13 Brands Using LinkedIn Company Page Features the Right Way

13 Brands Using LinkedIn Company Page Features the Right Way:
Back in November, I set out to write a post to highlight businesses that were using LinkedIn's company page features effectively. Needless to say, I couldn't find enough examples to create a compelling post, so in my dismay, what I actually ended up writing was, "11 Reasons Your LinkedIn Company Page Sucks."
What can I say? I was a little bitter and, frankly, slightly disappointed in the social media marketers of the world. We recently reported that, in a study of the over 5,000 inbound marketers where we pitted LinkedIn against Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn proved to be the most effective social media channel for lead generation -- 277% more effective, in fact. As a marketer, particularly if you're in the B2B game, how could you not leverage that awesome lead generation potential?
Well, it's been several months now, and I wanted to give you LinkedIn marketers out there another chance. While it was still difficult to find examples of businesses effectively using all of the company page features at their disposal, it was a bit easier to find some great examples of individual feature use. Looks like some of you may have gotten the hint! Let's take a look at some of the admirable use cases of the main LinkedIn company page features to inspire you to give your LinkedIn company page a little more love. You want to leverage LinkedIn's lead gen potential for your business as much as possible, right?

Blog RSS Feed

Let's get a few low-hanging fruit features out of the way first. There's a very simple way to populate your LinkedIn company page with your business' content, and it's called your blog's RSS feed. While simply including your blog's feed won't broadcast its content to your LinkedIn page followers via the updates feed on their homepage (unlike Company Status Updates, which we'll cover later), it's a really easy way to promote your blog content to the visitors on your page.
See the example above, which is a screenshot from Kuno Creative's company page. If you're going to add your blog's RSS feed to your page, just be sure you're regularly updating your blog with content. A stale feed of outdated posts that shows you haven't updated your blog in months will likely do you more harm than good. Kuno Creative, for example, maintains an active blog, so the blog RSS feature is a welcome addition to its LinkedIn company page. To add your blog's RSS feed to your LinkedIn page, click the dropdown menu next to Admin Tools for your page's 'Overview' tab, scroll to the bottom of the page, and enter your blog's RSS feed.

News Module

The next low-hanging fruit feature you should enable on your LinkedIn company page is the news module. This pulls in any news mentions of your company that LinkedIn finds on the web and features them in the right-hand column of the Overview tab on your LinkedIn company page, as seen on Red Shoes PR's company page (pictured here). Adding this module is a great way to highlight the media coverage your company has earned, adding third-party credibility and validation to your page.
The option to enable news mentions to be displayed on your page is right below the option to add your blog's RSS feed while you're in edit mode of the Overview tab.

Company Status Updates

LinkedIn's rollout of company status updates in October was a big win for marketers everywhere, but not many have been leveraging it. Just as marketers can post updates to their Google+ page and Facebook page timeline, they can also do so on LinkedIn. This gives marketers the opportunity to expose more of their content directly to their LinkedIn followers, who see status update content in their LinkedIn updates feed on their LinkedIn homepage.

PR 20/20's Company Page is a great example of one that is effectively making use of company status updates, regularly sharing blog posts and reports they've created as well as third-party coverage of their brand. This drives traffic from LinkedIn back to PR 20/20's website and positions them as a thought leader within the LinkedIn community.

Overdrive Interactive is another great example of a company using company status updates well, sharing helpful content from themselves as well as others to ensure they keep their LinkedIn company page regularly updated with content for their followers.

Keeping a frequently updated and engaging page is the best way to organically attract new followers and expand your LinkedIn reach. Don't have company status updates enabled for your page yet? Check out our quick tutorial here to start getting more out of your LinkedIn company presence.

Products/Services Tab

As a LinkedIn company page admin, marketers can also highlight their product/service offerings on a separate 'Products & Services' tab. Building out this tab is a great way to highlight and promote ... why yes, your products and services!

Voices.com's company page provides a great example of a robust Products & Services tab, highlighting 11 of its services and utilizing some of the other great features available for this tab, including a Products & Services Spotlight as well as a video (we'll get to these features later).

But are your products and services the only thing you should highlight on this tab? No way, Jose! You can also (and you should) leverage this valuable LinkedIn real estate to feature your marketing offers such as webinars, ebooks, free trials or other content to support lead generation, as we've done on HubSpot's LinkedIn company page.

The other awesome capability offered through the product tab is audience targeting. LinkedIn enables you to create up to 30 distinct landing pages for specific audience segments. This means you can show visitors to your products tab different variations depending on the targeting options you set up based on that user's company size, job function, industry, seniority, and/or geography. So if you have various segments of products or offers suitable for different audiences, you can only surface the ones that are applicable to those users. To learn how to set up targeted product tabs for your LinkedIn company page, check out this handy guide.

Videos on Products Tab

While you're editing your Products & Services tab, don't miss out on the opportunity to add a video! Use this space to explain your products, services, and value proposition in a video format, and if you're leveraging product tab targeting, you can add a different video for each tab variation you create. The only caveat is that any video content you use must already be hosted on YouTube; the video feature requires you to include a YouTube link for your video in order to display it.
Both OPTIO Solutions and ClearRisk are leveraging the video feature nicely on their LinkedIn pages' products and services tab to capture the attention of any LinkedIn page visitors who'd prefer a more visual overview of what these businesses offer.

Product and Service Spotlight

Another products tab feature worth mentioning separately is the 'Product and Service Spotlight,' which enables you to feature three scrolling, clickable banner images (640x220 pixels) near the top of your products tab. Again, if you're leveraging targeted product tab landing pages, you can choose different spotlight images for each variation.
Check out how the Taproot Foundation, a nonprofit organization that makes business talent available to organizations working to improve society, leverages its Product and Service Spotlight using the three images below. Each image includes a call-to-action for visitors to perform a few different actions: 'Apply Now,' 'Visit Our Facebook Page,' and 'Learn More.' You can visit the products tab on Taproot Foundation's company page for the full scrolling, interactive experience of how this works.



Just as Taproot has done, treat your Product and Service Spotlight as call-to-action buttons. Depending on your current goals and promotions in progress, you can use them to feature your lead gen marketing offers, promote registration for an upcoming event you're hosting, increase subscribers to your blog, highlight your presence on other social networks, etc. The possibilities are endless! 

Recommendations

Social proof is a real thing. According to a CompUSA and iPerceptions study, 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. Lucky for you, LinkedIn provides users with the opportunity to recommend your business' products and services. This is also one of the reasons why it's important to add your products and services to your products tab. Without products and services, your LinkedIn page visitors would have nothing to recommend! And without recommendations, page visitors are left with some very underwhelming social proof. When a LinkedIn user recommends one of your products or services, it's displayed on the individual detailed page for that product. The total number of recommendations across all of your products/services is also displayed on the main products tab on your page.
Check out Salesforce's Products Tab, for example, which boasts 821 recommendations across its 10 products and makes for a very compelling LinkedIn page.

While it's up to LinkedIn users to recommend your products, making sure your products tab is complete as well as boosting your LinkedIn following (here are some tips!) can help your page accumulate recommendations since A) users will have something to recommend, and B) your page followers are more likely to leave you recommendations than LinkedIn users who aren't following you. For a deeper dive into how you can generate more online reviews for your business, read this helpful guide.

Careers Tab

The final LinkedIn company page feature at your disposal is the 'Careers' tab. And while LinkedIn can serve as a valuable marketing and lead generation tool, one of its most powerful benefits is in its professional networking potential. And what better tool to help you recruit top talent for your business than a social network populated by professionals? According to an internal LinkedIn survey, LinkedIn beats the major job boards 3 to 1 on applicant quality. Use the basic, for-free careers tab to advertise your current job openings, as GE Energy does in the following example.

Want to take it one step further? Get more robust capabilities by upgrading your account to a Silver or Gold Career Page, which gives you access to a "full suite of features for promoting careers at your company, including a clickable banner, customizable modules, analytics on who is viewing the page, direct links to recruiters, video content, and more." If you choose the Gold Career Page, you can even customize up to five different versions of the page to display different content and job opportunities based on the viewer's LinkedIn profile. Think of it like targeted product tab variations, but for careers!

Deloitte's 'Careers' tab is an example of an upgraded careers tab:

Zipcar: Rocking All LinkedIn Page Features

Looking for a great example of a company that is leveraging many of LinkedIn's company page features well? Check out Zipcar's page.

Zipcar leverages every feature we highlighted in this post, and while we do think they could be sharing more compelling content via their company status updates, Zipcar provides a solid example of a business that 'gets' the value of LinkedIn company pages.

How well are you taking advantage of the features available to you on your LinkedIn company page?

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