LinkedIn is the world’s largest and most active professional networking platform, with over 13 million companies vying for the attention of more than half a billion users. Therefore, your LinkedIn Company Page represents a huge opportunity to establish your nonprofit as an industry expert, attract followers, and boost recruitment.
Update your profile image and banner
Your profile image is the first thing people searching for your company on LinkedIn will see, so make a good impression. Company Pages with profile pictures get six times more visitors than those without. One great way to differentiate yourself is to update your profile image based on current events or seasons. That way you can show you’re keeping up with the latest news and trends.
The profile banner above your company logo offers a bit more room for creativity, as there are no hard-and-fast rules for using this space. It’s a great way to showcase your organization’s personality and highlight things that are important to you.
Optimize your About us section
A well-written About us section on your company page is a 2,000-word opportunity to tell visitors everything they need to know about your organization. This section on your company page should answer six basic questions:
Who are you?
Where does your organization work?
Who do you help?
What are your mission and values?
What is the voice and tone of your content?
How can people contact you to learn more?
Build a career page
Glassdoor reports that 69 percent of job seekers are more likely to apply to an organization that makes an active effort to promote its culture online. LinkedIn Career Pages are an amazing way to boost your recruitment efforts by showing your organization’s culture in its best light.
Career Pages feature customizable modules where you can display high-quality images, videos, and articles about the day-to-day at your organization. Try to include a URL back to your website in every post since LinkedIn reports that posts with links get 45 percent more engagement.
Spotlight a Program or Affiliate with Showcase Pages
Showcase Pages are extensions of your Company Page on LinkedIn. They enable you to build program-specific pages within your main page so you can give more focus – and more specialized attention – to each element of your organization.
Through your Showcase Page/s, you can also create and share content that relates specifically to those areas, and you can add a follow button for each element. These pages are for the long haul. As LinkedIn says, “these pages are intended to develop long-term relationships with a specific audience and do not make sense for short-term marketing campaigns.”
While they can absolutely be used to represent any ongoing initiatives or events, one-off promotions or short-term initiatives don’t need a dedicated page.
Showcase your Authority with Long-Form Content
A key benefit of long-form publishing on LinkedIn is exposure to a defined audience. The people who follow you on LinkedIn are different from your audience on Twitter or Facebook – the focus here is on professional material, enabling you to establish your expertise and build your industry presence. Publishing long-form content on LinkedIn can help establish expertise and engage with a broader audience. Each post automatically shows up in your network’s feeds and gets pride of place on your LinkedIn profile.
There’s also the potential benefit of huge reach. Posts and Articles published on LinkedIn can help drive traffic to your LinkedIn Company Page and your nonprofit website. Even better, they can help your potential customers connect on a human level with your brand.
Not every one of your posts will reach every active member (it won’t even reach every one of your first-degree connections), but there is always the possibility that your posts could get picked up by LinkedIn’s editors and added to one of their highly viewed content channels.