LinkedIn’s reputation as a top recruiting watering hole is well-earned -- how many of us can give credit to LinkedIn for helping us hire that rock star employee, or take that next step in our careers?

However, there is another LinkedIn feature which is relatively less well-known and under-utilized. This is the ability to create a Company Page. Registering and maintain such a page is an incredible opportunity for B2B companies who want not only to recruit the best, but also establish a thought leadership position in their industry.

For example, at salesforce.com, we have grown our LinkedIn Company Page by 125% in the past few months by regularly posting timely content that resonates with our followers -- breaking company news, event invitations, emerging trends in our industry, insights into company culture and hiring tips. As a result, LinkedIn is now one of our top-performing channels driving inbound traffic (and leads) to our blog and website.

I am going to share 7 practical tips for unlocking the value of your LinkedIn Company page:

Tip 1: Set up your page
If you don’t yet have a Company Page on LinkedIn, grab it now. It’s free! Even if you can’t start posting consistently right away, this will still make your business more discoverable. Add your company description and start planning what content would be most appropriate to share with your followers.

Tip 2. Start posting content regularly
What to post? It all depends on who is following you (Tip 5), but avoid copying and pasting what you have already shared on other social channels. Think about your busy professional followers -- will your status update help them to stay competitive and succeed in business. For example, you can never go wrong with sharing favorable company news or trends in your industry.

Once you have developed a content plan and know what content you want to share, start posting at least one time per week. Once you post, 70% of your post views will come within the first 48 hours. LinkedIn users visit the site early morning and after work, so it’s good to post in the a.m. and after work.

Tip 3. Target your posts by Industry or Location
LinkedIn give you the ability to target your company’s status updates to very specific audiences. You can pick the people who see your update, based on their industry, job function, location or seniority. For example, if you have a post that would be of interest to California-based VPs of Sales, you can target it only to them and not spam the rest of your followers.  What company doesn’t want to deliver the right content to the right people?[ Read our case study of how we used Targeted Posts for driving attendance to a UK event] 

Tip 4. Increase the reach of your posts
When you post to your company’s LinkedIn’s page, only your page followers will see your post unless 1) they like it and share it with their personal network or 2) you share it with your personal network or a LinkedIn Group(s). The more times your post gets shared, the more likely is that you will gain new followers or that your post will make it to the “trending posts” section of LinkedIn. To fuel the fire, ask your employees to follow your Company page and share your post of interest with their own networks. Join industry groups and share your content there.

Tip 5. Get insights on your followers
Make sure you make use of the Follower Insights tab to understand your audience. The tab will give you information about follower demographics, engagement levels, update impressions, total following, and recent followers. This will enable you to make better decisions about what and when to post.

Tip 6. Drive inbound links
When posting, think about how to drive traffic back to your company website or blog. We’ve found that LinkedIn status updates are highly effective in directing high quality leads to our blog, website and events pages.

Top 7. Engage
If you are posting great content, your followers will comment and ask questions. Stay engaged and follow up. An interesting element of the LinkedIn Company page is that when you reply to a comment, you can only do this as yourself (eg. Jane Doe) and not as the brand. Jump in to answer questions and soon you will build their own network and put a human face on the company’s posts.

Check out “The Perfect Linkedin Post” infographic for more guidelines about posting on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the future of marketing using social media, join us at Dreamforce '12. Register now!

Since this original blog post, LinkedIn has rolled out an update to the LinkedIn Company Pages to a limited set of pre-release customers featuring enhancements including the ability to upload a larger brand image. Check out our Salesforce page for a sneak peak of what’s to come.