Does your company use LinkedIn for employer branding?
If you say yes, then you need to read this blog post and listen to this episode of my podcast.
I recently took a Social Media Examiner course by LinkedIn trainer Michaela Alexis and learned great tips and points how to use LinkedIn for building and growing a loyal community on LinkedIn for myself and my business. Some of the tips, I felt I was able to convert into employer branding context for you guys.
Carry on reading this post and then listen to the rest of the tips on my podcast episode below.
Your employer branding strategy on LinkedIn must include personal and company profiles
LinkedIn is probably the world’s largest virtual business networking event. And that’s exactly how you should think of it. An event.
We attend events for social and entertainment purposes. Even learning in an event is much more fun if it has some social and entertaining elements in it.
That’s why you want to use both personal profiles and the company page.
This is what I learned from Michaela Alexis:
Imagine yourself at a business event. You walk around and stop to meet and greet other event participants.
What you do is you shake hands and introduce yourself. The other person probably does the same and next you ask each other where do you work and what do you do.
During this opening conversation, you would probably hand your business card to the other person. Or if you had a booth close by at the event, you would invite them to come talk more about business and work.
According to Michaela Alexis, on LinkedIn your profile needs to do the same job.
Your LinkedIn profile has a job to do
On LinkedIn, your company profile and the profiles of your key people replace those light one-to-one conversations at events when we are just getting to know each other to figure out if we can trust each other.
When you are using LinkedIn specifically for employer branding purposes, you need to include both your company profile and the personal profiles of your key employer brand stake holders in your employer branding strategy.
Your key employer brand stake holders are:
- Your talent acquisition team members
- HR
- Hiring managers
- Business managers and directors
- Your employees working with onboarding and as mentors
- Ideally also some of your existing employees working in those positions and teams you hire the most
If your employer branding strategy is only about your company page, it easily looks like a dead end booth at the event which no one finds and no one visits. That’s why you need your key employer brand stake holders to go walk the talk and lead prospects to your company page, your “LinkedIn booth”.
If your strategy is to use only the personal profiles, then your employer branding strategy easily becomes your employees’ personal branding strategy.
An effective employer branding strategy for LinkedIn needs both: your Company profile and the profiles of your key employer branding stake holders.
How to use LinkedIn for employer branding?
(1) Optimizing your personal profiles
Optimization is often for SEO reasons but you want to optimize the first impression as well.
Here, you might want to consider a coherent look and make sure your employer brand key messages come through in all of the profiles of those people who are chosen and who have accepted to have a role in your employer branding strategy on LinkedIn.
Imagine how powerful experience it can be when the look and feel are the same across key stakeholder profiles, and they match with your company profile.
What you need to optimize are:
- Images should be good quality and express the culture of your company and the personality of the person in question. They should also be approachable. After all, this is a networking event and you want people to feel welcome to take contact with your employer branding stakeholders.
- Headlines need to speak directly to the audience you want to attract. Tell what you can do for them: Who you are | Your unique value for them.
- About description is an introduction, not a CV nor a cover letter and definitely not in 3rd person. Make it short, but sweet. Who you are, why you do what you do, what you have to offer and how to get in touch with you.
- Featured section could be your game changer. Did you know you can post even a few minute video intro where you address your target audience directly? Think of it as the first hello and tell how you can help your talent target audience.
(2) Optimizing the company page for employer branding
Many organizations we have worked with have already decided LinkedIn to be their primary or even only social media for employer branding.
If that is the case for your company as well, you need to optimize your only employer branding media for employer branding. Most company profiles on LinkedIn are optimized either for sales or for corporate communication. Neither helps employer branding.
Optimize the following:
- Cover image needs to express who your talent target audience are. It should definitely not have anything else but human beings on it.
- Tagline (under your company name) needs to tell what your company page visitor can expect from your company page on LinkedIn.
- If your profile is for employer branding, then it needs to say how a visitor can experience your employer brand on your company page.
- Your custom button should be targeted to your career site instead of your company home page.
- Did you know you can select three (3) hashtags for your company page? Those are for search purposes, how people might find your company page when they search on LinkedIn.
- Use the two out of the three for what your target audience is likely to search on LinkedIn so that they find you.
- Choose the last one something unique to your company. And remember, this is employer branding context!
- Company overview should summarize your company employer branding mission or EVP, clarify who your talent target audience are and explain how your company makes life better for your employees.
- Don’t forget to state what you want your company profile visitors to do next.
- If you want them to follow, subscribe to anything or send an open application, call for that specific action in the company overview.
(3) Using the available features for social media and content marketing
Nowadays, there are tons of options how to post on LinkedIn. And not just on your personal profile but also on the company page.
Here are my favourite ones that I think work really well for employer branding:
- Behind-the-job-scenes videos to give the opportunity to express the vibe of your workplace and people.
- Educational videos or snippets of them.
- Employee testimonials – work well in text, image and video format.
- Interviews of team members, hiring managers and talent acquisition.
- LinkedIn Stories (mobile only) to promote new blog content, new employees and employee spotlights.
- Photos and text posts on your key employer brand themes.
- Employee transformations (career stories with a transformational angle).
- Polls and questions to engage your followers.
- Celebrations such as work anniversaries, welcome to the team, new positions and employee recognitions.
(4) Content curation under sub-page
Did you know you can find mentions and content curation opportunities on the company page under “Trending Articles” tab?
Everytime when someone mentions your company, you can find those posts here and can share forward.
LinkedIn analytics for employer branding
You don’t want to forget about analytics for employer branding.
Even though LinkedIn analytics are not that great and require quite a bit of manual admin, you should still pay attention to your relevant new follows, visitors to your company page and your content impression, click through and engagement rates.
These should be tracked and traced periodically to catch trends.
Tip! Go to the followers tab on your company page analytics and scroll down. At the bottom of the page you can find a list of who started to follow you and when. Because the profiles are listed you can pretty easily, albeit manually, take note on which one of the new follows each month match with your talent target audience for employer branding!
Check out my previous episode on LinkedIn for employer branding >>
Listen to episode 80 of the Building a Modern Employer Brand podcast
I recently took a LinkedIn course thought by LinkedIn trainer Michaela Alexis and offered by Social Media Examiner. Some of the tips were so interesting I converted those into the employer branding context and share them with you in this episode of the Building a Modern Employer Brand podcast.
In this episode:
- Optimizing the company page for employer branding.
- Ideas what to post on your LinkedIn company page for employer branding.
Episode-length: 25:08 min
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Click on the link and you will be directed to the Building of Modern Employer Brand -podcast. Click follow there and you will be notified weekly on a new episode!
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