LinkedIn 101: Personal Profile vs. Business Page [Social Media 101]

LinkedIn is one more of those social media platforms that continues to grow. Using it can get your company name out there, and get potential employees in contact with you along with possible new clients.

The benefits of using LinkedIn is that it is based more for professionals and businesses to get in touch, not like the other social media platforms where it’s more of a social forum to chat with friends. You can also create pages that are specific to your different products, events, brands, and services. Utilizing LinkedIn can give you a way to generate leads, and possible clients, which leads to more exposure for your company, and in turn brings more revenue.

Today we are going to talk about LinkedIn, and why you need a personal profile for yourself and a business page for your company. But first, we’ll talk about the benefits of using LinkedIn in general.

Benefits of LinkedIn for Your MSP

With millions of users, LinkedIn is all about building networks and making connections. The more professionals that see you and connect with you through your personal profile, the more potential connections your company can make. Like they say, it's all about who you know. It’s also about who they know.

Related, your company should have a detailed Company Page, and it needs to be updated regularly. I know this seems like a lot of work, but staying current with your company’s LinkedIn page is important to grow your audience and business results. LinkedIn allows you to:

• Share content with like-minded professionals
• Increase your searchability
• Engage with your community
• Increase opportunities to network
• Find potential new employees
• Generate leads
• Connect with current and potential clients
• Gain a higher level of credibility
• Showcase your company, projects, and services
• Gain trust with customers/prospects, by using the “Recommendation” feature
• Show off your accomplishments and achievements

To fully recognize these benefits, you’re going to need to create a personal LinkedIn profile as well as a LinkedIn Business Page.

Why You Need Both a Personal Profile and Business Page

It’s important to realize that if you have a company and have a personal LinkedIn profile, you should also have a business LinkedIn page. It looks much more professional. With having both pages, your searchability by potential clients and current customers puts you on their radar. You can connect your employees and get connected to new people through them. You can target your desired audience. Don’t think that having these that you can get lax in the other areas that you market in, have reasonable goals and expectations about its usefulness.

What If I Set Up A Personal Profile for My Business?

To start a company LinkedIn page, you will need a personal profile. Don’t do what some businesses do and make a personal profile for your company instead! We’ve seen companies do this before, and we’re going to strongly advise against doing this. Sure, if you go this route, you can bypass having to create a personal profile on LinkedIn. However, it’s going to appear less professional and you’re going to lose out on many of the features available to you through a LinkedIn Business Page, including:

• Having a logo and clickable link to your company’s page when an individual lists themselves as working for your company
• Give more opportunities for people to find you due to its SEO-friendly pages
• Highly targeted LinkedIn advertising features
• Share available job openings in their own section
• Utilize Showcase Pages
• See more detailed metrics

To learn more about marketing your MSP through LinkedIn, check out our other LinkedIn 101 blogs. Feel free to reach out to us with any questions that you may have.