Here’s a question — do you know which company has the highest number of followers on their LinkedIn company page? I know you’re about to say, “Duh, obviously LinkedIn itself.” Alas, my friend, you’re wrong. With over 23.38 million followers, Google’s the one topping the follower charts followed by Amazon and Ted Conferences. LinkedIn, in fact, is fourth in line.
Clearly, apart from their unmatched popularity, Google’s definitely been able to ace the LinkedIn follower game. While I can’t promise you 20 million followers (though, that’s not entirely impossible!), I can definitely share some tricks of the trade to help you take your game up a notch! In this article, I will cover some tricks and tips that I personally recommend for brands trying to increase their follower count organically on LinkedIn.
Before I get into the trade secrets, I’d first like to address the sceptic in you. Why should you really care about increasing LinkedIn followers in the first place?
Why Does Your LinkedIn Company Page Follower Count Matter?
Without beating around the bush, I can narrow the answer down to just one word: credibility. For what it’s worth, people consider your company’s LinkedIn presence to build an impression about how trustworthy your company is. Everything from how many followers your company page has to what kind of content you’re posting creates an impression about your company. In fact, even if you’re running a Google ad campaign, they’d go to your website, but eventually, many might look at your LinkedIn company page to evaluate your brand better.
Once they’re on your page, the number of followers makes their perspective about how established you are in the market. In fact, at Impactable, we’ve seen a visible difference in the results of paid ads depending on the Linkedin company page follower size. For companies with less than a thousand followers, we see fewer conversion rates. The rationale here is that once people see their ads, check their company page and find out that it has merely 23 followers, they simply consider it as a new company or not trustworthy. Hence, they don’t engage any further.
In fact, people don’t even have to land on your LinkedIn company page to make a judgement now. A lot of times, when you run LinkedIn ads, your follower count is displayed right below your company name, next to promoted right there in the feed. Invariably, your ad gets more clicks when you have 30,000 followers as opposed to merely 30 of them.
How to Grow Your Company Page Followers on LinkedIn Organically?
Now that you’re with me on the fact that your LinkedIn company page’s follower count actually matters let’s get straight to the 11 tricks that I deploy to organically boost followers for my clients’ company pages.
1. Keep Posting Regularly, Consistency Matters
Not just your follower count but the frequency at which you post content on your page also makes a difference. First of all, it indicates that your company is active. Secondly, posting regularly increases the engagement your posts get (algorithm hack!). So, this way, you create an impression that you’re actively sharing content worth engaging with, and people end up following you. When you’re starting out, posting thrice a week should be enough.
Eventually, for LinkedIn, I recommend that you post once every day unless you have over a hundred thousand followers and you just have as many people consuming your content. However, once a week is ideal for most scenarios.
2. Focus on the Style of Your Content
When I say post regularly, I don’t want you to post an ad about your brand every day. No one’s coming to your LinkedIn company page to look at your sales pitch. So, it shouldn’t be just about “this is who we are, and this is what we sell, book a call with us.” Rather, focus on putting out informative content that educates your visitor.
As a brand, your page should deliver insights about your industry, your thoughts about current trends, or show people how to do or improve something. All of these work exceptionally well. For instance, at Impactable, we focus on sharing tips and tricks about LinkedIn ads, best practices, beginner’s guides, and campaign strategies. Essentially, your content should add value to the page.
3. Actively Engage with Your Audience
I often find that brands plan a social media calendar, share some content weekly and think they’re done with the social media effort. No, social media management, including LinkedIn, is an ongoing effort, and you need someone to actively engage with the community to be noticed. If someone comments on your posts and no one on your team ever likes and replies to those comments, people see that, and they slowly just stop commenting.
Think of LinkedIn management (ads or page posts!) as a major networking conference. You not only have to be present there, but you also need to interact with people around to get noticed and make connections (a.k.a followers!). Every time a person likes, comments, or engages with any post of yours, a part of their audience sees that. So, you’d want people to actively engage with you and to that, you need to like, reply and carry on the conversation to promote their behavior. Only then, you can leverage the amplified exposure that you get from their engagement and organically reach more people.
4. Interact with Others from Your Company Page
Organic efforts are always inbound as well as outbound. When it comes to LinkedIn, a part of your outbound efforts to grow your LinkedIn company page followers is to interact with other people’s and brand’s content from your company page. LinkedIn offers every company to follow three relevant hashtags. For us, that could be #marketing, #entrepreneurship, #linkedinads. Then, you engage with the trending posts in these hashtag groups — like, comment, share (if it’s that relevant!). This works wonders for brands that are starting out on LinkedIn. You need to put yourself out there, comment on posts related to your industry and topic and be seen by those consuming similar content.
5. Encourage Your Website Visitors to Follow You
Your LinkedIn followers can be your go-to prospect list that you can actively engage with to convert as a customer. So, you can drive visitors from all fronts to your LinkedIn company page to capture that audience. You can always add elements on your website that encourage your visitors to check out your LinkedIn company page and follow you. No, I am not talking about the standard social media icons that you place in the footer of your website. We all do that. I am asking you to go the extra mile and add a section or a widget on the side or on your header that exclusively asks people to follow your company on LinkedIn.
6. Try Cross-Promoting, It Never Hurts
Like I said, your goal is to build a LinkedIn prospect list in the form of your followers. So, you need to direct the audience from EVERYWHERE to your LinkedIn page. If you have a podcast, a YouTube channel, a newsletter, or a website, you can use all of those to plug them into your LinkedIn page. Just to be clear, you can use cross-promoting across all your communities. I am just focussing on LinkedIn for the benefit of the article. All you need to do is note the community they joined and then promote all your other communities in order to organically grow them — be it Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, or even your newsletter.
By doing this, you’re just increasing the chances of them converting. A prospect who’s in your Facebook group, who follows your LinkedIn company page, and subscribes to your YouTube channel is warmed up and goes through the buying journey faster versus someone who just joined your newsletter.
Sometimes you have to take the horse to the well and your content to your target audience. Sharing your content in any relevant space where your prospects can be is always recommended. I suggest you start by leveraging LinkedIn groups for this. LinkedIn allows all its members to create groups for building communities.
All you need to do is find groups related to your industry or domain. For us, we’d go for groups that are focussed on LinkedIn marketing. Don’t worry — finding relevant groups is quite easy. Simply go to the search bar and type a relevant keyword. Then, filter the search by groups. Here’s what we got when we looked up LinkedIn marketing.
I know a lot of these groups are often crowded, and you might get lost in the masses. However, if you strategically identify small focussed spaces that are as close to your TG (target group) as possible — you can get a lot of traction. Also, don’t get all promotional here — group admins often kick you out for that! Focus on sharing relevant, educational-type stuff that adds value.
8. Employee Activity
By now, you’d have realized that when your company page is new (building followers), you need to attract visitors to it from all directions. So, leverage personal profiles to do that. You can use your LinkedIn profile and also all your employee’s profiles to share content and posts from your page. Again, don’t put out messages on your personal profiles saying, ”follow our company page.” Instead, just share quality content from your company page on your profile and let people make the decision to follow your company if they find the content interesting.
9. Send Invitations
So far, I had been focusing on covert ways to increase followers, most centered around content sharing. However, that does not mean you cannot be direct about it. LinkedIn page admins are allowed to send invites to their network to follow their company page. There’s a catch though — you have a limited number of invites every month.
Most page admins are allotted 100 invites per month which you can send out to your network. Clearly, you have got to be picky there. You won’t get an invite back just because someone rejected it. So, use them wisely and pick connections who are not only more likely to accept the invite but also are relevant to your company. Trust me, these invites make a big difference when you are starting from scratch.
Also, note that some page admins have been upgraded to be able to invite 250 connections (lucky them!) to follow each of their pages every month. That depends on LinkedIn’s algorithm. Don’t worry — every month you’d get a refill of 100 or 250 (depending on your account to invite again)!
Here’s how you can invite connections to follow your LinkedIn company page:
Go to your company page > Select ‘Admin tools’ and choose ‘Invite Connections’ > Choose contacts you wish to invite > Click ‘Invite Connections’
Or
Go to your company page > On the sidebar on the right, click ‘Invite Connections’ > Choose contacts you wish to invite > Click ‘Invite Connections’
10. Post Content That’s Witty, Once in a While
I know I have been encouraging you to put out educational content all throughout this article — but it’s okay to break character every now and then. You can spice up your page’s content with something clever and funny. It works wonders in attracting followers. Having said that, it doesn’t mean you do all witty and funny posts. That’s overkill.
Continue with your educational content, interspersed with one or two funny memes, and clever puns. That way, even if someone starts following your company page because you posted a funny meme and then the next five posts are educational and value-adding — it doesn’t matter what originally attracted them. They’re now hooked to the content you want them to engage with. However, latching on to something funny is usually 10 times more likely to get someone to follow your company page than something super insightful or educational. I can’t help it — people always like to be entertained to some degree, even if they’re on a professional platform like LinkedIn.
11. Bet on Your Winning Horses and Promote Relevant Posts
I always recommend putting a TINY bit of money behind posts that are performing well. Yes, don’t go all out and promote every post. Test the waters first, post it on your company page, if you see it getting higher engagement, put some money behind it to help it reach an audience beyond your followers. In fact, when you promote a post, you ensure that all of your followers see your post and not just a handful.
Yes, even if you have 1000 followers, whenever you post something, not all thousand of them see it on their feeds (algorithm shenanigans!). So, putting some bucks behind them ensures that you increase the visibility of your posts. The rest follows. As soon as more people see your posts, more people engage with them.
When they react to your posts, their network starts to see it as well without it coming across as a promoted post. As a result, you start getting organic impressions from your followers’ networks who can follow your company. For example, John follows me, and he sees my sponsored posts in his feed (it does show up as sponsored), and he comments on that. If Stacy follows John and she sees on her feed that John interacted with my company’s post, it doesn’t have the sponsored tag anymore on her feed, that’s organic.
That’s my top 11, but I am not going to leave you on a cliffhanger. I know you’re wondering which kind of posts you must boost (read: promote).
What Type of Posts Is Recommended for Boosting?
If you want me to give you a simple answer to this — it totally depends on your purpose. If your purpose is to attract followers, then go for posts that are a mix of entertaining and educational. You can choose an image-based post with some text or a video.
Also, don’t be afraid of sharing too many hacks or trade secrets with your followers. I mean, if I tell you all the LinkedIn advertising hacks in my LinkedIn posts, then you would not hire Impactable ever! You’d end up doing it all on your own. That’s not the case.
What I have learned is that sharing educational content proves your expertise to your prospects. They understand your capabilities and know that you’d do a good job. I have noticed that there are two types of people there. If I put out an ebook or a video course that says, “This is exactly how you run LinkedIn paid ads, and here is exactly what we do, take it for free,” the people who are not ideal clients for us who have more time than money, they’ll take that, and they’ll try to execute.
However, our ideal clients will look at that and say, “Wow, this is really cool, but this is really complex, I have money, and I don’t have time, please do it for me.” So, there’s really almost no harm in just giving information away about exactly how you do things. Trust me, no one can do what you do best!
In Action — Hacks to Grow LinkedIn Followers!
I already told you all of these tricks are tried and tested. The best example of this that comes to my mind is how we used these for Altium, a global software company. The company had a LinkedIn ads budget of $30,000 a month and wanted to grow their LinkedIn company page.
So, instead of using paid dollars to run ads, I went the organic way. I hired a VA (virtual assistant) using a chunk of their budget to do a manual daily routine. I made the VA follow a daily checklist — “Every single day, log in to this account and check for comments on any of our posts. You are going to reply to every single one of those comments. Next, check mentions of the company name and thank them. Later, move on to the three company hashtags. Find 5 relevant posts per hashtag and leave a comment on each, making a total of 15.”
Essentially, I automated the 11 hacks, and it had 10 times greater impact on growing their following than $10,000 of ad spend. No doubt the client was tremendously happy because I had not only grown their following substantially but also not used the entire ad spend.
Summing It Up
More often than not, companies take an easier way than an effective way of marketing. I have seen it everywhere. Need some leads, show some Google ads. Need some followers, run some follower ads. However, growing your followers organically not only ensures you get a qualified audience (the one that’s actually interested in your content) but also makes your efforts sustainable. You cannot depend on paid ads alone, right? When you focus on organic gains, you focus on the quality of your content, you put efforts into making it engaging, and you set up processes that last you a lifetime, and not just until your ads are running.
Let me help you set up an organic process of leveraging LinkedIn to grow your business. Book a demo with us to discuss more on running the show organically and acing your LinkedIn game!
2 Responses
Is engaging with company’s page is good or we have to do that by our personal profiles?
You can engage with the company page and in fact is good to do. This is a good way to get more exposure for your company page and liking and commenting on others posts can often get you more visibility for your company page than an actual post from your company page.