If your company doesn’t have a LinkedIn business page, it’s time to jump on board. As the largest professional online networking site, LinkedIn is a goldmine of business opportunity. However, once you have a company page and an individual profile set up, knowing how to leverage LinkedIn to reach prospects and close leads can prove difficult. We’ve compiled some tips for our readers to help.

Establish Your Vision

It’s essential to establish with your team exactly what you’re trying to accomplish with your LinkedIn company page. State it in one sentence, like you would a mission statement. Something like:

Company ABC’s LinkedIn Company Page is a professional online platform used to engage with our clients, investors, prospects, employees and advocates to help grow the visibility and credibility of our company.

Set Goals

Create a specific list of objectives that you and your team want to accomplish using your LinkedIn page. They should be specific to you and your industry, and focused on growing your business.

• Use LinkedIn to establish Company ABC as the premiere company in our industry.
• Use LinkedIn to share meaningful content that will show our followers our expertise in our field.
• Use LinkedIn to lead followers to our website.
• Use LinkedIn to attract potential employees.

Know the Basics of Social Media Publishing

Post Smart – Make sure the content you post is interesting, meaningful and relevant to your audience, while still being cohesive with the LinkedIn environment. Use your best judgment to determine what fits the professional feel of LinkedIn. If you have a good story to share but it’s not very professional, reserve that story for Facebook and/or Twitter.

Post Catchy – A good tagline will lead to a click, and a click will lead to a like or share. Take the most interesting piece of the post and make it into a quick and easy-to-read headline that will draw the follower in.

Post Rich – Include photos, videos, articles and/or links that will make the post more enticing.

Post Often – To start out, post at least once or twice per week. Once your followers increase and you find yourself more active in social media, you can post as much as a few times every day. Remember that an inactive page is almost no page at all.

LinkedIn-Specific Tips

Ask Questions – Not only do questions provide good feedback, they can also lead to increase loyalty and reach. People like to see that you are genuinely engaging with your followers and audiences online. Don’t make it sound like you’re fishing for comments or people may get turned off to your posts.

Ask for Recommendations – Use the “ask for recommendations” link on the “products and services” page to get people to recommend and even review your services. This further validates your quality and exposes your page to those peoples’ connections.

Post in Groups to Start Discussions – Group pages are purpose or interest-centered discussion pages anyone can join (though some require permission). Every post is sent to the email of all group members. Joining and posting in groups is an easy (and free) way to expose your page to a large group of people who are already interested in some part of your mission.

What to Do Later

Start Your Own Group – It may be a good idea to create your own group if one doesn’t exist in your area of interest or within your existing network. Find a niche or certain aspect of business that you excel at and see if there others who are interested in it. If there is a demand for it, establish a clear purpose for the group and start inviting the right people to it.

Jobs – LinkedIn is often enticing to users because it can lead them to a job opportunity. Using it to post jobs and look for employees is a great way to build visibility of your brand. Be wary though, as listing jobs on LinkedIn does cost money, and depending on the size of your company, you may already get enough applicants for your postings.

Post more often – Successful LinkedIn pages post once, if not multiple times per day. As your page grows, start posting more and more often.

Check out these winning LinkedIn pages that were voted the 10 best pages of 2013 for some inspiration.