The Importance of Employee LinkedIn Profiles for Companies

Optimized and branded employee LinkedIn profiles can help companies gain more visibility on social media, reinforce their brand image, and build trust with prospects and clients.

Prospects, clients, or even job seekers are very likely to end up on your company's LinkedIn page.

Ideally, as a company owner or community manager, you will have set up a professional LinkedIn page for your business, serving as a digital profile of your activities, mission, vision, and achievements.

Now, as you well know, as soon as you hire a new employee and that employee is using LinkedIn, it's likely that new recruit will indicate working for your company and thus become an added ambassador for your company, with a direct link to your company page.

As individuals have, on average, 10x more connections than your company's Linkedin page does (LinkedIn, 2017), you certainly want to make sure you can benefit from that reach.

What do optimized employee LinkedIn profile pages look like?

1. Professional and branded LinkedIn banner

The LinkedIn banner constitutes one of the main visual elements of a company or employee's LinkedIn profile.

Your marketing and communication team can create one in minutes using Canva for example. The best part about it? Once you create one, it can be used by all your employees.

As not all your employees might like your suggestions, why not come up with 4-5 options that they can easily customise while keeping the same branding frame?

Examples of easily customizable branded LinkedIn banner frames

Paris Team

Amsterdam team

Vienna team

2. Branded LinkedIn pictures

Branded LinkedIn pictures are also easy to make and apply company-wide.

This is also something you're unlikely to face resistance towards; who doesn't like a professional LinkedIn picture?

To brand your employees' LinkedIn profile pictures, you can either make a photo shoot with a common background (e.g: brick wall, office terrace, office logo) or go for a classic profile picture and add a branded frame to it.

Example of a framed LinkedIn profile picture:

As you can see, the LinkedIn profile picture has borders using the company's brand colours. If your company logo has a very eye-catching, bright or unique colour, this is an easy way to harmonize all your employees' LinkedIn profiles in a very easy way.

Again, you can subscribe to Canva's free version to brand your employees' LinkedIn profile pictures!

3. Professional LinkedIn title

Social media such as LinkedIn can be powerful, even more so when you know how the algorithms work. Let's say you're an event planning agency and want to attract leads and clients using the LinkedIn sales navigator.

If your sales managers are in charge of this, you'll definitely want to make sure they have a professional LinkedIn title, indicating they are Sales Managers for your event planning company.

Here's an example:

E.g.: Sales Manager @UrbanEvents - Bespoke Event Planning Agency

4. Link to your website in their contact info

Another small step which can help increase your audience reach. LinkedIn users have the option of adding company websites to their contact details.

This can be done in a few clicks and put your company website a click away from all your employees' contacts on LinkedIn.

How employees can add your company website to their LinkedIn profile

Step 1: Click on "Contact Info"

Step 2: Click on edit (top right icon)

Step 3: Insert the company URL and click save

5. Optimized summary

If some of your employees use LinkedIn to reach out to prospects or seek potential partnerships, they will be the first point of contact on behalf of your company.

To build trust, transparency and authenticity, you'll want to make sure they have professional LinkedIn summaries

Here's what your employees' professional LinkedIn summaries should include

• Their title

• Their years of experience in the industry

• The main skills they possess and how they can contribute these to helping your prospects

6. Company presentation and portfolio as an attached file

You probably have a company presentation file, or corporate PowerPoint you share with clients and prospects. If you've done a good job at crafting these documents, it'll have all the information people need to know about your company and convince them you're the team they need.

Among other elements, company decks present:

• Your company mission

• Your core values

• Your services

• Your achievements

• Your previous large accounts

• Your team

Attaching this corporate document to your employees' LinkedIn profiles can help clients clicking on their profiles easily get an overview of your company and the services you provide.