B2B Brands on LinkedIn: Thought Leadership vs Company Page

When businesses in the technology space are in the early stages of building brand awareness, they often have a choice to make: Should they invest time in creating thought leadership content or in building a robust company page on LinkedIn?

The answer: leverage both.

There’s no disputing the power of a well-crafted LinkedIn company page. It’s the storefront for your company, the place where your brand identity, values, voice, products, and services are showcased. It’s your home base for building community, engaging with colleagues, customers, and prospects. And it’s ideal for sharing your perspectives and insights about industry trends with people in your network, establishing your brand as a thought leader within your industry.

Today, the value thought leadership content provides is greater than ever. In fact, an Edelman and LinkedIn survey found 75% of decision makers (including members of the C-suite) said thought leadership content led them to look into products or services they hadn’t considered before. For 70% of C-suite executives, it even caused them to reconsider relationships with their existing vendors.

LinkedIn is a powerful platform for showcasing your thought leadership content, and your company page is a great place to launch it. It’s why you need to leverage both.

But, why stop there?

The Power of the Employee Personal Profile

Your employees can also use their personal LinkedIn profiles to help push out your thought leadership to their networks, exponentially increasing the impact of your content.

On average, an employee's LinkedIn personal profile has 10 times more first-degree connections than a company page and receives up to 561% more interactions. People are looking to establish relationships with other people, not organizations. It’s the key reason why company pages list “followers,” while personal profiles list “connections.”

Resharing thought leadership content via employee profiles is a great way to boost brand awareness and credibility. In this example, Spyglass MTG, LLC., promoted a webinar on its company page.

Source: Spyglass MTG, LLC.

Employees of the company then reshared this post with their LinkedIn networks, exposing the brand (and webinar) to a larger network of industry colleagues.

When employees share your company’s thought leadership content, not only will it appear in their networks’ feeds, it will also often prompt conversations with their colleagues. This enhances organic interaction with that content, simply because people are more likely to engage with your employees than your brand.

An employee’s personal profile also provides many ways to interact with colleagues, current customers, and potential prospects — with private messaging using LinkedIn InMail or with LinkedIn DMs.

To optimize the impact of your content, ensure that your employees post a link to your company page in the Experience section of their personal LinkedIn profiles.

Activating Employees To Share Thought Leadership Content

When employees proactively share your company’s thought leadership content, you benefit from wider distribution. The first step is to ensure that you continuously provide employees with high-quality content to share with their LinkedIn networks. It’s also a good idea to encourage employees to share their own original, authentic content. LinkedIn makes it easy to publish articles directly on a LinkedIn page and get analytics reports on how the content is performing, which helps employees increase engagement.

LinkedIn also provides ad tools that can assist you in activating and engaging employees in the distribution process. LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads makes it possible for you to use LinkedIn Campaign Manager to create new ads promoting your content or to leverage organic posts by employees and use them as thought leader ads.

Your Company Page Is Still Important, Too

Even with all of the benefits that come from active employee engagement on LinkedIn, a company page will always be a vital component of your thought leadership strategy. It boosts your brand credibility with others who are searching for information about your organization. It also improves your company’s ability to rank on search engine results pages. (Your employees’ personal LinkedIn pages are search-friendly, too.)

You can also increase your impact with LinkedIn ad campaigns on your company page, using LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager advertising platform. And, when employees are connected to your company page —- especially when their personal profiles include a clickable link to your company page —- your organic exposure is heightened.

Beyond LinkedIn: Promoting Thought Leadership on Other Social Media Channels

Leveraging LinkedIn content on other social media platforms is a savvy way to reach a wider audience of stakeholders, industry influencers, colleagues, and potential customers. However, it’s important to remember to keep your target audience and platform in mind, and modify your content accordingly.

For example, Centric Software is a technology leader that actively promotes company updates, events, and thought leadership on LinkedIn and other platforms. One of those platforms is Facebook, where the company promoted an eBook that was also shared on LinkedIn.  

Source: Centric Software

Employees can also play an important role in getting readership for your content on the social media platforms on which they actively participate. When you identify those employees who are active on social media (your super-users) and provide incentives to share your content with their followers — and make it easy to do by providing them with easy-to-share content — you’ll be well on your way to amplifying your reach.

The Right Mix

Promoting your company’s thought leadership content on your LinkedIn company page, the LinkedIn personal profiles of your employees, and a mix of social media channels can go a long way to building credibility for your business and expanding your network. Think of your LinkedIn company page as the billboard, while the individual employee personal profiles can serve as platforms for community engagement.

GaggleAMP’s employee advocacy tool makes it easy for your staff to share your organization’s thought leadership content with prospects and customers — and reap positive results for your lead generation, recruitment, and internal communication programs. To give your employee advocacy on LinkedIn a boost, schedule a demo today!