Does your company have its own LinkedIn page?

It should. Trusting individual employees to act as faithful ambassadors for your company isn’t a winning strategy — though there are certainly ways to incentivize this behavior, as we’ll see in a moment.

Noted business coach Steve Phillip lays out six convincing benefits of company LinkedIn pages on, what else, his LinkedIn channel:

• LinkedIn company pages show off your entire company, not just its employees (rockstars or no)
• They compel connected employees to act as brand representatives
• They generate valuable data about customer and prospect engagement
• They alert you when your company is mentioned by other LinkedIn users, including those you don’t follow
• They highlight your company’s differentiators and value-adds

They don’t do all this on their own, though. It’s up to you to build and maintain an effective LinkedIn company page that puts your organization’s best foot forward. These eight best practices can help.

1. Optimize Your “About Us” Blurb

Your LinkedIn profile is just as important to optimize as your company website and blog.

Pay particularly close attention to the first sentence or two of your “About Us” blurb. That’s the snippet of LinkedIn content most likely to appear on the first page of Google’s search results for common terms associated with your company — unless there’s lots being written about your company in the news, in which case your LinkedIn profile might not surface until page two or three.

Your “About Us” blurb should include the primary keyword for which you’d like to rank, plus a succinct, eye-catching description of your company’s services. The right language can dramatically increase click rates, boosting traffic to — and engagement with — your company LinkedIn page.

2. Clearly Highlight Your Company’s Specialties

Don’t neglect the “Specialties” subhead in the Company Details section of your LinkedIn page. Use it to call out specific specialties or services that you provide. If possible, these should set your company apart from its competitors. Optimization isn’t as crucial here, so don’t be afraid to use unique tags that people aren’t necessarily searching for.

The Talus Payments company LinkedIn page is a great example of the effectiveness of Specialties tags. Amid core services like “credit card acceptance” and “electronic payment processing,” Talus calls out less common terms that not all payment processors can highlight: “gift cards,” “PIN-based debit,” “check services.”

3. Make Sure All Your Employees Are Connected

You can’t force your employees to list your company in their profiles’ employment histories, but it’s of course in their best interest to do so. (If they want to have a job after they leave your company, that is.) Gently encourage your team to tie their profiles to yours. Your employee count might be just a number to you; to your prospects, it’s a proxy for legitimacy.

4. Keep Your Content Professional

LinkedIn is not Facebook. It is a respectful, professional environment. Never forget this, unless you feel like chasing away customers.

Whole books have been written about proper LinkedIn etiquette, but there’s one particularly common mistake made by countless novice company page managers: overly aggressive messaging. LinkedIn messages are best used sparingly, and they’re not designed for hard selling. If you want to cultivate relationships with prospective customers or vendors, engage publicly by liking their posts or tagging them in (relevant!) posts of your own. Don’t be a creeper.

5. Use a Catchy Cover Photo

Buttoned-up doesn’t mean colorless. Choose an eye-catching, lively cover photo for your LinkedIn company page. Team photos and office candids work well. If your company sells photogenic products or has a super-duper logo, those will work too.

6. Keep Branding Consistent (On Your Employees’ Profiles Too, If Possible)

Your page’s imagery is important for another reason: consistent branding. You want to keep your LinkedIn company page’s look and feel as close as possible to your main website’s. That means identical logos, background images, taglines, and other identifying elements. If your prospects don’t know within seconds that they’re on one of your company’s virtual properties, they’ll move on.

7. Participate in Relevant LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn group participation is a great way to position your company and select individual team members as an authority in your industry. You can post pithy status updates, answer other members’ questions, introduce problems or questions of your own, and generally raise the conversational bar in your niche. The more engagement you produce, the higher you’ll rise through the influencer ranks — and the more attention you’ll attract outside your group.

8. Regularly Post Unique and Curated Content

Think of your LinkedIn company page as an extension of your company blog.

For technical reasons, you should avoid cross-posting entire blog posts on your LinkedIn page, but you should definitely promote and link to every new blog post from your LinkedIn page. Feel free to post entire press releases, company announcements, original articles, and links to external press mentions too.

Mix up post lengths: just a paragraph or two for announcements, less for blog and press updates, and much more for original articles.

The ideal posting schedule is three to four times per day. If that’s too much for you or your team, use a social scheduling tool to set content dumps well in advance.

Don’t Neglect the Rest of the Social Mediasphere

LinkedIn isn’t the only social media platform your company needs to countenance.

It might not even be the most important one. As we’ve seen, LinkedIn is a powerful networking and thought leadership engine, particularly for B2B firms and their employees. If your company primarily sells to other businesses, you absolutely need to get your LinkedIn presence right before moving on to other platforms.

If your company primarily sells to consumers, your calculus is different. You’ll of course want to follow your customers, but they’re likely to be found on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat — not LinkedIn or industry-niche platforms and directories like AngelList and Crunchbase.

Some of the best practices we’ve outlined here apply to other social media platforms. Others are unique to LinkedIn. But, however you approach your social media game, it pays to have a plan. Your customers’ trust is too important to lose.