Introducing the new LinkedIN company pages

Just like Facebook created its version of a company page, now so has LinkedIn, but the appeal of having a company page on LinkedIn, is the professional business orientated community it sits in. With 85 million business members, who wouldn't want a business page there?

Normally the profile pages that you set up on LinkedIn are for your personal use, and it is indeed against LinkedIn's terms and conditions to set a personal profile page up as a business. But LinkedIn has seen that by capturing and promoting more business information in this community, it could make way for a whole lot more engagement and knowledge sharing.

If you have not yet created your LinkedIn company page, simply click on COMPANIES on the top navigation and then ADD COMPANY. You will need to have an email address for that company, as a safeguard to stop people creating company pages if they are not authorised to do so.From there it is fairly self-explanatory, but did you know you can now:

1. Add video to your products and services page, a great way to showcase what you have on offer.
2. Add a careers page if you have vacancies to advertise.
3. Get product or service recommendations from satisfied customers and display them on your page.
4. Follow any company that interests you (keep your eye on the competition).
5. Use the company overview page, which allows you to see how you may be connected to that company – a bit of inside intelligence.
6. Feed your blog posts into the page so people can see the lighter side of your company.
7. Feed in your tweets (watch what you tweet for this environment).
8. You can add three banner images that link through to different pages of your website. Why not use one to cross-pollinate to your Facebook page?
9. You can add a disclaimer.
10. You can even create a new page for a different target audience which LinkedIn will publish for you – all for free!

As of writing this post, LinkedIn has just added analytics, so you can now see your page views, and a whole bunch of other stuff. I am sure that this is just the start for LinkedIn's company pages, and I suspect that we will see these pages being connected to company groups too. If you are not currently using LinkedIn to network and build your business connections, do so. Make it one of your New Year resolutions – it could be worth your while.