Business pages play a vital role in marketing your products and even for future expansion. The competition gets tougher each day so it is important to leverage on your online resources. Aside from having business pages on Facebook and Google+, you can also make the most out of LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a proven effective in networking with customers, clients, peers and employees. In fact, finding people is easy with LinkedIn. Your target market can be found in a single click. Furthermore, LinkedIn is ideal for all types of business, whether it is a micro-business or a corporation, you can benefit by creating company pages and building a bigger network.

With the most recent update, followers of a particular company in LinkedIn can get more updates such as insights, news and even job opportunities. It all started with Company Follow feature in LinkedIn resulting to more than 2 million companies and millions of professionals following them. And now, the headlines from the companies you are following will also appear in your homepage news feed which are all readily available for sharing to your own network. Hence, there are really rewards in following specific companies such as your competitor or a company that interests you. You can also follow your own company to get updates.

Without doubt, LinkedIn can better enhance your business presence online. Here are the 3 ways to get the most out of the new LinkedIn company pages:

1. Customize your company page.

When updating your company profile, make sure that the overview page is informative. Highlight your accomplishment, awards and specialties. Relate facts in a very interesting way. And to optimize it even more, insert your blog feed URL to promote your recent blog posts.

You can also integrate images, banners and videos within your company page. With this, the presentation for your products and services becomes more attractive and lively. Integrating rich media on your profiles generate more leads.

As your followers increase, it is important to provide fresh and valuable updates. You have to enable the page for status update then designate people to who can post status updates to continuously stream company updates.

2. Provide relevant updates and monitor your reach.

Providing every-minute update is not enough. People connected to you want relevant updates than can either help them with their business or yours. Be professional when posting status updates and be sensitive with your followers. As an expert to your industry, you wouldn’t want to turn off your followers. Be creative when providing updates by integrating rich media once again.

Doing the above things will require you to exert time and effort. But if it is for the improvement of your business and satisfaction of customers, you have to keep doing it.

But how do you know if you are doing good? How to measure your performance?

Thanks to LinkedIn “Analytics” feature, it can help you track your visitors. Though this is not an in-depth report, it can help you monitor activities within your company page such as liking or commenting on your status updates.

3. Build followers and be engaged.

To get more followers you have to increase your online visibility. Include a LinkedIn link on your sites, newsletters, email and forum signature and more. It is better if you can get relevant followers or what we called, your target market.

There are different strategies on how you can build followers such as linking up with other companies, sending announcement about your company page and referring to other professional.

Deal with your followers professionally. Once you have got plenty of followers, you must know how to keep them.

The author, Ryan Cote is a Project Manager for Ballantine Digital, a NJ social media agency Ryan has worked in SEO and Internet Marketing over 10 years providing SEO solutions