LinkedIn now has a user base of more than 200 million members, making it the world's largest professional network. That is a huge potential audience for your company to reach out to and a large venue to promote your products and services.

Although it is common for companies to just set up a company page, most companies are not able to harness the full potential of the platform. One reason for this might be not knowing fully the tools LinkedIn offers in its company pages.

So read on to know how to setup your company page, know it inside-out and what benefits it can have for your business.

Why use LinkedIn company pages?

1. Expand your reach: Many of your employees are updating their personal profiles to show where they work. Every person that connects with that profile may potentially click on your company’s name and get navigated to the page. Would you want to showcase them an empty company page? How much effort you put into your company page will influence the opinions of these visitors.

2. Products and Services: LinkedIn has a separate section in the company page to showcase your products and services. This makes Linkedin a more robust platform compared to other social networks from the product awareness perspective. Not only do your consumers learn about your products, but they can also see how many of their connections have recommended them.

3. SEO: LinkedIn is its own search engine for finding jobs and companies. You don’t want to miss out on being found by a prospect, lead or potential employee.

Creating your page

Creating a company page is simple. Just hover over "Interests" and click on "Companies." Then, click on the "Add a Company" button on the top right. On the following page, just enter the company name and your company email address. Check the tick-box to verify yourself as an official representative of the company.

What’s in a company page?

1. Home

The "Home" page is basically the dashboard of your company page where you can access all its features. You can view:

  • The appearance of your company page
  • Recent updates posted
  • How many people are following the page
  • How your personal profile is connected to the employees of the page
  • The "About" section — where you can fill some details about your company

Clicking on the "Edit" button on the top right hand corner of the company page shows the following options:

The "Edit Page" button will take you to the editing mode of the company page. You can change all details of your page here. All the other sections have been explained further.

2. Products/Services

Here, you can showcase all your products, services, events or even your company’s mobile apps.

Clicking on the "Get Started" button will take you to a page where you can add everything about your product or service (name, category, image, description, key features, URL and more). You can also add a contact from your company if a LinkedIn user wants to contact your company to learn more about your product/service.

3. Analytics

The "Analytics" section gives details on your updates as well as followers. The "Updates" section shows statistics on the number of impressions, clicks, interactions and engagement on each of the updates posted by you. The "Followers" section shows demographics by seniority, industry, company size, function and employee.

Now that you know the basics of a LinkedIn company page, read 15 tips for compelling company updates and this ebook by LinkedIn on company pages and followers.