Week 7: Creating a Company Profile
In Week 7, I’ll take you step by step through creating your own company profile on LinkedIn. Even if you already have a company profile, do a quick read through this section to make sure your profile is fully optimized. LinkedIn has made a lot of changes within the past year, such as adding targeted product and service pages and company status updates. Make sure you are making the most of what LinkedIn has to offer.
Monday: Get Started on Your Company Profile
It’s Monday morning and a great time to get started on creating your company profile. Before you do, it’s a good idea to see if your company already has a profile on LinkedIn. Many people are surprised to discover that a company profile already exists. The reason for this is, for a while, LinkedIn was prompting everyone who added a company to their experience section to create a company. There were a lot of company profiles created by people who didn’t know what they were doing. So first step first, check to see if your company already has a profile on LinkedIn.
You can search for your company’s LinkedIn profile by going to the Company tab and clicking Search Companies. Or on the right-hand side of your page, in the general search area, click the Company option in the drop-down box. Both options will take you to the same page. In Search Companies, simply type in your company name and click Search.
If your company does in fact have a profile, check to see if you’re in a position to edit it. If you see a small blue box on the right side of your page that says Admin Tools (as shown in Figure 4-1), then you are in good shape.
If there is no such box, check the Overview, Careers And Products And Services menu. There should be a linked message that reads, “To edit company pages please contact an admin,” and then under that is a See Admin List link. Those are the people who are currently administering the page and they can give you administrative rights.
If you see your company profile but do not have the option of seeing the admin list, then contact customer service at [email protected]. You will have to meet LinkedIn’s requirements for adding or editing company pages. These requirements are as follows:
- You must be a current company employee and your position must appear on your profile.
- You must have a company email address and it must be confirmed in the email addresses on your LinkedIn account in the Settings section.
- Your profile must be associated with the right company. You have to click on a name in the Company Name drop-down list and then edit or add your position in your profile in your Experience section in order to be associated with the right company.
- Your company’s email domain must be unique to the company.
- Your profile must be more than 50 percent complete.
- You must have more than 10 connections.
Figure 4-1: Admin Tools
If your meet all the qualifications, you should be able to edit your company profile.
If you have done a search on LinkedIn and your company does not yet have a profile, select the Companies tab and click the Create A Company button on the right side of the page, as shown in Figure 4-2.
Figure 4-2: Creating a company
Tuesday: Name Your Company
The first thing you need to do is name your company (see Figure 4-3). I do not recommend including Inc., LLC, or Corp. in your company name. With most companies I recommend adding the entire name of the company, although IBM uses its acronym. Be careful with the name you choose, because it is not easy to change.
Figure 4-3: Naming your company
As you can see in Figure 4-3, LinkedIn will ask you for your email address. Make sure that the email address is the domain name associated with the company profile you are creating. Also make sure you have added it to your Settings section (Account tab ⇒ Add & Change Email Addresses). If your email address is not in this section, you will not be able to create a company profile. If you haven’t yet done so, go there right now and add your email address to the Settings section.
You will also want to add your company logo. (Make sure you have permission to use that company logo.) You can add a standard logo and/or a square logo. We’ll cover writing the company description tomorrow. Click Publish to save your company page.
Wednesday: Add a Company Description
Now you get to write your company description. Remember all those keywords we used earlier? Which ones apply to your company? Go through your list of keywords and put a check mark next to every keyword that is appropriate for your company.
To edit information on your company page:
You get up to 2,000 characters to describe your company. As you did in the Summary section, be sure to use whitespace, special characters, bullets, and capitalization, as shown in Figure 4-4.
Figure 4-4: Company description
You probably already have a company description on your website. So by all means copy and paste that text into the word processing document you use to create your new company profile description. And add those keywords!
Right under the Description section, you’ll notice that you have the opportunity to add specialties. You have 256 characters to add keywords specific to your company, service, or product.
If you are the administrator of an existing company page and want to add more information to your company description or company Specialties section, you’ll need to click the Admin Tools button on the right side of your screen and then click Edit. The Admin Tools will change according to the page you are on, so if you don’t see the Company Description, Company Specialties, and Standard Or Square Logo fields, then make sure you are on the Overview page, which is the default (Figure 4-5).
Figure 4-5: Editing an existing page
Other fields you’ll want to fill in are:
- RSS Feed
- New Module (which pulls from the Internet and your company profile)
- Company Type (don’t choose self-employed)
- Company Website URL
- Main Company Industry (choose the closest one)
- Company Operating Status
- Year Founded (optional)
- Company Locations (list up to five)
Oracle and IBM both have very thorough traditional LinkedIn company page descriptions. I also admire the company profiles created by HubSpot and MLT Creative. In Figure 4-6, notice how HubSpot’s company profile does the following:
- Speaks directly to its LinkedIn audience
- Calls your attention to its Products tab by capitalizing it
- Shares not only the features of its service, but who it has helped and how that has made HubSpot thought leaders
Figure 4-6: HubSpot company profile
As Figure 4-7 shows, you also have the opportunity to optimize your Overview page description for other languages. This tool enables companies to provide a more globally accessible page by including the company description in other languages, much as you choose to write your profile in alternate languages. This way, someone viewing the page from their default language will see the company description in their language.
Figure 4-7: Optimizing your page for other languages
That should give you a few ideas on how you can create a dynamic and engaging company profile description. Remember to create it in a word processing document so you can format it and catch any spelling or grammar errors.
Thursday: Designate Company Administrators
If you are the only administrator of your company page, you might want to consider allocating a few other individuals as administrators in case you ever leave the company or your profile gets suspended.
I do not recommend choosing the All Employees With A Valid Email Registered To The Company Domain option because that might land you in a world of hurt. You might have a helpful employee who altruistically tries to improve your branded message—or an angry employee who alters your company description to fit their opinion.
To designate administrators, click the Admin Tools link and then click Edit. In the Company Pages Admins section shown in Figure 4-8, under Manage Admins you type the names of other individuals on LinkedIn who you want to be administrators of your page.
Figure 4-8: Assigning administrators
Here are the directions LinkedIn suggests sending to employees who don’t show up as employees on your company page who you would like to make administrators:
Friday: Edit and Revise
It’s Friday, which means I’m giving you a break. If you’ve already created a company page, just take a moment to look through it. Select the Company tab and your company name should now show up in the drop-down box. Verify the following:
- Have you used all 2,000 characters in your description? Is it formatted?
- Have you added all the specialties relevant to your business?
- Are you showing up in the Company Search under your keywords?
- Is all the information accurate?
Don’t skip these steps. Now that you’ve had a night to sleep on it, you might have come up with some new ideas or better phrasing.
The other thing I want you to do is take a quick look at your employees. Is there anyone listed as an employee of your company who is not? If the person is a previous employee, you can always just send them a message asking them to update their LinkedIn profile. If they don’t do so in a reasonable amount of time or they have never been an employee, follow these steps: