We’re nearing the very end of our series on LinkedIn tutorials – so please let me know if you have any questions that you think haven’t been addressed, and I’ll answer them in our last LinkedIn post next week!
Today, we’re going to talk about the Company feature on LinkedIn. There are a few different ways you can use this:
- Create and edit your own company page.
- Follow other company’s pages.
Today, we’re going to focus on how to follow other company’s pages, and tomorrow we’ll look at creating and editing your own company page.
Let’s see what LinkedIn has to say about it in their Learning Center.
Company Pages are a company’s profile of record on LinkedIn and a powerful way to speak to millions of professionals through word-of-mouth recommendations and trusted testimonials. It’s like a LinkedIn profile for a company."
For LinkedIn members, Company Pages are a great way to research companies you’re interested in, follow them to stay updated, see what kind of people work there, and even review the products and services you use."
For companies, Company pages present an opportunity to reveal the human side of your company. Provide a peek at the individuals behind your brand and highlight how members use your products. Your Company Page offers tools to bring your brand to life."
As I’m sure you can imagine, this is a tremendous opportunity for lawyers. You can search out your existing clients’ company pages on LinkedIn and follow them to stay up-to-date on what they’re doing. When you’re preparing an RFP or getting ready to meet with a potential client, you can look up their company page for additional information. There are some great possibilities here.
My assumption is that for most law firms, their marketing department will be handling the creation and management of their firm company page. So while we’ll get into that tomorrow, we’ll start with how you can search and follow other company’s pages. There are three ways to do this:
- From the LinkedIn header.
- From any member’s LinkedIn profile.
- From the company page.
We’ll start with the LinkedIn header. From any page within LinkedIn, you will be able to see the main header at the top of the page:
There are actually two ways to search for companies from the header. In the menu, you’ll see that there is a "Companies" option. You can click on this to go to the companies home page:
The main part of this page is the search option. You can search for companies by name, keyword or industry – this can be particularly useful if you’re focused in a particular industry, such as construction or transportation, as you can search for companies to follow.
But a good place to start is with your top clients. As with most social media, there is some time investment involved here, but once you put out that initial investment, LinkedIn will be doing the work for you. So you may want to piecemeal this and add five or so companies at a time.
You can also see that on the right hand side, LinkedIn has a list of nine companies that they suggest that you follow. If any of these are of interest to you, you can click on their logo to go to their company page:
Here’s a sample of a company page. You can see that they give a company overview at the top, and then below that is a list of the employees that are in my network (1st-3rd degree). Next to that, is a tab that allows me to see a list of all of that company’s employees – these are only the employees that are on LinkedIn.
On the right hand side of the screen, it tells us how many followers the company has (909) and has a button that would allow us to "Follow" the company. When you click to follow a company, you are agreeing to see their updates, which as I mentioned earlier, can be helpful with clients and potential clients.
You can also "share" this company by clicking the "Share" button, which will allow you to post this to your news feed with any comments you might have.
Below these buttons is an overview of how you’re connected to that company – how many first and second degree connections, as well as how many of their employees are on LinkedIn. There is also a link that allows you to see insightful statistics about the company’s employees. This will give you information on the job functions, years of experience, educational degrees, and universities attended of the employees and how these compare to employees at similar companies.
You can also see their annual company growth compared to employees at similar companies, what other types of companies people who are looking at this company are looking at, employees with new titles, and a graph of your connections at the company. They also show you where the employees of that company worked previously, and where they’re located.
Back on the main company page for this company, I can also see the most recent mentions of the company in the news, the type, size, website, industry and year founded, and the headquarters:
Maybe even more importantly, I can see recent tweets and blog posts and the company’s activity on LinkedIn:
For attorneys who are following their clients, this is a great way to see what they’re up to and perhaps give you a reason to reach out to your connections there.
You may have noticed that at the top of the company profile page, we were on the "Overview" tab – there is also a "Products" tab. When we click on that, we can see a list of the products/services offered by that company, and how many recommendations they have.
As you can imagine, this is immensely helpful for a company, and for anyone doing research on a company’s products.
So that’s one way we can follow a company through the LinkedIn header – the other way is using the search box:
In the right hand of the menu bar, there is a search box. When you’re on your main LinkedIn home page, this is defaulted to "People," though LinkedIn allows you to search for anything without having to change this if you want.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s change it to "companies" – to do this, click on the down arrow next to "People" to get this menu:
You can see that you have a LOT of search options here. We want to search Companies, so we’ll click this. Then, you can type the name of the company, or keywords for industries, in the box to bring up some search results. As you start to type, if you are typing a company or industry, LinkedIn will offer you some suggested results. If you see the company or industry you want, you can click on this directly. Otherwise, you can hit "Enter" or the magnifying glass button to go to the overall search results page.
Since I see the ILN, which is what I’m searching for, I’ll click on that in the drop down list. You can also see here that LinkedIn is sorting those results by type, so you know whether you’re finding a company or group.
Clicking on the name of the company, either through the drop down list, or from the search results page, will take you to the company page, and you can follow them or review their page as we did above.
As we mentioned above, you can also see company pages through a LinkedIn member’s profile. We’ll use my profile as an example, but when you’re connecting to your clients and potential clients, it’s a good rule of thumb to then click through to their company page so you can follow their company as well as their profile.
On a profile page, you have the usual basic information on the person’s title and location, then their latest news item, and then the overview of their current and past jobs, etc. For each of these job positions, you will notice that you can mouseover the name of the company, and a little box will pop up:
This will give you the basic overview of the company – their description (where you can also select the "more" link if you’d like to see the full description), the company size, website, headquarters and industry, and the ability to follow or stop following them. I’m already following them, as you can see.
To follow the company, you can either click "Follow company" in the box that pops up, or you can click the name of the company to go to their company page.
And as we’ve already shown, you can follow companies from their individual pages.
Before we get into creating your own company page, let’s talk about a couple of other tabs. If you go back to the companies home page through your header menu like we did earlier, you’ll see that there are three tabs – "Companies home," "Search companies," and "Following (#)." The first of these we’ve already seen, so we’ll click on search companies.
Although you can search companies elsewhere, this is where you would come to do a more in depth search:
You can search companies here by entering keywords or company names into the search box in the upper left hand corner. You can then refine these results by location, by those who are hiring, by industry, by your relationship to them, by company size, by number of followers, and by fortune (ie Fortune 50, Fortune 51-100, etc).
So again, if you’re looking to focus your practice more on a particular industry, it would be helpful to use this page to search out any companies you may not have already thought of.
The third tab is "Following (#)" with # indicating how many companies you’re currently following. We’ll click on this to see and edit the list.
Here is the list of companies I am following. You can see that each company has its own entry, and I can click on the company name to go to their company page, I can click "Stop following" if I no longer want to see updates from them, and I can click "Notification settings." Let’s do that now.
When you click on notification settings, a new window will pop up for that company:
You have the option to decide how you would like to be notified and for what. You can be notified when employees join, leave, or are promoted at the company (and whether you see this for those in your network or all employees), any job opportunities at the company and any company profile updates. You can also decide whether you want to be notified through network updates (this is your news feed) or by email digest, and you can see that for that setting, whatever you choose there will affect all of the companies you follow.
If you choose to be notified by email, you can decide whether you’d like to see these emails weekly or daily. Any changes you make to this should be saved by clicking "Save Changes." If you have further concerns, you can click "Edit Privacy Settings" in the bottom righthand corner – note that this will take you to a new page, and won’t save any settings you’ve made.
You’ll likely be asked to input your username and password, as LinkedIn does any time they’re taking you to the accounts section, and a window will pop up on that page:
As you can see, this identifies what is shared by you with your network with regard to companies. As we saw during the settings post, if you want people to know when you change your profile, make recommendations or follow companies, leave this option checked. Otherwise, you can uncheck it and click save changes.
To get back to the last screen, we would have to repeat the Companies >> Following (#) >> Notification Settings sequence.
Tomorrow, we’ll talk about creating and editing your own company profile.