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If your school is committed to helping its students find work upon graduation (which is the case of most schools) or providing them with a professional network, it needs to develop a presence on LinkedIn. This help build your school’s credibility to your students and community and will help you stay connected with your school’s audiences. Here are 4 steps to get your school started on LinkedIn. 1. Create a company page for your school If you do not have a personal LinkedIn account, create one and complete it. Indeed, you will need to have a profile at least filled at 50%, have connections and provide an email address at the company in order to add a company pagee Beware: make sure you become a Designated Administrator of the page. Go in Companies, pick your school’s page, and go to Edit. If you wish to assign other individuals user profiles as admins, add their names to yours. Not designating an admin allows anyone with email addresses from the company to update the page. 2. Optimize your school’s LinkedIn profile For maximum SEO benefits, make sure you include your school’s keywords early in the descriptions of the Company. Use the Products and Services section: This part is often overlooked as schools feel that programs are neither products nor services. But they are both! This tab offers a recommendation section, which means that students and graduates can recommend your programs, and prospects visiting this page will see who in their network is recommending your programs. Here is what the London Business School does: Embed a YouTube video either on the Overview page or on each of the individual Products & Services pages you create. It is as simple as copying and pasting a URL from YouTube and it will help make your page personable. Use the Career section: even if you are not looking to recruit, this section will give visitors information about the school’s culture. Other LinkedIn page optimization tricks. 3. Continuously build your LinkedIn community Include your company page link in all your school’s corporate communications: newsletters, emails, etc. Ask for every employee at your school to follow your school page. Create a LinkedIn follow button directly on your website for people to follow the page directly. As with any social media platform, you need to feed your profile with relevant information on a regular basis: Connect your school’s blog RSSS feed. To add your blog's RSS feed to your LinkedIn page, click the dropdown menu next to Admin Tools for your page's 'Overview' tab, scroll to the bottom of the page, and enter your blog's RSS feed. Put any content that may be relevant to your followers in the Company status update feature. This feature will allow your content to be liked, commented, and shared in a status update that will appear on your followers’ feeds. Follow companies that are good resources about your industry: partners, employers, community organizations. If you’ve searched and found a business/organization, you can follow them by simply click on the “Follow Company”. Use LinkedIn today to keep track of your school’s main industry news Keep at it at least once a week. Progress will be incremental. 4. Track your progress with LinkedIn Insights YouTube is continuously updating its Insights section. The Analytics tab is only visible to administrators of your Company Page. LinkedIn Analytics is one of many social media analytics tools available to help you track the effects of your LinkedIn efforts: new followers, page views, sections visited. It will also help you tweak your content on LinkedIn by tracking which posts or content received the most clicks. One of the most interesting features is the Follower Insights: you can find out exactly who follow you and gives you an estimate of people’s background. It will also tell you how many Likes, Comments and Clicks your profile got. Make sure you keep in touch with your followers and see what groups they follow, what they are interested in, etc. to get to know them better. What tricks have you tried on LinkedIn that have worked for your school?
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