Today De-de Mulligan, President & Chief Content Specialist of the Mulligan Management Group and a LinkedIn expert talks company pages on LinkedIn. She shares how to optimize them, keep them up to date & why you should be doing this.
Episode 0358
Optimizing Your LinkedIn Company Page: Part One
Sandro Hey there, welcome back to Liz and Sandro’s Marketing Podcast. We are the podcast that helps companies and marketing departments control their business, control their brand and get the word out. Today we have our second guest ever, someone I met on Slack, a social media expert and a LinkedIn expert, De-de Mulligan.
Liz That’s right. We’re happy to have De-de here today. We are gonna be doing a deep dive on LinkedIn, which we’ve never talked about on the podcast. So we’re really excited to jump into this topic. Let me introduce De-de. She helps clients extend their marketing reach and add more value to the conversation surrounding their business. De-de leads an energetic team that delivers exceptional design and content for websites, blogs, social media posts.
De-de She’s well known for her excellent writing skills and ability to tell a compelling business story, which we all know is very important. As a consultant, De-de works closely with essential decision-makers to set digital communications goals, plan strategies and build long term relationships. Welcome to the podcast, De-de.
De-de Thank you. I’m happy to be here. So, I would like to focus today on the LinkedIn company pages. And everyone pretty much knows except Sandro. He’s learning.
Sandro Just so everyone knows, I am not on LinkedIn, nor have I ever been on LinkedIn. So this is going to be a tutorial for me too, but I don’t want to drag it, bring us down to a basic 101 level.
Liz Well, I think that’s OK because I think there are plenty of people out there who are even on LinkedIn and might be asking some of the questions you’re gonna ask. So I think it’s all good.
De-de Yes, it is. Awesome. So what I’d like to talk about is, before I jump in is, most people have a LinkedIn profile. And then there’s something called a LinkedIn company or brand page. And in the brand page, many of our clients just kind of set it up and forget it. Unfortunately they don’t often go back to it to monitor it. They might be focusing more of their time on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google My Business, all these other things, or they usually have someone that’s really, really good in one of the channels. So they might be super, super good in Instagram. But LinkedIn company pages often get neglected. They’re the neglected child of the social media platforms.
De-de But the problem with that is basically when you are trying to get business as a small business, trying to get business from another business owner, and they really don’t know you and they really don’t know your company, they might have gotten a referral from somebody or they might have seen something posted by you. They’re going to do two things. They’re going to Google you and your company first. And if you have an active LinkedIn profile, your LinkedIn profile will come up first.
De-de And if you have an active company profile, it will also come up. But they will then go on LinkedIn and Google your company. And if you don’t have a company profile and if you’re not on LinkedIn, there might be some question if you’re a really valid company or not. So what I wanted to do today was talk about some of the things that we’ve seen companies do and how we’ve helped them kind of move toward a better LinkedIn company profile. OK?
Liz Now, why do you think companies ignore LinkedIn? More than any other channel.
De-de Because I think they think they just have to set it up and forget it. So they have to put in their logo, a little picture of the background of their company banner, the number of employees that they have and encourage their employees to connect to it. And there are some things that I’ll talk about that are problematic with that as well. And they’ll put, we’re in Cleveland, Ohio, we’re in Brecksville, Ohio, wherever we have 10 to 15 employees. Here’s our website. And that’s it.
De-de And they don’t think that they have to post to it or update it or monitor it or make sure that the right number of employees are connected to it. So that’s, that in fact, that leads me into the biggest mistake that we see is they have employees that have left the company three or four years ago that are still connected.
Liz And that can get awkward.
De-de Yes.
Sandro So you as a company have to disconnect those people? Or…
Liz No, I think it’s the individual.
De-de They do. But you can ask the individual, gee, you know, it still shows you presently work for us. Can you please change it? And I can say why it often doesn’t get changed is because they put their new company, but if you don’t spell the new company exactly the way it’s in the LinkedIn profile, it will default back to the company they were connected to previously. So someone has to monitor that and make sure also new employees are in it. And also the other thing is I’ve seen companies we’ve worked with where somebody will occasionally contribute to their blog or something or an article and they’ll put that they work there. Well, they really don’t work there. They are a freelancer.
Liz Sure.
De-de And they want to say, I work for XYZ Company, which may be a well known established company like a Progressive or Sherwin-Williams or something. And they contribute content or something along those lines, but…
Liz They’re not an employee of that company. Yeah.
De-de …an employee of that company. So that’s one thing. And what it really does is erodes trust. Because now you’ve entered a conversation about your company. And I’ve gone home and I’ve checked out your company. And you said you had 13 employees and now it says you have 50 employees. Well, do you have 13 or do you have 50? And I’m working with a client right now who they have actually two locations listed on their LinkedIn company page. I asked them, so, I’m here at this physical location, which is listed on your company page. And then there’s another location listed from Lyndhurst. And he said, oh, that was our old location. I said, OK.
De-de So all these little things erode trust. And the last thing that you want to do is not have a conversation that you thought was going pretty well that might lead to some business. And they’re not going to tell you, gee, I checked you guys out. There was a problem on your LinkedIn profiles. And then that kind of bleeds into the incomplete profiles.
De-de So one of the things that LinkedIn demands, there’s a list. And you can go and say “LinkedIn company best practices” and it will come up with a list. But they want your website, number of employees, the correct employees. They want a description of who you are. They want postings. And they want, like I said, a banner, profile picture. So just like Facebook has their little banner on your company pages, that sort of thing. They want that all completed. And they have said, this is their statistic, not mine, that when you check off all the checklist and they give you a little checklist and it’s all green…
Liz Your profile is 100 percent complete or whatever.
De-de Correct. And you’ll get 30 times more views as a company than someone, a company that is your competitor who has an incomplete profile.
Liz So that’s pretty significant.
De-de Mm hmm.
Liz And for a platform that’s B2B, that matters. Yeah.
De-de Right, right. And the other research, as I said, is for B2B, it is the second most trusted tool behind Google. So it beats out Bing or Yahoo! or YouTube or any other thing that you can think of from searchability. And I know you all are focused on search abilities with SEO and SEM.
Liz We talk a lot about that.
De-de And so LinkedIn is a big search engine just like Google. And if recruiters are looking for specific talent and they happen to be looking for that talent within an agency, for example, you know, they’re not finding that talent in a person. So they might type in “digital marketing agency” or “SEO specialist.” Companies can come up in that search too, not just individuals. I mean, individuals will come up first.
Liz Sure.
De-de But companies can come up also. So if they’re frustrated, I can’t find this talent, I can’t find SAP talent. Maybe I should just outsource. Or I can’t find IT talent. Maybe I should just outsource or go to an agency to do it. If you have all the checkmarks and you’re within the location they’re looking at, you have a chance. Your company has a chance of coming up, too.
Liz I love that.
De-de So, in the search. So, that’s two things that I see, that they don’t have the right employees connected the page and they have an incomplete profile. Those are the two things that we, and they don’t post regularly. Those are the top three things that they have. So, one of the things that a takeaway for anyone that’s listening, you guys too, is you have to spell the name of the company exactly as it’s listed in LinkedIn. So if there is an LLC or an INC or whatever and you misspell it, it won’t come up with that logo. And the easiest way to tell is as long as your logo is on your LinkedIn company page, it will show it. It will start to show it. And it will show the logo.
Liz Like in a dropdown. Yeah.
De-de Correct. Correct. Yeah. But most people don’t pay attention to that or they think, oh, they just don’t have a logo or…
Liz They just want to type it in and move on to the next thing.
De-de Yeah. Right. And I just saw this recently. I have a customer who has a pretty long name and they have “, inc.” After their name. So it’s not just inc, it’s inc dot. Well somebody just typed in the first portion, that employee, and it didn’t connect them. So that’s one of the things that we train on too.
Liz It’s probably a challenge depending on the size of the company. You know, if it’s a company of five people, you can very easily educate. But if you’re suddenly training hundreds of people, that can probably become a lot to communicate and distill.
De-de Sure. And the best people, the best practices are when you’re onboarding someone. You make sure that they have all that information in front of them so they can. And a lot of times when I do the LinkedIn training, we sit down on a large screen and I actually have them go through it line item by line item.
Liz And you’re doing it together.
De-de Right. Right. So it’s a little harder, like you said, with a thousand or twenty-five thousand people. But it’s possible.
Liz And of course, when you’re that size of a company, you’re maybe, you’ve established a pretty recognizable brand and maybe you’re a little less concerned about LinkedIn as, you know, not quite as much as some of the smaller businesses might be trying to leverage it. Sure.
Sandro And can you claim a page URL like, LinkedIn/MulliganMarketing, or…
De-de Management Group? Yep.
Sandro Mulligan Management Group? Yeah.
De-de Yes. So it will, you personalize your URL just like on your personal URL on LinkedIn. So the company, yes, so when you create a page, it will ask you what do you want the page to be? And then it will tell you if there’s a problem with the page. So on like LinkedIn, LinkedIn when you create it actually gives you your personalized URL and then a dash with a bunch of numbers behind it. You have to go back and fix the vanity URL, because if your name is Joe Smith, there’s a lot of Joe Smiths.
De-de So it’s going to put a number. But you can get around that by putting your middle name in there or something like that. So on like, it’s a little different because you’re, when you’re creating the page, it’s going to ask you what your name is. And then it will tell you if that name’s already taken. So it will tell you right away. So usually you can just create it right from the get-go. The URL, the vanity.
Sandro So it’s very similar to Facebook.
De-de Yes.
Sandro Although on Facebook you have to have 40 people like your page before you can, I believe…
De-de Oh, do the vanity URL?
Sandro Yeah, correct.
De-de Right. No, you can do it right from the get-go. And actually, I, every time I’m a little hesitant to always say I’m a LinkedIn expert because every time I teach somebody I’m going…
Sandro They make a change.
De-de Well, that used to be over here. Now it’s over here.
Liz Whenever I’m doing training with a client, a screen share or something, on any tool, I always start the session by saying, you know, I give a little disclaimer. You know, we know this tool very well, but I could log in right now and something may have changed. So, if that happens, just bear with me. Because this stuff changes so fast.
De-de Exactly. Exactly. So the current way to do it, as of today at whatever, 1:52 pm.
Liz Friday the 13th at approximately 2:00 p.m., yeah.
De-de So, is you go to your little picture at the top of your main page and you, it brings down a very long dropdown. And at the very bottom, it has a blue button that has a plus that says, “Create Company Page.” And you click on that, and you, if you’re a small business, even if you’re a small business of one, I’d still recommend that this be created and that you post there too. Even if you post on your regular LinkedIn profile. I post on both. I post on my LinkedIn personal and the business one too.
Liz Yeah. So tell us a little bit about some of that content. Is it the same? Is it different? Tell me about the frequency. I’m curious.
De-de Sure. OK. So Google, I mean, I’m sorry. LinkedIn says you should post twice a day.
Liz What?
De-de I think that’s a little excessive myself. And I don’t think it’s valuable to post on the weekends because you’re a B2B channel. So most people aren’t going to be checking…
Liz Most people are taking that time for themselves. Yeah.
De-de Exactly. So I post once a day generally and I use a scheduling tool to do that. And right now I post the same content on my company page as my personal profile. But what I’ve found generally is if you have the time and the inclination and I’m a small company and I can get away with that, but if you have the time and inclination you should post separately, two types of different posts.
Liz Sure.
De-de The ones that don’t resonate and we’ve been doing this for a while, are the stock pictures that have very little content and very little value to the user. The ones that really do well are where you’re out an event, you’re snapping a couple of pics and you’re pushing that user may be back to the event page or you’re just hashtagging the event.
Liz Yeah, or providing some piece of knowledge that’s useful. OK.
De-de Right. So one of my clients has a lot of partners, vendors that like her page and they actually go to the page.
Liz For updates. Wow.
De-de Yeah, and they like the updates. So it’s like working organically for them and we’ve just kind of been doing this for about a year and talking to the different vendors and asking them to go on to the pages. But oftentimes they see themselves in the pictures because where they’re out at events or various, promoting different partners or vendors or that sort of thing. So the page isn’t exclusively about the company. It’s about kind of spreading the goodwill with, among their vendors too and events, different events. So that seems to work super well.
Liz All right. Well, we are going to pause there and continue this discussion in our next episode where we’ll dive a little bit deeper into the nuances of a LinkedIn company page. Thank you for joining us. Don’t forget to check us out on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. If you have any questions or comments about LinkedIn, send us an email. We’d love to hear from you. We’ll definitely give you a shout out in the show and we’ll see you next time.