Per Statista, LinkedIn was a top contender in brand value change from 2018 to 2019 with a 46 percent increase. The brands were measured by transparency, validity, reliability, sufficiency, objectivity and financial, behavioral and legal parameters. It’s also ranked in the top 15 of the most famous social network sites as of April 2019 with 303M active users.
Having never previously created a LinkedIn page from the ground up, I was surprised by the number of resources provided by LinkedIn, especially for higher ed professionals. There’s an entire site to support higher ed efforts including best practices, an alumni tool plugin, career services and students section, and more.
To create a page, you will need to log in to your personal LinkedIn account and be prepared with information like:
- University/college name
- Desired LinkedIn public URL
- Website
- Industry
- Company size
- Logo
- Tagline (120 characters max)
On the upper right-hand corner, there is a drop-down menu with “Create a Company Page” at the bottom.
From there, select “Educational institution” and you will be brought to this screen:
After that, you can get into the specifics about your university/college like specialties (up to 20), year founded, location, hashtags, featured groups and buttons.
Once all of the information above is entered, your page will be optimized for LinkedIn searchability. Once the basics are up, you can focus on generating content your audience will love to build stronger relationships with alumni, students, faculty, staff and other stakeholders.
Other best practices from LinkedIn:
- Post content like university news, event promotions, alumni or faculty stories
- Post regularly
- Post interactive content (open-ended questions are your friends)
- Target your posts for specific audiences
- Play on nostalgia
- Connect key audiences with professional content
- Move beyond stock photos to accompany your posts – and make sure the imagery matches the messages
- People want to see your brand’s personality
- Test out serial, themed content with your audience
- Quotes and stats tend to see higher engagement
- Create brand imagery that’s cohesive in your posts
- Keep caption copy to 150 characters or fewer
- Experiment with different types of video for different objectives
Pro Tip: Targeting posts is pretty simple on LinkedIn, simply select the drop-down menu when you’re creating a post to select specific audiences or keep it general to all.
University pages have changed slightly since their tips were originally published on their higher ed resource site, but checking out the best company pages on Linkedin can give great insight on what’s working best for others so you can adapt it for your brand.