Building It Better: How We Took Advantage of LinkedIn's New Company Pages

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March 2011, Issue 85

Social Media
Building It Better: How We Took Advantage of LinkedIn's New Company Pages
By Amy Bills, VP of Marketing, Bulldog Solutions

There's no question that LinkedIn is stepping up its game and developing some intriguing ways, such as LinkedIn Ads and LinkedIn Jobs, to leverage its 100 million user base and be a go-to resource for businesses, both BtoB and BtoC. At Bulldog Solutions, we're looking into how LinkedIn works for our company and for our clients, and as part of that process we took advantage of their new "company pages," which took a big leap forward this year in terms of functionality and flexibility. Here are some of the things we considered as we took the Bulldog Solutions LinkedIn company page to the next level.

Leading by Example

Our project setup began with two key components: Goal setting and market research. Metrics are, of course, critical. We do very little in Bulldog's marketing department that we can't in some way measure and validate. Updating the page wasn't just about going through the exercise for the sake of completing it. We determined our goals: What did we want to accomplish and what metrics would we use to measure success (see metrics section, below)? We wanted to take advantage of the new company page options to create a great presence on LinkedIn that could be used for:

Recruiting
Early-stage buyers seeking to be educated
Late-stage buyers seeking to know more about our company

With that in mind, we did some research to find examples we liked: companies that seemed to have a terrific presence and those that did not. We used those as guideposts for our company page creation.

Ready, Aim, Execute

Armed with expectations and examples, we moved to the planning and execution phase. This involved identifying and listing the functional options being offered, and creating a briefing to capture all of the components we would need so the process would be repeatable. Based on our objectives, we made decisions about what kind of information we wanted to share. A Careers tab was, of course, part of our plan. We also debated how best to convey our solutions, and finally decided to bucket them into key capabilities areas (right).

This decision will be different for every company—it could be by product group, or by geography, or by enterprise vs. small business. Those decisions were all about our message and business rules, so we took some time to think them through.

Included in this project was:

Creative: One of the most appealing things about the look of the new company pages is the opportunity to build custom, branded banners highlighting key areas and using our look and feel. There are also some video options.
Copy: We developed succinct copy that conveyed our message and took into account relevant keywords consistent throughout all of our communications.
Social media integration: The new functionality includes the options for a Twitter feed and blog feed. This means not only getting those synched and tested, but coordinating with the people responsible for those aspects of our social media strategy.

Metrics: How Do We Know if We Did It Right?

Creating some expectations around what we hoped to achieve with the update took some thought. Happily, LinkedIn considered this and has an Analytics tab that gives us some read on traffic and visits to our page (right). So we can see:

Page views
Unique visitors
Clicks to our specific services
Members following us

And we can also see those metrics over time, as well as in comparison to "similar companies." So, while that is not a measure of revenue being driven by our company page, it's a useful barometer of traction.

We also chose a few tactical metrics:

Followers
Recommends

And we developed some specific programs throughout our integrated communications to have an impact on that. For example, our Marketing Watchdog Journal newsletter referenced the new page (right), as did some one-to-one communications we created to request recommendations.

The largest piece of the puzzle is insight into what happens to people once they hit our website: what they do, where they go, how they engage. Ultimately that is what will help us connect our company page efforts to revenue and new hires.

Next Steps

The company page was not an end, but a means to one. It’s also a work in progress. After laying the groundwork (actually, during the process of laying the groundwork), we built a plan for integrating the page into our marketing communications and exploring ways to leverage it throughout the LinkedIn community. Like most social media tactics, the page alone is not as meaningful as its place within our strategy. We built some basic playbooks that included:

An administrative playbook to ensure key stakeholders know how to manage and update the page
Employee guidelines to make it easier for employees to leverage the page, such as sharing new job postings with their own network and asking their networks to "recommend"

Visit the Bulldog Solutions LinkedIn company page and follow us!

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Amy Bills is VP of Marketing for Bulldog Solutions.

Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, an online marketing agency that changes the way BtoB companies define demand-generation strategy, engage prospects and convert leads to customers. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, VP of Marketing.