Linked In - Have you got your Products and Services in the Spotlight?

  I recently gave a talk to over 100 accountants discussing the merits of Leveraging LinkedIn.

Whilst most business professionals do have a LinkedIn profile – a high percentage haven’t completed their profile to the recommended 100% - and many aren’t ‘joining’ up the Company Profile.

Whilst Carvill Creative has had a LinkedIn company profile for a while, we’ve not really be doing that much with it.

From an employee perspective, we’re a small team and so we have our relevant team members associated to the profile – and we’ve completed the Products and Services section so that people are able to explore, the range of products and services we provide. However, as yet, we haven’t gone to our clients and asked for recommendations for our company products and services – so we’ll be doing that soon.

LinkedIn has a great opportunity as a professional network to help businesses leverage their online company profiles. Whilst Facebook seems to be enhancing, daily, the features and functionality of business pages – LinkedIn hadn’t introduced any new features for while.

Their recently launched ‘Product and Services Spotlight’ feature – is quite snazzy. It enables you to effectively create up to 3 ‘ads’ for your products and services – which showcase above the service and product descriptions and are clickable through to relevant landing pages.

Also – the information you can add to a product and service page is now far richer – you can add videos, customer recommendations, specific product or service promotions and  offers.

If you get this company profile right – you can see how it can become another effective online presence for people that find you via LinkedIn.

So here’s the quick step guide to creating an effective LinkedIn Company Profile:

• From your own personal LinkedIn profile – click Companies tab.  Scroll down that tab until you see ‘See all’ – hit ‘See all’ and then you will have a screen outlining all the companies you are associated with. In the right hand corner of that screen you will see ‘Add a Company’.  You then add your company name.  Please note that you have to have a relevant company email address when setting up a company profile.  Eg:michelle@carvillcreative.co.uk – was acceptable to set up a profile for Carvill Creative. It’s effectively the way LinkedIn verifies that you are an employee and therefore eligible to set up the profile.

• Once you’ve added your company – then it’s a case of completing the content.  As with all online content relating to your business, you want to ensure that you are utilising your ‘keywords’ when creating the content. If you are a social media consultancy – then be sure to say that throughout your content. Just as people search Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter using Keywords – so they too search LinkedIn – so be sure you have optimised your online content effectively, to give yourself a good chance of being found for relevant searches.

• The content tabs you need to create for your company profile are pretty simple:

•  Overview of the company – here you can provide an overview of what your company does – how long it’s been established, partners, clients etc. It’s your ‘About us’ section of your website effectively.
• Careers – you can showcase any placements that you may have – and details of what people have to do and who they need to speak with if interested in working with your company.
• Services -(more on this in number 4)
• Analytics – here you can review some basics insights into what’s happening with your company profile.  Who’s viewing, which sector, growth of follower trends, page views, followers, clicks through to your products and services page.

• Services Tab

This is where you can really segment and showcase each product / service you provide. For example on Carvill Creative’s page we’re currently promoting 4 key services:

• Marketing and Social Media Consultancy
• Design Services
• Social Media Marketing Training Courses
• Digital Marketing Strategy and Services

For each service we’re able to spell out what we offer – ensuring each service is leveraging the relevant keywords and showcasing what we do. Not only that but on each service page, you can run special promotions around that service – and showcase video relating to that product or service. So making the service page, a great resource

On this tab now – there’s also the opportunity to create 3 ads – so we have ads for

• Ultimate Website Package for Business –  (see ad example below, which clicks through to a relevant landing page).

•  Make Social Media Work for your business – which, again, clicks through to a relevant landing page.
• General Carvill Creative ad – which clicks through to our Home Page.

On this page too – you’ll see in the right hand column the opportunity to showcase promotions: See below the one we created which clicks through to a dedicated landing page.

So you can see – that LinkedIn are giving companies a much richer array of resources to tap into – and I can only see this continuing to improve.

I’ve noticed that for certain searches I’ve done in Google – it’s the LinkedIn products and services pages that are appearing. So I would suggest to all, that it’s time to create an effective Company Profile – which you can share, and indeed get all of your employees to link to and share too.

Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  Carvill Creative covers all aspects of online visibility – website effectiveness, social media marketing, social media management and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

Passionate about Online Visibility - creating an integrated approach across websites, blogs and social media platforms.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog