it like that.

Share

This gives you most options … and is a two stage process. Clicking on the ‘share’ option allows you to either redistribute the article as an update to your 1st level connections, post it to a group (or multiple groups), or forward it in a message to your connections which then arrives at their inbox on LinkedIn.

Each of these has a number of benefits but, as ever, should be used with a level of caution.

1. Sharing an update starts a new ‘thread’; that’s to say a 1st level connection could indeed get to see it more than once – this has been particularly the case of late with people sharing ‘Thought Leader’ posts;
2. With groups, multiple postings where they are not specifically relevant to the group can be regarded as spamming which is not a good idea;
3. And especially with the messaging option – it is a great direct marketing method but it’s also imperative that you use with caution. Of all the share options this can get you disconnected from people the quickest if they believe that you are spamming them.

So lots of options … but do use them appropriately and, as with everything when it comes to social media, do think about what you want to achieve with them and use them accordingly.

Author information

Mark White, LinkedIn trainer

My passion is helping companies and individuals to use LinkedIn more effectively - what I mean by that is use it to develop new business, find a new role, to market yourself, your company and products ... whatever your reason for using LinkedIn is!

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You can’t have failed to notice over the past couple of weeks that your updates have been filled with notifications of people endorsing each other. Whether this has been annoying you or has encouraged you to check out the profiles of those people, you’ll probably have your own opinion as to whether this is a key new feature or a step in the wrong direction.

Anyway, here’s mine …

For me, LinkedIn is a professional business that people use in a variety of ways from networking to developing business, to recruiting or job hunting. As such, anything that enhances your reputation or helps you achieve this is of benefit, particularly if it increases your standing amongst your peers or ‘ticks’ one of the list of requirements that potential prospects are working through.

My issue with endorsements is that I don’t feel they add a great deal in either respect, particularly to those who use the site a lot. You are prompted to endorse someone’s skills when you visit their profile and it’s done in an instant. There’s no real guarantee or vetting process to validate that you know much about the person or the skill you are endorsing. You are also encouraged to endorse skills which may not be the most apt ones … they are just the ones you are presented with.

Recommendations, however, do add real value in my opinion and the product recommendations likewise – here you have to think about and write why the person you recommend has ‘delivered’. But the endorsements are an easy click … one that really does not take any great effort or contain any real value.

What are others saying?

I have looked at a number of evaluations of the endorsement system over the past couple of weeks and there has been a distinct split for me.

Those who use the system as a business development tool from a B2B perspective have generally been against it. The worries expressed have generally centred around the lack of checking into an endorsement, the randomness of those that are initially highlighted to us, some technical issues and the ability for people to add them to someone else’s profile creating inconsistencies and duplications in some cases.

Those who consider the site to be primarily an internet marketing tool (and not so interested in using the relationship value) have on the other hand been supportive – if I were of a cynical persuasion, then I might add because it is both visual and easily gamed.

There’s a “but” …

To sum up my thoughts: I don’t like the system and feel little attraction in getting involved with it. It lacks substance in my opinion because it is too easily gamed and too easy for people to use casually … without thought in many cases (though by no means all!). I believe that those who use the site extensively, day in day out are aware of this.

However, most people don’t fall into this category nor do they spend large swathes of time on the site. Most people, including those you may be looking to work with, use it much less frequently – they are rightly selective of the time they dedicate. So a system such as the ‘endorsements’ which appears to offer access to an easy ‘ranking’ system of the skills and expertise that they are searching for when they look at potential suppliers / partners / candidates, seems to be an absolute godsend and something they will put great store by.

The dilemma therefore is whether I stick to ‘principles’ and stay away from it or let my commercial requirements take the upper hand, thereby making sure that I compete on all fronts and tout my wares when people look at my skills. Being a business person (and realist) I am likely, reluctantly, to do the latter – effectively because this is a business tool to me and I need to use all its capabilities as such.

Use the rules of the community

As a final thought: when we are on LinkedIn, we are part of a community which acts within certain “house rules”. If we want to be visible and achieve our aims for being on the site, then we need to use all relevant tools at our disposal to help us in that process, working within those rules. Here, with the introduction of the endorsements feature, the rules have changed and so we have to adapt accordingly. Therefore, like it or not, I will need to develop endorsements for the skills I have listed and perhaps even the skills I have assigned to my profile will need to change.

Realistically, therefore, that will also need to be the advice I pass on at my LinkedIn training sessions … and perhaps it’s that last comment that indicates most clearly which side of the fence I actually fall.

Author information

Mark White, LinkedIn trainer

My passion is helping companies and individuals to use LinkedIn more effectively - what I mean by that is use it to develop new business, find a new role, to market yourself, your company and products ... whatever your reason for using LinkedIn is!

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