LinkedIn company pages are not well-developed yet, but the company is encouraging businesses to build follower counts soon. Image: Flickr / nanpalmero / CC-BY-SA

When it comes to business engagement, LinkedIn is often considered a distant follower. The network has announced plans to “emphasize” company pages, and is effectively warning business owners to build their follower counts soon.

LinkedIn Company Pages

LinkedIn company pages contain much of the same information as other company profiles available online, including company name, corporate URL, industry, description, logo, products and services. LinkedIn users can choose to “follow” a company, which posts their updates to the user’s news feed on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn building fan counts

The senior vice president of sales at LinkedIn, Mike Gamon, has highlighted that LinkedIn is at a “brand-friendly scale” with 120 million users. LinkedIn plans to focus on and push company pages from this point forward. This includes advertising to both LinkedIn users and companies, pushing company pages as a way to connect with companies on a more “professional” level.

Start building fans early

As a part of this push to create and use company pages, LinkedIn is conducting research on how many brands each user will follow. LinkedIn executives estimate that this number is “in the low single digits, or a couple of brands per category.” This means that any LinkedIn users with company pages are being pushed to build follower counts as quickly as possible. This is because LinkedIn analysts think that any time a user follows a new brand, they may unfollow others.

The lessons of Facebook pages

The updates to Facebook have had a huge effect on Pages, and not entirely to the positive. Users no longer have to “like” a page in order to comment on that page’s activities. While no hard statistics have come out yet, anecdotal stories show that the number of “likes” and impressions on pages have gone down. While LinkedIn is very different than Facebook, some of the lessons of pages are likely to carry over; engagement is important and building fans takes time and effort.

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