Take a look at the referral traffic to your website in Google Analytics. Do you find LinkedIn before having to scroll to page two?

For many B2B companies that’s often the case. In fact, according to research from Content Marketing Institute founder, Joe Pulizzi, 62 percent of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn to be the only effective platform for them. So it makes sense that a B2B company would make this channel a key part of their digital communications strategy.

LinkedIn has evolved quickly and dramatically over the years. It seems like every day a new opportunity crops up for businesses to maximize the opportunity it can bring. But are you taking advantage? Even a few extra steps—beginning with your company page—can help increase quality website visitors, further raise brand awareness and help you better engage with the right audience. You can start by…

Speaking Up

If you’re not creating company updates you’re missing a serious opportunity to engage with your page followers, demonstrate thought leadership, and show a more human side to your company, all while extending your brand’s reach. When updates draw engagement, those messages are spread to your followers’ networks. As a result, it’s also critical to be thoughtful about each and every post. Before hitting “share,” ask yourself: is this going to be helpful to my customers? Will this not just demonstrate my company’s expertise, but also provide value? Will it invite new visitors to stick around?

Personalizing Your Content

Have you ever posted a company update that enthusiastically touted a new product that half your followers don’t care about and then promptly wish there was a better way to personalize your messages? Earlier this year LinkedIn solved that problem by swapping out its Product and Services Pages for Showcase Pages. Done right, they have the potential to foster a true community around a particular product, business unit or company initiative. You can now serve up specific messages to those who are eager to hear them without inundating all of your page followers with information they don’t need.

Making Your Content More Exciting with Visuals

LinkedIn lets you enrich your company updates with multi-media content, such as an image, presentation, document or video. If you’re sharing an article, don’t always rely on the image that’s automatically generated. Do you have an infographic that would help tell the story? Would a SlideShare presentation complement your expertise? What if you tapped your creative services team to turn around a bite-sized image that would make a compelling stat sing?

Many tend to default to a channel like Facebook to share visuals, but I’ve seen them really shine on LinkedIn. A few weeks ago, an update accompanied by an image for one of our client’s here at PAN garnered 131 percent more clicks than the average number of clicks all posts received that week. See? It’s worth taking the extra step to infuse your posts with unique, easily digestible and shareable pieces of content.

Measuring Every Little Thing You Do

LinkedIn has some nice graphs that help you visualize reach, engagement, page views and visitors over a period of time. But it also offers specific insights for each company update. Sure, it may seem daunting to pour through it all (I know, graphs are prettier), but roll up your sleeves and take a deeper dive to discover the impact of every single post. Then, analyze trends to help you continuously improve your content. You may find that posts leading with stats tend to garner the most impressions, but those with images tend to drive more clicks. Those little tidbits matter when you’re trying to map activity back to goals like elevated awareness and website traffic.

Are you using LinkedIn to its fullest potential? Tell us how.