Everyone interested in marketing a B2B business should understand the key differences, it is especially important for small businesses and consultancies.
Headlines
Unlike personal pages, you don’t get to customise a headline for your company page. So make the ‘About Us’ blurb on your company page count.
Advertising
You can only run advertising campaigns (Sponsored Content or InMail) from a company page. 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. Specialities
On your personal profile, you’re showcasing your skills — those things that make you valuable at work or to prospective employers. You select your skills from the options LinkedIn provides.
On a company page, you detail your business specialties. They are not limited to standard options in the LinkedIn interface. They’re any keywords that relate to your industry, products, services, or your own niche. Use this and be creative!
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. 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 to whom they’re connected.
The activity feed is the great equaliser 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
Companies can’t publish articles to LinkedIn anymore. Only individuals can do that. So if you want to leverage LinkedIn using content, you’ll need to publish this 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!)