What’s the Difference Between Your LinkedIn Personal Page and Company Page
Yes, the obvious here is that LinkedIn personal pages are for persons and LinkedIn company pages are for companies. But there are differences in what you can do with the two types of pages.
While everyone interested in marketing a b2b business should understand the key differences, this is especially important for solopreneurs. Maybe you planned on your personal page being your sole LinkedIn business presence. Before you eschew a company page, read on.
Headlines
Unlike personal pages, you don’t get to customize a headline for your company page. So make that About Us blurb on your company page count.
Advertising
You can only run advertising campaigns (Sponsored Content or InMail) from a company page. Solopreneurs, take note. If you’re targeting businesses, you’ll want to create a company page so you can leverage paid tactics to build your business audience.
Skills vs. Specialties
On your personal profile, you’re showcasing your skills -- those things that make you valuable at work or to prospective employers. (I don’t even want to get started on endorsements. I’m so surprised that gamification gimmick has stuck around. And I still don’t think recruiters give a hoot about them.) You select your skills from the options LinkedIn provides.
On your company page, you get to set your business specialties. And these can be anything. They’re not limited to standard options in the LinkedIn interface. They’re any keywords that relate to your industry, products, services, or customer niche.
Connections vs. Followers
The purpose of both personal and company pages on LinkedIn is still to link your brand with people who are interested in it. For personal pages, you’re connecting with other people. The idea being that you can leverage each other and each other’s connections as needed, right? Beyond that, you also end up following your connections in your activity feed.
For company pages, you’re seeking to attract followers to your page. Of course you can’t leverage each other as connections. But, your followers still end up following your updates in their activity feed, just like they do the people they’re connected to.
So...the activity feed is sort of the great equalizer that puts companies you follow and people you’re connected to on equal footing. At least, the companies and people who regularly post updates to their pages and end up in your activity feeds are on equal footing.
Publishing
Currently, companies can't publish articles to LinkedIn. Only individuals can do that. So if you want to leverage LinkedIn to cross-publish your blog content, you'll need to do so as yourself -- or each of your bloggers would do so as themselves. And then you can post an update to your personal page, and another to your company page, promoting the article. (Remember to include a link back to your website in that article on LinkedIn!)