Social Media for B2B: A Guide to Setting up LinkedIn

Social media is often overlooked by B2B companies as a medium of marketing and communication, but an effective strategy can be very fruitful in terms of growing your brand awareness, creating authority for your brand and bringing in new leads.

But, you need to get the fundamentals right first, creating a professional aesthetic is the first step in getting social media right.

In this series of Social Media for B2B Guides, we’ll look into the various ways you can use social media to benefit your business. In this instalment, we’ll look at how to set up your professional LinkedIn account.

LinkedIn is known as the professional network and this is the place you want to be building your reputation as a business. Here are the fundamentals you want to get right:

• Create a LinkedIn Company Page – Don’t use a personal LinkedIn Page as a company page. You need to create a built-for-purpose company page, it looks more professional and it means that your employees can officially say they work for you by linking to the page in their bios. The platform makes it super easy and quick to set one up, the instructions to do so are here.
• Profile Image – Your profile image or avatar should be 400x400px in size and it’s best to use your logo or an abbreviated version of your logo that you use for square spaces. If you don’t have an abbreviated version of your logo and it’s particularly long, you might consider having one designed, for example:

• Banner Image – You also need to add your banner image, the dimensions of which are 1536x786px. This image is taken up a lot by the furniture on the page so make sure it’s a branded image but one without any copy or imperative elements.

• Company Information – Ensure you fill in the information about the company correctly including a concise yet compelling company description. You can add a maximum of twenty specialities but you should only need around four or five as you don’t want to appear too broad. 
• Showcase Pages – For specific products or areas of expertise you can create showcase pages which highlight the features within these. Showcase Pages require their own content and creative so make sure you have enough brand/product collateral/assets for a Showcase Page before setting one up.

Extra Tip! – If you’re linking to LinkedIn from your site in the header or footer, make sure you’re linking to the company page, not your personal profile and always make sure your link opens in a new window so the user doesn’t navigate away from your site!

Now you can ask your members of staff to link to your Company Page in their job titles. All they have to do is click edit on their personal profile and start typing the company name in the Current Position cell. If your page is published, it should come up automatically as they start typing.

We’d also recommend branded headshots so that everyone in the company has a similar aesthetic on their account.

If you’d like any help on setting up your social media accounts, please get in touch, alternatively, we also offer social media master classes.

In the following posts in this series, we’ll look into setting up Twitter, creating a social media activity plan for your business as part of an overarching strategy as well as advertising your business using social media.