How to Use LinkedIn for Business in 2022: A Simple Guide

LinkedIn is the world’s leading business network with 722 million users as of January 2022. 25% of all American adults use LinkedIn, and 22% of them use it every single day.

Main reason? To “strengthen your professional network”. For individuals, this is a great place to keep in touch with old colleagues, get recommendations for a new business, or look for a new job.

But how do you effectively promote your business on LinkedIn?

We’ve rounded up everything you need to know about marketing your company on LinkedIn – fresh update for 2022.

Before you get started, check out our step-by-step guide to creating a LinkedIn Business Page from scratch:

How to use LinkedIn for business

Follow the steps below to set up, grow, and promote your LinkedIn Business Page and reach your strategic goals on the platform.

Step 1: Create a LinkedIn Company Page

To access LinkedIn, you first need to create an individual account. He will also be your company page administrator (although you can add more page managers later). I recommend registering with a working email address.

Okay, now we can create your Page. After logging in, click the Work icon in the upper right corner of the browser. Scroll down the pop-up menu and select Create Company Page.

Select the desired Page type from the four available options:

• Small business
• Medium and large business
• Showcase page
• Educational institution

All of them speak for themselves, with the exception of the “showcase pages”. They are designed for companies that want to separate the divisions in their business so that each has its own subpage, but still links to the main corporate page.

Showcase pages appear on the company home page, as you can see here with the Hootsuite COVID-19 Resources page listed under Affiliated Pages.

After choosing the page type, start filling in your details. Your logo and slogan will be the first impression of you for most LinkedIn users, so take the time it takes to write a good slogan.

Hootsuite’s slogan is “The Global Leader in Social Media Management.”

When you’re done, click Create Page.

Ta-yes, now you have a company page.

Step 2: Optimize Your Page

Okay, that’s the basics, but it’s time to optimize your new Page to get noticed and grab the attention of your followers.

First, scroll down and click the blue “Edit Page”button.

Complete all fields in this additional information area. This will make what you do understandable to users and help with your LinkedIn SEO, also known as display in search results. It’s worth it: Companies with full profiles get 30% more views.

A few tips for optimizing your LinkedIn page

Use translations

Serve a global audience? You can add translations here so you don’t have to create a separate company page for each region. Your page can have up to 20 languages, including name, slogan, and description fields. I like.

Add keywords to description

Your LinkedIn page is indexed by Google, so use natural-sounding keywords wherever possible in the first paragraph of your business description. 3-4 paragraphs maximum about your vision, values, products and services.

Add hashtags

No, not in your copy of the Page. You can add up to 3 hashtags to subscribe.

You can see all posts using these hashtags by going to your page and clicking “Hashtags”below the post editor. This allows you to easily comment, like, and share relevant posts directly from your Page.

Add a branded cover

Take advantage of this space to draw attention to your latest product launch or other important news. Keep it brand and simple. Hootsuite presents the new Social Trends 2022 report: a free mega-deep dive containing the secret sauce to beat the competition this year (and next year, and another year…).

The current dimensions of this space are 1128 x 191 pixels.

And finally: add a custom button

This is the button next to the Follow button that LinkedIn users will see on your page. You can change it to any of these:

• Contact us
• learn more
• register
• Subscribe
• Visit site

“Visit Website”is the default option.

You can change it at any time, so if you have a webinar or event, change it to “Register”or “Register”to focus on that and then return to your website. Your URL can include UTM so you can track where the leads are coming from.

Step 3. Create your page by following

No one will know your Page exists unless you let them know.

Until you start posting content, you’ll see this frankly adorable illustration of a marketer in sweatpants having a deep discussion with his dog about this block – wait a minute, it’s me…

Here are 4 ways to win love for your new Page:

Share your page

On the main page, click “Share Page”next to the “Edit”button.

Share your new Page on your personal LinkedIn profile and ask your employees, customers, and friends to follow it. This is an easy first step.

Link to your LinkedIn page from your website

Add the LinkedIn icon to the rest of the social media icons in the footer and anywhere else you link to social media.

Ask your employees to update their profiles

This is the key to your Page’s long-term growth. When your employees first listed their positions on their profiles, you didn’t have a Page. So these headers are not related anywhere.

Now that your page exists, ask your employees to edit their job descriptions on their LinkedIn profiles to link to your new company page.

All they have to do is edit this section of their profile, remove the company name, and start re-typing it in the same field. LinkedIn will look for matching page titles. After they click on yours and save their changes, their profile will now link to your page.

This allows their contacts to find and follow you, but also adds that user as an employee of your company. Displaying the number of your employees can help your company build trust on the platform.

Sending invitations to follow your Page

From your Page, you can invite people you know to follow it. LinkedIn limits the number of invites you can send to keep people from spamming.

It’s not the most efficient method since a lot of people ignore their LinkedIn notifications (guilty), but it only takes a minute, so why not?

Step 5: Implement Your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy

You have a LinkedIn marketing strategy, right?

Creating the page is the easiest part. It’s hard to maintain the content your audience wants if you don’t have a plan.

The LinkedIn part of your social media strategy should include answers to the following questions:

• What is the purpose of your LinkedIn page? (This may differ from your general social media goals.)
• What will you use your Page for? Recruitment? Lead generation? Do you share super boring things from the industry that don’t work so well on Instagram or Facebook?
• Are you going to advertise? What is your LinkedIn ad budget?
• What are your competitors doing on LinkedIn and how can you create better content?

Finally, make a content plan:

• How often will you post?
• What topics will you be covering?
• How can existing content be repurposed for use on LinkedIn?
• Are you going to curate content from others?

When you know what you’ll be posting about and how often, it’s easy to stay on track with the Hootsuite Scheduler.

You can upload your content, schedule it to post automatically, and quickly view everything in a weekly or monthly view. At a glance, make sure your posts are evenly balanced across all the goals and topics you want to cover, and easily add new content or reorder upcoming posts as needed.

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In addition to posting your own content, don’t forget to interact with others. Even though LinkedIn is for business, it is still a social network.

Check out our top tips for growing your audience in 2022:

4 Ways to Use LinkedIn for Business

1. Advertising on LinkedIn

There are many LinkedIn ad formats, including:

• Promotional text ads
• Promotional posts (such as “promoting”an existing Page post)
• Promotional messages (to a LinkedIn user’s inbox)
• Dynamic ads, which can include user data such as the name, profile photo, and employer in the ad.
• Job advertisements
• Photo carousel ads

Four out of five LinkedIn users have the ability to influence business buying decisions, so advertising can be very successful.

With Hootsuite Social Advertising, you can create, manage and analyze the performance of all your social advertising campaigns on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook in one dashboard. Hootsuite’s unique analytics break new ground by showing the performance of both paid and organic campaigns across all three platforms. You always have the right information at your fingertips and the ability to customize campaigns to achieve maximum results.

2. Posting job listings and recruiting

Job listings have already become a popular destination for LinkedIn users. Forty million people search for a new job on LinkedIn every week. You can publish an ad for free, which will also appear on your company page.

Paying to advertise your jobs can be worth it too. Paid job postings get 25% more applications than regular job postings.

LinkedIn has a dedicated Recruiter premium account that has been the standard for recruiters around the world for years. They also have a lite version designed for small businesses.

3. Networking

That’s the whole point of LinkedIn. Your professional network is more important than ever as more business tasks and deals continue to happen virtually.

LinkedIn reports that conversations between connected users grew by 55% from January 2020 to January 2021.

LinkedIn groups are a great networking tool. These are private discussion groups, so anything you post there will not show up on your profile. The only downside for companies is that you can’t join your company page. You must use your personal profile in groups.

But many Groups allow users to share Page content, so joining a Group can be a good way to build both your personal networking and Page followers.

You can find groups under the Work icon in the top right corner of your LinkedIn dashboard.

4. Intellectual leadership

LinkedIn allows you to post rich content that many business leaders have used to build an influential influencer reputation. Long content, when used correctly, can solidify you as an innovation leader and expert in your industry.

To post an article, click Write Article on the LinkedIn homepage.

You can choose your personal account or company page to post. Since our goal is to grow your business, choose a new company page.

Alternatively, you can post thought leadership content on your CEO’s personal profile and then re-share that content on your company page.

The publishing platform is almost like your own blog software. It allows you to easily format the post, including adding images and videos, and you can even save drafts.

Writing your piece is the easy part. Now who will read this?

If thought leadership is your goal, you need to stick with it long enough to build momentum and interest in your work. Why worry? B2B decision makers love thought leadership content.

These high-value potential customers say they are willing to pay more to partner with companies that publish cutting-edge content.

A few tips for success:

• Be consistent. This is the most important thing to keep your current readers and earn new ones. Decide on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly posting schedule, and then – I can’t stress enough – do it.
• Be original. Do not repeat existing articles from the Internet. Take a stand, form an opinion, and give strong arguments in favor of your point of view. Not everyone has to agree with you. If they do, it’s probably not true thought leadership.
• Write once, promote forever. Don’t forget to share and promote your old posts. Content production on LinkedIn is up 60% in 2020, so you have some competition. There’s still room for your content there – just be sure to share it more than once.

3 Important LinkedIn Marketing Tips

How you market your business on LinkedIn will depend on your goals. Generally speaking, these are the three things that everyone should be doing in order to sell like a pro.

1. Optimize your posts

Relevance is more important than aging on LinkedIn. Their algorithm, like all platforms, aims to show users more of what they want to see and less of what they don’t like.

For example, the only LinkedIn poll I’ve ever voted on was about how much I hate polls, so I had to laugh when LinkedIn showed me this at the top of my feed today:

Here are the main ways to optimize your content:

• Always include an image or other asset. Posts with visuals get 98% more comments than posts with only text. For example, add a photo, infographic, SlideShare presentation, or video. (Videos get five times more engagement than other resources.)
• Keep your post short. To share long content, create a short description and then link to the full article.
• Always include a clear call to action.
• Name the audience you are trying to reach (e.g. “Calling all creatives”or “Are you a working parent?”)
• Tag mentioned people and pages
• Lead with a question to get quick answers
• Create LinkedIn polls for feedback and engagement
• Include two to three relevant hashtags naturally.
• Write strong titles for articles
• Respond quickly to comments to encourage more engagement

In this course from the Hootsuite Academy, you’ll find more tips for optimizing LinkedIn content.

2. Learn from LinkedIn analytics

If you are not tracking, you are only hacking.

But seriously, measuring your marketing goals is only possible with accurate and timely analytics. LinkedIn has analytics built in to walk you through the basics, but you can save time and learn more by using Hootsuite analytics.

We have a complete guide to everything you need to know about Hootsuite Analytics, but basically you can:

• Track the most engaging content
• Find out how people find your page
• Get traffic information for each section of your Page and showcase pages if you have them.
• Easily assess your audience demographics

Hootsuite Analytics includes personalized information so you can customize your LinkedIn strategy as needed to reach your goals.

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3. Post at the best time

What is the best time to post on LinkedIn?

…There is no one best time. It all depends on when your target audience is on LinkedIn. It depends on many factors, from the time zone to the work schedule.

As with everything in content marketing, success depends on knowing your audience.

Hootsuite helps with this big deal.

Not only can you schedule all your posts ahead of time so you never forget to post, but you can also choose to automatically post them at the best time for your company. Hootsuite analyzes your past performance to determine when your audience is most active.

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4 LinkedIn Marketing Tools

1. Houtsuit

In this article, we talked about how Hootsuite helps your LinkedIn strategy. Hootsuite + LinkedIn = best friends.

In Hootsuite you can do everything:

• Create and schedule posts and ads on LinkedIn
• Always post at the right time (for example, when your audience is online and active)
• Track comments and reply to them
• Analyze the performance of organic and sponsored posts
• Easily create and share comprehensive custom reports
• Optimize your LinkedIn ads in just a few clicks
• Manage your LinkedIn business page along with all your other Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Pinterest accounts.

2. Adobe Creative Cloud Express

Creative Cloud Express, formerly Adobe Spark, lets you create compelling visuals for free right from your browser or mobile device.

You can remove background images, add animations, resize graphics for any platform, and create professional quality videos. It also has a template library for professionally designed elements to help grow your brand. You can also use Adobe Stock images for free.

Source: Adobe

slideshare

Adding meaningful content like a presentation, infographic, or white paper instantly makes your LinkedIn post more popular.

To add such content, you need to do so via SlideShare. It’s a separate platform from LinkedIn, so adding your content will also make it searchable (bonus!). But the reason you want to add it there is so we can attach it to LinkedIn posts as a functional slider presentation, like so:

You can upload a PDF, PowerPoint, Word, or OpenDocument file to use in this way and LinkedIn will show it in presentation format.

Glass door

Managing your company’s reputation on LinkedIn is vital to hiring.

Through the Hootsuite app directory, you can install the Glassdoor app. Share posts from your LinkedIn company page on Glassdoor so job seekers can better understand your company. It also includes Glassdoor Content Engagement Analytics reports along with your other Hootsuite reports.

LinkedIn is a professional network that allows you to build trust, build a meaningful network, and establish your company as an industry authority. All of this is possible with the right LinkedIn marketing strategy, and now you know all about how to create your own.

Easily manage your LinkedIn page and all other social channels with Hootsuite. From a single dashboard, you can schedule and share content (including videos), reply to comments, and interact with your network. Try it for free today.