Each of your employees should have a complete and detailed LinkedIn profile. Every employee. Not just the sales department and not just the twenty-somethings: Any employee with a company e-mail address should have a LinkedIn profile. It’s good for your business.

Here’s why:

LinkedIn is where you go to find people and get found by people.
LinkedIn is the networking and search engine used by professional people to find professional people. And it’s going to be really hard to find your people if they are not on LinkedIn.

Great LinkedIn profile pages lead to great search engine results.
Your people and your company need to have keyword-rich profiles on LinkedIn. Google ranks LinkedIn very highly in its search algorithm. That means profiles that are SEO-optimized for the keywords you want your customers to use to find you.

Send a consistent message about your company.
A specific section can be found in each employee’s LinkedIn profile that can used to include a standard company description optimized for search engines. So, no matter which employee’s profile is viewed, the same message is sent to the reader about your company.

Help job candidates to develop a good first impression of your company.
LinkedIn is increasingly being used as a reference check by job candidates. Candidates want to see that a future employer “gets” social media and its implications. That means good profiles in all departments and senior management. How impressive would it be to have everyone there with sharp looking profiles?

And while you’re at it...
Job candidates can view your employees' profiles and see possible career paths with your company.

And for you CEO’s who dislike the prospect of being disturbed....
LinkedIn allows a wide range of account settings so that senior executives don’t get buried in sales pitches. Let’s face it: LinkedIn wants senior executives to use LinkedIn, it makes LinkedIn look good. So the care and feeding of those executives is very important to the service. Many filters are available that control how contact is made and the information viewed. 
 
Use your employee’s profiles to market your company.
Notify every one of your employees connections each time your company issues a new blog post. If you have 40 employees with 100 connections each, that’s 4,000 possible impressions for each and every blog post. And every one of those people may decide to forward your blog post to someone new. Cost? Zero. Please tell me you have that much in your budget.