LinkedIn: A Basic Element of your Social Media Presence

If you are part of a technology company considering what your social media presence should include, one simple place to start is LinkedIn. You may know LinkedIn from a personal/job hunting perspective as most of us have professional profiles posted on LinkedIn. But there are ways LinkedIn can also best be used to represent your company.

Where should you start?

When looking at this from the company angle, the first place to start is to familiarize yourself with the “Companies” section of LinkedIn. You can access this section from the top menu on the LinkedIn site. It takes you to a nice search box. Enter the name of your company and see what the current company profile says about your firm. My guess is that many of you will find inaccuracies in the description. Determine who from your company is responsible for keeping the profile current and contact them if there are changes needed to the profile.

What can people learn about your company on LinkedIn?

There is a lot of valuable information about your company on LinkedIn. Much of this information is generated based on analysis of the LinkedIn profiles created by current or former employees. The information you can find from a Company profile page includes:

• Current employees (those in your network pop to the top of the list)
• New hires
• Recently promoted employees
• The mix of males and females in your company
• Median age of your employees
• Likely career path: companies that your employees previously worked for or may work for in the future

Why do you care?

I can think of many ways your customers, partners, potential employees and others will be using LinkedIn to become more informed about your company. Imagine these scenarios. Are they applicable to your company?

You want to attract the best possible talent to your company. Your presence on LinkedIn influences how potential employees perceive your company.

Clients and prospects use LinkedIn for informal background checks on your employees. This may be of particular importance if you are a service oriented business (IT services firm, consulting firm, PR firm). Why? Because your “product” is your employee base. Clients will be gathering intelligence on the people assigned to work with them.

During certain stages of your customer experience LinkedIn may be an important data source. There are certain critical times in your customer experience – perhaps it’s during the info gathering phase, perhaps it’s during the proposal phase or perhaps it’s post-sale during a critical support experience. During these critical touchpoints anticipate that your customers will be checking the LinkedIn profiles of your employees for information that may impact how they will be served by your company.

These are three examples of how the Companies section of LinkedIn may be used by your customers and others in your market. No matter what type of business you are part of, it’s important to remember your LinkedIn presence is one more touchpoint the world has with your company. It’s one more factor that’s impacting the presence your brand has in the market. Take the time to make sure your profile is up to snuff and keep it current. It’s one small step into the social media world.

Additional blogs that may be of help on this topic:
Guy Kawasaki’s How to Change the World
Emiel Van Wegen’s Research Reinvented