Having a LinkedIn account for your business can be a great way to reach out to other businesses and to connect with your customers or clients, via a professional platform. And while there are some benefits to posting from your company’s account on LinkedIn, there are far more benefits to having your employee’s share on LinkedIn. Here are just a few of them:

1. Your business will seem more human

These days, no one wants to do business with the nameless, faceless corporation. After the recent recession, consumers have become more and more concerned with the people behind the company. When your people post on LinkedIn, instead of your company, anyone who looks for your company on this platform will find not just your company page, but the pages of the people who work at that company. Because consumers want to work with other human beings and not with soulless corporations, you will be earning serious points.

2. Your content will be more visible

When just your company posts something, it only has so much reach. Even if you have only two employees, when they post something, they can more than double your reach. If you have four, you’ve quadrupled that reach. Instead having just your company share, if your employees share, you will be able to get your message in front of far more people. And if you are trying to lengthen your reach, this is probably the very best thing you could do.

3. Increase your social signals

Social signals are very important to search engine optimization. And all social media give more attention to sources that are already getting a lot of attention. If a particular article is being shared by your employees and then by their connections, LinkedIn is more likely to promote that article, because it appears like it is relevant and interesting to people in your industry (which, hopefully, it actually is, too). These increased social signals mean that you get more attention, both on the platform itself and on search engines.

4. Increase your authority

When many journalists look for sources for their articles, they will turn to content posted on LinkedIn. This is considered to be more trustworthy than messages posted on other social media, because LinkedIn is considered to be a more professional platform. Now, your message is being spread across a platform where it could be used as a real source in a real news article. A journalist could link back to your content and your authority is instantly boosted.

5. You can build thought leadership

This is likely something that you are striving very hard to build already. Thought leadership, like authority, can go a long way to improving your search engine page ranking and simply to making your brand more attractive to potential clients or customers. LinkedIn is a platform with more than 330 million users. This gives you lots of opportunities to reach out to people who are looking for the content you have to offer. Because it is primarily a platform for sharing professional ideas and proving your company’s prowess in a certain industry, content posted there helps to establish your thought leadership in that industry.

6. Makes your employees ambassadors for your brand

This is something that you want your employees to be anyways. They may not always get the chance to be this on social media, especially social media like Facebook and Twitter, where most employees will only have personal accounts. LinkedIn is the perfect place for these individuals to take ownership of the company they work for and to help market it to their connections. This is often called “brand citizenship.” They do not just operate behind the corporate mask, they come out and talk about your brand as individuals.

7. Sets you apart from the competition

Only a small fraction of companies have employees that are active on LinkedIn. Almost 70% of all CEOs of Fortune 500 companies use absolutely no social media. By using social media and being active on it, you will set your company apart from the companies that are not properly utilizing this platform. Between two businesses who both have accounts on LinkedIn, your potential clients and customers are more likely to choose the one that is active, especially when that activity comes not just from the company itself, but from the employees of that company.