Simply Social Media

Given LinkedIn's more than 200 million members, a company page on the popular professional networking site can provide a valuable venue for recruiting talent and promoting your products and services. But while setting up a LinkedIn company page is relatively common, some business owners have questions and wind up making potentially costly mistakes. To generate the kind of results you're looking for, it's important to consider many details when setting up a company page on LinkedIn.

Cambridge, Mass.-based business-to-business marketing software firm HubSpot, for instance, found LinkedIn to be nearly 300 percent more effective for visitor-to-lead generation than Facebook and Twitter, says Kipp Bodnar, HubSpot marketing director and co-author of The B2B Social Media Book (Wiley, 2012)....

Social media lay people may regard LinkedIn as, primarily, a venue for networking and for career advancement—but smart business owners know better. They know that LinkedIn is nothing less than a critical tool for brand enhancement and lead generation. Indeed, when used properly, LinkedIn can actually be used to drive traffic to a company website and ultimately to garner higher sales. The trick, of course, is having the right LinkedIn marketing strategy. Six basic pointers are offered below....