Here is a major LinkedIn tip for all small business owners and social media managers: Conduct an audit of your corporate LinkedIn presence. With the 4th fastest growth rate by new member signups, LinkedIn has fully entrenched itself as the premier business oriented social media platform in the world and whether organizations love it or hate it, their employees are signing up. This is where the problems can spring up. When auditing your organizations LinkedIn presence, consider these 5 tips: Build A Proper Company Page Make sure your company page is properly set up and can be associated with your employee's profiles on LinkedIn. This will ensure that your company’s logo appears next to their name on the experience section of their profile. When done correctly, rolling your cursor over the logo will cause a quick company bio box to appear. Additionally, clicking on the logo or company name will drive users to your company’s LinkedIn page. [caption id="attachment_682" align="aligncenter" width="639"] A properly linked company page will place your logo on your employees LinkedIn profiles[ Get Your Employees On Board Search all of your current employees names on LinkedIn or ask them to email you a link to their personal profiles. It is critical that users who actually work for you represent that on their pages. You do not want a current employee to have an outdated profile on LinkedIn indicating they still work for a different organization, especially if they were hired from a competitor. If you discover that current employees profiles are out of date, ask them to update them and link them to your organizations official page. Remove Your Old Employees One tricky part of conducting a LinkedIn audit is executing the complete reverse of the above and having a former employee remove their affiliation with your company on their profile. There is currently no easy way to do this. What can make this challenging is that company page owners cannot simply go in and delete old employees. If you are experiencing this problem currently, go to LinkedIn's help center and fill out the form pictured below. Try including a link to the user's profile you want removed and consider uploading and sending a letter of resignation or termination if you have one. Removing old employees from your LinkedIn company page is just as important as making sure your current ones are associated with it. [caption id="attachment_687" align="aligncenter" width="647"] Contacting LinkedIn directly can be required to remove a past employee from your company page[ Get Company Wide Professional Pictures Since your employees on LinkedIn will be associated with your company page, and thus your online brand, it is critical that their profiles include a professional picture. The importance of a professional picture on LinkedIn has been widely blogged regarding an individual's profile, but the importance to an organization's corporate LinkedIn presence is often forgotten in these blogs. When someone visits your company page and can quickly bring up a list of all your current employees, it is important to be professionally represented. [caption id="attachment_691" align="aligncenter" width="583"] Making sure all your employees have professional pictures will improve your corporate LinkedIn in search results[ Have Employees Expand Their Profiles  Once you have correctly associated your current employees (and disassociated your past employees) from your company page and encouraged them all to get a professional photo, ask them to enhance the experience section of their profiles in order to accurately reflect their role with your organization. This will help increase the overall appearance and professionalism of your corporate LinkedIn image. This can be as simple as adding their official HR title and including 2 or 3 sentences about what they do in their day to day role. Auditing your organization's LinkedIn presence is necessary to ensure you are being professionally and accurately represented on LinkedIn. Additionally it can contribute significantly to maintaining a cohesive brand identity on the largest and fastest growing business oriented website in the world.

---

Ready to create a corporate LinkedIn strategy? Click here to learn how AltaVista can help!

or

Call us at 410-760-6680