LinkedIn for startups: 16 best practices to promote your company page

February 09, 2022

The best tactics to leverage LinkedIn for startups

LinkedIn popularity for B2B collaboration increases every year and it became a must-have platform for startups to become noticeable and connect with other businesses or customers. Although different social media platforms are part of our daily life, you must do some research to find more about the preferred approach if you want to use LinkedIn for startups.

When you post content on LinkedIn it’s imperative to know that it’s a collective team peer energy voice. Unlike Facebook and Instagram where you communicate through “I” or “you”, LinkedIn is all about “we”, and when you communicate with people on LinkedIn, you need to do that the way you talk to your colleagues.

Before we go through the best practices that are proven to be effective for startups, remember the one most important tip. Instead of thinking about LinkedIn as a professional place to promote your startup, think of it as a leadership platform. Therefore, when using LinkedIn for startups you need to create leadership content that is relevant to your target audience.

Remember to give each of your posts a human element. Many companies, especially B2B companies often make a mistake and sound robotic when using LinkedIn for startups. But, everyone you want to entice, whether a company or customer, all have a human that makes the decision.

3 content categories you must know if you’re using Linkedin for startups

To become noticeable on LinkedIn you need to create content in all three of the following categories so you can reach a wider audience. Maybe someone is interested in getting more industry insights, but if you create only such content many can find you boring. Therefore, when using LinkedIn for startups, it’s crucial to have a diverse content strategy.

Industry insights

This includes relevant insights into your industry. Share relevant news and give your opinion about it. Ask your followers whether they agree with you or if not, ask them to share what’s their point of view.

Storytelling

Give your followers a chance to find out more about your team. Share what is happening, what is your experience, share before and after success stories, and everything else you think might be interesting to your followers. This gives a human touch and helps your followers and potential customers connect more easily.

Relatability

Share book recommendations you recently read, business novels that are useful for business owners and entrepreneurs, or even related podcasts, etc. You can also ask your followers for their thoughts or recommendations they have for you. This will also help you establish a leadership voice because people will find your page useful and it will boost credibility for your startup.

16 most effective practices for LinkedIn for startups

After you create a LinkedIn page for your company before you jump into creating a marketing strategy, make sure the page is on brand and you maintained consistency. Include CTA that will lead people to your company website, choose community hashtags and ask connections to follow your page.

After you finish all that, the next step to get the most out of LinkedIn for startups is to create a winning marketing strategy, and for that, we have the best practices and marketing tips shared by experts who have already been down that road.

Publish relevant content at least once a week

To begin, post something important and valuable at least once a week, and then expand from there. Remember that your company page should not solely focus on the product or service you offer. Make it engaging, genuine, and worthwhile.

Remember the 3-2-1 rule: three bits of industry news, two pieces of your team’s successes, and one item showcasing what you have to offer. Include 2-3 hashtags in each post, and if you’re stuck for ideas, look up content suggestions!

Daniel Carter, SEO Manager at Manhattan Tech Support

Employee engagement is the key to growth

Encourage your staff and coworkers to interact and communicate. According to LinkedIn, employees have up to ten times the number of connections as your company page’s followers. Hence, employee engagement is the most effective strategy to expand on LinkedIn.

If one of your coworkers has @mentioned your page, you can re-share those mentions to draw attention to them. Remember to train employees and share knowledge about why engagement is so vital. Remember to start with your company goals – whether it’s to gain more visibility, generate sales, or raise brand awareness, there’s a lot you can do when using LinkedIn for startups.

Daniel Foley, SEO Specialist at UNAGI Scooters

Optimize company’s page for SEO

So, it is not only blogs and websites that can be optimized using SEO. Your LinkedIn profile is fully capable of being optimized given you use all the right moves. You can use relevant keywords to boost your SEO and draw in more audience.

Your profile needs to be strong enough to top the search engine and keywords will do the magic. Remember that everyone uses keywords to search for things. So, if you have the right words attached to you, your potential audience will walk themselves to your profile. Hence, don’t leave these magic words out since they are the ones pitching you to your audience.

Christian Velitchkov, Co-Founder of Twiz LLC

Write consistent content

You need to write consistent content for your audience and then share it within the community. Do not try to be sales-y or mark comments without knowledge of the subject. Be authentic and genuine. People are looking for advice and tips to grow their careers or businesses. You need to understand the objective of the social media platform.

Rahul Gulati, Founder of GyanDevign Tech Services LLP

Your content should be top-notch

One of the greatest tactics to leverage LinkedIn for startups is to post high-quality material on the platform. To produce high-quality content, focus on narrowing your audience. While bright colors might pique the interest of a potential customer, they may not be the ideal choice for
advertising.

Submit the content directly to LinkedIn, rather than publishing a link to your YouTube video or else. When you preview your adverts, check to see if your image is clear and engaging. It’s easy to come out as unprofessional when using low-quality photographs or images with text; images that are overly cluttered will deter readers from reading further.

David Farkas, Founder and CEO of The Upper Ranks

Join and utilize LinkedIn groups as one practice

Joining business-related or relevant groups enable you to initiate conversations, gather sentiment, and ask or answer questions. This can assist in establishing your reputation and
promoting your business, as well as allowing you to share your content.

Moreover, you should encourage employees from all levels of your organization to join LinkedIn groups so that no single person is responsible for all posts.

Marc Bishop Director at iDigiMagnet

Maintain a consistent presence

Maintaining a consistent and up-to-date presence for your brand, complete with its own company profile page, is also critical. The images, colors, and information on this page should be consistent with your company’s website and other social media sites.

Furthermore, the page should be updated regularly to keep the brand active and create the idea that it is still in use. We’ve all seen a company’s social media presence that is only updated once a month, if at all. It’s worse to create a LinkedIn profile and then neglect to update it than to have none at all.

Vaibhav Kakkar, CEO at Digital Web Solutions

Use Sponsored Updates

Companies pay to have their posts appear on a LinkedIn user’s feed via sponsored updates. This ‘pay-per-click’ or ‘pay-per-1,000’ impression feature has demographics similar to those found on other social platforms, but the difference is the option to tailor depending on the company name, job title, job function, talents, schools, and organizations. Users can target industries of interest without competing with unrelated companies and communications.

A sponsored update with a well-built call to action is an efficient approach to promote thought-leadership, helpful to the targeted demographic. People no longer want to see pure advertising and instead prefer to receive something favorable for free. You can target a specific audience, increase website visitors, and even generate sales leads by marketing content through a LinkedIn Sponsored Update.

Shiv Gupta, CEO at Incrementors Inbound Marketing

Sponsored content and lead gen forms

The adjustments we’ve been making involve a combination of looking at bottom-of-funnel data to see what messaging, targeting, or ad format converts to actual customers at an affordable cost and working with LinkedIn’s tools to implement best practices. Our adjustments included:

    • Adopting bid changes to ensure that we are serving at the right frequency.
    • We are changing targeting to make sure we are reaching the right audience while ensuring delivery and scale.
    • Tracking bottom-of-funnel conversions can be used to optimize top-of-funnel ad creative and messaging.
    • Expand opportunities by experimenting with different targeting options and ad formats.

Hilda Wong, Founder of Content Dog

Create relevant content

Having a content strategy in place for your LinkedIn page to post news, research reports, opinion articles, industry trends, company updates, and job postings is the best advice you can receive for managing LinkedIn for startups. You need to post content frequently for the SEO requirements.

Furthermore, to make the most of your presence on LinkedIn, it’s important that your company’s LinkedIn page can easily be found. By posting videos, recently completed projects, tips, and hacks, or anything you feel that may be useful for your professional community your LinkedIn page will be positioned for valuable search rankings.

Philip Pasma, President of Asterisk Marketing Inc

One of the most effective strategies we used to get our startup recognized on LinkedIn was creating content that was relevant to our target audience. We made a point of sharing thought-leadership articles, infographics, and other types of content that would be of interest to professionals in our field.

We also sponsored posts and ran ads targeting people within our industry. By creating valuable content and targeting the right people, we were able to attract new customers and build relationships with key decision-makers.

Ryan Fyfe, COO at Workpuls, Inc

Leave comments

One of the most powerful LinkedIn exposure tactics for startups is also the most underutilized – leaving comments. Leave 5 meaningful comments a day on LinkedIn for one week on popular industry posts.

Doing so will get you exposure quickly, will build your authority in your space, and provide you with content for your own posts. This same tactic works so well that one of our partners used this and gained 400 connections in 24 hours from just one comment.

Mandy McEwen, Founder, and CEO of Mod Girl Marketing

If there’s one strategy that can help your business get noticed, it’s comments. A lot of people think LinkedIn is all about posting great content. And that without a doubt plays a part, but what’s the use if no one sees the content you produce?

Comments are similar to posts, in that it’s a way for your business to be seen. Obviously, comments are usually shorter than posts. But they work. The best thing is that the more you comment, the more likely people are to see your posts in the future. Don’t ignore comments,
but also, don’t rush them. My advice is to aim for 10+ valuable comments per day.

Ravi Davda, CEO of Rockstar Marketing

Curated content

We began to grow on LinkedIn once we put more effort into curated content tailored specifically to our company page and showcase pages. We also began reaching out to experts in our areas of interest and featuring their high-quality content for our followers and readership.

Additionally, LinkedIn has been a great medium for us to get in touch with podcast hosts. Overall, it has helped us get more press, become more visible, and get in touch with relevant figures while we were also taking care of our following.

Diana Dupu, Marketing and PR Specialist at Creative Navy UX Agency

Connect with everyone

Your main aim when it comes to making an impact on LinkedIn should be to connect with everyone! Unlike other social media platforms, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know them personally, we all want as many links as possible. Of course, they need to have some relevance, but don’t be afraid to connect with the best in the business!

Annie Everill, Digital Marketing Executive at Imaginaire

Polls

Speaking of LinkedIn for startups we had success with the polls. Polls have brought in a good amount of traction to our page and even helped increase the engagement on LinkedIn.

With polls that are relevant to our business, we have been able to create a streamline for our target audience to vote for their options and even interact in the comment sections from where the teams can funnel out the relevant people who can be approached for business.

That way we were able to get people who are relevant to our field of work on our page, and that has resulted in creating a positive buzz about the company as well as the products.

Chirayu Akotiya, Director at Leena AI

Clearly show your startup’s journey

When using LinkedIn for startups leverage the different elements that can be shown on your profile. For example, short descriptions, achievements, positions, work status, skill sets, etc. You can fill in all these areas to clearly show your startup’s journey.

Start from the very beginning when you just started and add how much you have grown over the years passing from different stages. On LinkedIn, people want to know about you and they want to know your journey. So embrace it and portray it to the public. It is the best way that will get people to admire your page and follow you for more.

Michelle Caruana, Founder at HANA Resources

Share real customer reviews and testimonials

The ability to share real customer reviews and testimonials on LinkedIn seems to be an effective method these days. Companies are getting unique in how they do it so finding your own way to share these reviews is up to the startup. Especially early on when others require evidence of success from others, these methods can be really helpful in establishing yourself on LinkedIn.

For a written testimonial, you could even include the text on a branded graphic. It’s also effective to share videos or even link to a website where a review exists.

Try a variety of ways before deciding on a permanent method to share these reviews and then run with it. People want to hear from others – that’s why you need good ratings and reviews on Amazon and Google.

Joe Davies, Co-Founder of FATJOE

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, LinkedIn for startups has plenty of possibilities for promotion, reaching the target audience, and even finding investors for your fast-growing startup. LinkedIn strategies above are proven effective for companies before, so they are most likely to work great for your startups as well. However, remember that the biggest marketing asset that will help you stand out is being unique and having quality and valuable content.

More must-read stories from Enterprise League:

Related Articles