For some time now LinkedIn has been the world's largest, most influential, and most trustworthy business social media platform. It currently has close to 900 million active individual users and around 60 million business pages up and running.

LinkedIn is the place to be if you want to achieve one of the following:

• Build your brand and authority,
• Drive sales,
• Generate quality leads,
• Recruit top-notch workforce,
• Optimize your business reach.

The first step in achieving this is creating a recognizable and well-optimized company page. Before immersing yourself in this task, try exploring the LinkedIn page solutions of other companies. You could draw some inspiration and quality pointers from them.

Putting Together a Company Page

Start with the profile image. As the most striking element of your company page, it has to be:

• High-quality and professionally made,
• Authentic and recognizable,
• Bold and engaging.

The banner gives you space to be more creative. You should use it for brand exposure, the company's missions and values, or to announce an ongoing activity or a campaign.

The Summary needs to be brief and to the point. Use the Overview to tell others everything they should know about your company. The language here should be simple, succinct, and accessible.

The Overview should answer these basic questions:

• What is your business?
• Where is your company located?
• What do you offer to others?
• What are your company values?
• How can customers reach you?

Try to find out beforehand which words and phrases best describe your business. Use those keywords when composing a Summary and Overview to achieve maximum reach.

Creating Content and Posting

After setting up a company page, it's time to proceed to the next stage: creating content and posting it regularly.

Whether it is articles, blogs, images, audio or video clips, data reports, opinion or values pieces, or simply short updates about certain company affairs, LinkedIn offers a variety of methods to inform and entertain your followers.

Use the built-in LinkedIn analytics to keep track of your most successful posts. Sometimes the LinkedIn algorithm omits posts from your followers' feeds, so it shouldn't be a bad idea to occasionally do a re-post.

Furthermore, feel free to hire copywriters if possible, to produce a regular and steady flow of quality page content.

This can certainly pay off because nothing attracts new connections better than targeted, amusing, and knowledge-driven storytelling techniques.

Growing Your Audience

There are a plethora of ways to win attention on LinkedIn. Some of the methods are as follows:

• Inviting people to follow your page,
• Targeting posts to reach certain audiences,
• Paying LinkedIn ads to promote your content,
• Using business-related hashtags to reach connections within the same industry,
• Engaging your employees to share content,
• Cross-platform leverage by sharing LinkedIn posts on Facebook, Instagram, etc,

Often the key is to create interaction with your audience. If you find a way to ask for their opinion, you will learn something new about your consumers, and make them feel important and valued. An easy way to do this is to create polls. A poll with good interaction is a reward in itself.

Networking With Your Contacts

While making new contacts on LinkedIn is important, it is equally significant to nurture the existing ones. Whether it's asking for recommendations from specific clients, sending follow-up emails, using blanket emails to various connections, or sending custom messages to random followers, it is crucial to possess knowledge on how to keep track of networking contacts.

LinkedIn's built-in connection overview has its limitations, so using a connections manager may be a good idea. Such managers can bridge LinkedIn's lack of useful features, e.g. adding custom tags and notes to different connections. When using LinkedIn tags you can quickly and easily find existing accounts according to their assigned categories.

Another hallmark of this platform is LinkedIn groups. An active, dynamic group is a unique place to see and to be seen. It's a meeting point inside your industry where you can promote yourself and your brand by creating distinctive content, while directly engaging with your future clients and associates.

Conclusion

Now that you've learned how to make full use of an optimized LinkedIn company page, it is up to you to start applying this knowledge and enhancing your presence.

By applying the aforementioned tips and tricks in creating quality LinkedIn business profiles, knowing the importance of posting regularly, engaging and communicating with your connections, and finally growing your audience, you gained your entry pass into the peculiar world of LinkedIn.