BY RICHARD STONE

Earlier this year, LinkedIn introduced the ability for a company page to publish long form content in the form of articles. As a result, lots of businesses have changed, or are currently changing their LinkedIn and overall social media strategy. But what should you do?

LinkedIn wants more advertising. Like most businesses, it wants to increase revenue and profits; there’s nothing wrong with that. After all, those Empire State Building New York offices don’t pay for themselves.

As a result, it has fixed a long-standing problem with its company pages. Until this latest change, a corporate page update was limited to 700 characters: that’s normally about 150 words. Have you ever tried expressing a thought coherently in 150 words? It’s not easy.

This meant that most businesses were driven to host long form content on the individual pages of their team members. That’s what Stone Junction did and, until recently, that was our advice to our clients. We would suggest that they have ‘hero’ pages, belonging to willing individuals, where their content could be hosted. Those hero pages, in turn, would be marketed by the company page.

Now though, my advice, and the advice I would like Stone Junction to give to its clients, is that we should host long and short form content on the company page and link to it from the individual pages of as many people in our client organisations who are willing.

ADVANTAGES OF COMPANY PAGE ARTICLES

This creates several benefits. First, the company page grows in stature as the content added to it increases in texture, complexity, and volume. It will be driven upwards in

Furthermore, the value of LinkedIn marketing activity can be owned by the company page and not the individual. No longer is there the danger that a team member could take that content with them when they leave.

From a practical point of view, it also makes the process much easier to manage. Not every company has enough potential hero pages to make that strategy viable, and many people are shy about providing a third party with access to their individual LinkedIn page. In contrast, a company page can be managed and accessed from any LinkedIn profile with the right permissions.

ARE THERE ANY DRAWBACKS?

Yes. You are likely to see the number of likes, comments and shares you receive decrease in the short term. This is natural; some of the audience will be used to seeing content from the hero profile and may not follow the company page.

However, over time, you will see this balance redressed. Why? Well LinkedIn knows that companies have ad budgets and individuals don’t. So, it has a vested interest in ensuring company pages work well on every level. LinkedIn is very happy in the Empire State Building thanks; it doesn’t want to move.