Linked, Inc.: How to Create a Company Page on LinkedIn

Dave Awl

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If you’re a social media-savvy creative professional — and since you’re reading this, I’ve got a pretty good hunch you are — you probably already have a professional profile on LinkedIn. But in addition to profiles for individuals, these days LinkedIn also offers pages for companies.

Figure 1: Peachpit Press’s page on LinkedIn is a good example of a well-developed company page.

Company pages are essentially LinkedIn’s equivalent of business pages on Facebook. They’re informational resources that serve as both a communication tool for the company as well as a kind of reference book entry that allows users to learn more about it. When you visit the LinkedIn page for a company like Apple or Adobe or even CreativePro.com, you can read background info about the company and its products. And just like Facebook’s business pages, LinkedIn’s company pages allow businesses to post updates that show up on the home pages of their followers, helping the company to stay on their radar.

Figure 2: One of the recent updates on Peachpit’s company page

LinkedIn’s company pages are woven right into the fabric of its professional profiles, too. As you’re scanning someone’s profile on LinkedIn, you can click the names of the companies where they’ve worked to visit the relevant company pages — assuming that pages for those companies have already been set up. If no page exists for a company whose name you click on, instead you’ll just be taken to a LinkedIn search page that displays various users who list that company, or similarly named companies, in their profiles.

Smart cookie that you are, you can probably tell where I’m headed with all this. If you’re an independent professional who’s incorporated, or an entrepreneur running your own business, and you haven’t already done so, then you should probably consider setting up a page for your company so that when contacts click on the name of your business in your profile, they can learn more about it.

And if you work for an employer whose company page isn’t set up yet, it might be feasible for you to volunteer to take care of it, if you meet the necessary requirements.

So in this article, I’ll walk you through the process of setting up and customizing a company page on LinkedIn. Ready? Let’s get started.

Prerequisites for Setting Up a Company Page

In order to set up the page for a company on LinkedIn, you need to meet the following prerequisites:

1. You must be a current employee of the company, and your position must be listed in the Experience section of your profile.

2. You need to have an email address at your company, and you’ll need to make sure that your company email address has been added to your LinkedIn account and confirmed.

3. Your company email address needs to use the company’s own email domain. So, for example, if you’re trying to set up the company page for Spacely Sprockets, you should have a company email address along the lines of [email protected]. This is a firm requirement: If your company doesn’t have its own email domain, LinkedIn suggests setting up a LinkedIn group for your company instead of a company page.

4. Your LinkedIn profile needs to be rated “Intermediate” or “All Star” on the Profile Strength Meter, which you can find on the right side of your profile. If your rating isn’t high enough, you probably just need to fill in a little more content to get it up to snuff. You can also click the “Improve Your Profile Strength” link for some tips on how to proceed.

5. Your LinkedIn profile needs to have “several connections,” according to LinkedIn. (That’s a little vague, but I’m guessing the magic number is somewhere between 3 and 10.)

And of course, you should double-check to make sure your company doesn’t already have a page before you try to set one up.

Also note that as part of the setup process, you’ll be asked to verify that you’re an official representative of the company and that you’re authorized to set up the page. If you’re creating the page on behalf of an employer, make sure you’ve got clearance from the appropriate higher-ups!

Creating a Banner Image

One other thing you might want to do ahead of time is to round up or create three key images for your company page:

1. A banner image. The banner image is similar to the cover photos on Facebook and Google+, but of course the dimensions are unique to LinkedIn: Your image must be a minimum of 646 pixels wide by 220 pixels high. (Wouldn’t it be nice if all the social media sites would agree on a standard cover image size and shape? Oh, I know, that’s like asking for world peace.) Larger images will be automatically shrunk and/or cropped.

Figure 3: Peachpit Press’s banner image (shown here a little smaller than actual size) does what a good banner image should — it communicates the essence of Peachpit’s brand.

2. A standard logo. The standard logo allows for a rectangular shape and needs to be at least 100 pixels wide by 60 pixels high. This is the one that will appear at the top of your company page.

Figure 4: An example of a rectangular standard logo at the top of Google’s company page

3. A square logo, which will appear next to your company’s updates and job postings on LinkedIn’s home page. (You might think of this as your company’s profile pic.) Minimum size is 50 x 50 pixels.

Figure 5: The square logo for the Economist magazine shows up just to the left of one of its updates on LinkedIn’s home page

Acceptable formats for all of these images are PNG, JPEG, or GIF with a maximum file size of 2 MB.

I should note here that when I tried to upload my images as JPEGs, I encountered an error message despite the images being correctly sized and well below the 2 MB limit. But resaving my images in the PNG format got me around this glitch.

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