The ultimate guide to growing your business on LinkedIn in 2023. Discover the best practices and frameworks to attract, engage, and convert more leads on LinkedIn.
Discover the key differences between your LinkedIn company page and your personal LinkedIn profile and decide on the best option for your business to generate leads.
Key Differences Between LinkedIn Company Page and Personal Profile
This section will discuss the key differences between a LinkedIn company page and a personal profile.
By understanding these differences, you can choose the best approach for your business to grow your brand and generate leads.
We will start by exploring personal profiles' unique features and benefits, including their role in organic lead generation.
We will then delve into the advantages of LinkedIn company pages, including their ability to recruit and advertise.
What is a Personal LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn personal profiles are focused on individuals rather than companies.
They represent you as a person on LinkedIn and include your name and photo, your elevator pitch or LinkedIn headline, your work experience, education, and content sharing.
Your LinkedIn profile should include a professional photo of yourself, a clear and concise headline that represents your personal brand, and a summary of your work experience and education.
You can also use your profile to share and create valuable content with your network. This will help establish you as an industry thought leader.
Key Features of Personal Profiles
- Connections and Followers: You can connect with other professionals and gather followers interested in your updates.
- Company Following: You also have the ability to follow companies.
- Messaging: You can send messages to people in your network or InMails to people outside of your network if you have a LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator Account.
- Content Creation: You can share various types of content, including posts, photos, videos, documents, carousels, polls, and articles, to engage your connections and followers.
- Who's Viewed Your Profile: You can see a list of people who viewed your profile, giving you insights into your visibility and reach within the platform.
- Groups: You can join LinkedIn Groups to network and collaborate with other members within your industry.
LinkedIn Profile Types: Regular and Creator Mode
LinkedIn offers two types of profiles: a regular LinkedIn profile primarily focused on professionals and job seekers and a Creator Mode profile adding additional features for content creators and industry thought leaders.
You can always switch between these two profile types and select the one that serves your current situation best.
Regular Profile
The regular profile primarily highlights your professional background and experiences.
- Connect Button: The primary call-to-action button is the "Connect" button, which sends you a connection request when someone clicks it.
- Job-Focused Profile Layout: Your About and Experience section are accessible at the top of your profile, just below your introduction section.
LinkedIn Creator Mode Profile
The LinkedIn Creator Mode is designed for active content creators. This profile type emphasizes your content and activities.
Special features of Creator Profiles include:
- Follow Button: A " Follow " button replaces The default " Connect" button. While the number of connections is limited to 30,000, you can have infinite followers. Followers will see your content in their newsfeeds, but they cannot send you messages. This makes it easier to manage your inbox by only connecting with current and future customers.
- Content-Focused Profile Layout: Your profile layout is optimized for content discovery. This means that your Featured section, Activity Feed, and Content are displayed at the top, below your Intro section. Your About and Experience sections are displayed below this content.
- Clickable Profile Link: This feature allows you to prominently add a single URL of your choice to any website in the introduction section at the top of your profile.
- Profile Hashtags: You can add up to five hashtags to your profile to highlight the categories that your content is most focused on. This will help people interested in these hashtags discover your profile and will also boost your posts with matching hashtags.
- Creator Analytics: Offers data on the visibility and engagement of your posts.
- Audience Analytics: Provides insights on your follower demographics and growth.
- Events: Allows you to host LinkedIn LIVE and LinkedIn Audio Events.
- LinkedIn Newsletters: This feature allows people to subscribe to your newsletter, so they receive an email notification whenever you publish a new one. Creating a newsletter is as simple as creating a LinkedIn article and then publishing it to your newsletter.
What is a LinkedIn Company Page
A LinkedIn company page is a dedicated page for your business, designed to showcase your products and services, share company news and updates, and engage with your followers.
LinkedIn company pages focus on the company rather than individuals.
- Call To Action Button: You can add clickable call-to-action buttons
- Contact Information: Share company contact information for one or multiple locations if applicable.
- Employee List: All people who added your company page to their profile can be found via your company page.
- Products & Services: Pages can showcase products and services.
- Hashtags: Each page can add up to three hashtags. Whenever someone publishes a post with high engagement, your company page will receive a notification inviting you to comment under the post as your business, helping people discover your business. Therefore, adding hashtags that your company's ideal customer uses is best. For example, if they ask a question about a problem in their business that your company can help with, use those hashtags.
- Analytics: Detailed graphs and analytics are available for visitors, followers, leads, content, and competitors.
- Content Creation: You can create various types of content, including posts, articles, and newsletters. You can also choose who can see your content - everyone or targeted audiences (with at least 300 followers).
- LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms: Company pages can create lead generation forms that are automatically populated with individual members' names and email addresses. Members can always change this information and type in a different email address if they want to. This feature works great for generating leads by offering a whitepaper or lead magnet to page visitors that they can access or download in exchange for their email addresses.
- Connections and Followers: Company pages cannot connect with other pages or individuals, but they can follow other pages. Pages can be followed by both pages and individuals.
- Job Postings: You can also create job postings and publish them under your page if you want to receive qualified applications from qualified job seekers.
- LinkedIn Groups: You can feature a LinkedIn Group of your choice. The "Featured Group" feature allows you to highlight a group you manage or belong to.
- LinkedIn Ads: To run a LinkedIn Ads campaign, you need a company page. Each ad will appear as a post published by your page, and people can click on your company logo to learn more about your business.
LinkedIn company pages are a powerful tool for businesses looking to grow their brand and generate leads.
By showcasing your brand and culture, creating and sharing valuable content, and targeting specific audiences with sponsored ads, you can attract top talent, build your brand's credibility, and generate leads and conversions.
How to generate Leads on LinkedIn
LinkedIn Content Strategy
Sharing high-quality content on LinkedIn is the best way to generate leads.
LinkedIn's content platform has the most qualified audience among all social media networks worldwide.
You can find anyone from business owners to company directors, C-level executives, VPs, and anyone with real decision-making power.
By focusing on growing LinkedIn followers and sharing relevant and valuable content with these decision-makers, you increase the chances of your ideal customers discovering your content.
This can happen if they follow the same hashtags that your post is about or if one of their trusted peers engages with one of your posts.
Once they follow you or send you a connection request, they will always see your new posts in their newsfeed. This is a great opportunity to build trust by providing value on a daily basis.
When someone is ready to work with you, they are almost always half convinced that they want to work with you specifically, which makes the entire sales process much easier.
LinkedIn Outreach Strategy
Cold outreach on LinkedIn can be powerful.
With LinkedIn's search filters, you can quickly find people and companies that would make perfect customers.
If you upgrade your account to LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator, you can access even more advanced search filters.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator customers can also save companies and individuals to lead and account lists, making it super easy to receive automatic notifications whenever something important happens with any of your leads.
You can learn more about how to set up a super effective LinkedIn Outreach campaign in this article.
LinkedIn Ads Strategy
LinkedIn Ads offers all the same targeting options as LinkedIn Sales Navigator and a few more.
With incredible targeting options that include specific job titles, companies in certain industries, and specific annual revenue and headcounts, among hundreds of additional filters, LinkedIn Ads is the most powerful advertising platform in the world.
However, this power comes at a price, with one of the highest CPMs in the world, especially when targeting high-level executives in the world's strongest economies.
Only companies focusing on account-based marketing and very high order volumes can achieve a positive return on investment with LinkedIn Ads campaigns. Therefore, it is not recommended for most small businesses.
Which is better for lead generation
Creating Content
If you want to create content on LinkedIn, you will notice that sharing a post via your personal profile instead of your page can lead to much higher views and engagement.
The main reason for this is that the LinkedIn algorithm favors individual creators over pages for two reasons. People are more likely to engage with others, and LinkedIn wants to incentivize companies to boost their posts with LinkedIn ads.
Therefore, creating content with LinkedIn profiles is more effective.
The downside to creating content with personal profiles only is that the individual profile will gain connections and followers, but not the company page.
This can be a problem if you have a high number of employees who might occasionally leave for another business. In this case, they take all of their connections and followers with them.
If you have a team of 10 or more, I recommend a hybrid strategy.
Ask employees to follow an 80/20 strategy: 80% of content should be shared via their personal profile, and 20% should be reposting content created by your company page.
I also recommend encouraging your team to comment under your page's posts to drive indirect traffic to your page.
Send Outreach Messages
Company pages do not have an inbox to receive or send messages from.
Therefore, you need a personal LinkedIn profile to send messages or InMails required for a cold outreach campaign.
Outreach also works best in combination with LinkedIn content strategy, for example, by sharing a link to a post or article that you have created and shared under your profile.
Therefore personal LinkedIn profiles are the clear winner in this category.
Running LinkedIn Ads
Since LinkedIn Ads require a company page for every ad type, you need to use a company page in this category.
Who is the Winner
In all cases, every business needs a company page, and every employee should link to it in the experience section of their personal LinkedIn profile.
If you have a team of 1 to 10 people, I recommend focusing exclusively on LinkedIn profiles for content creation and outreach.
If your company has over 10 employees, I recommend using the 80/20 strategy for social media content. This means that 80% of the content should be published under each person's profile, and 20% of the content should be reposted from your company page.
If your business has more than 50 employees, consider creating a dedicated content creation team that follows the 80/20 approach. Additionally, you should explore LinkedIn Ads as a viable option to generate leads on LinkedIn.
