Growing the following for your LinkedIn Page is one of the most valuable things you can do for your business on LinkedIn. Why? It leads to a greater organic reach and better insights for your target audience and the people who are engaging with your content, which are key when marketing via LinkedIn. However, increasing the number of people that follow your company page is difficult, as people have a higher threshold than they do when engaging with people rather than businesses. Think about it, how likely would you be to follow a business page, compared to accepting the connection request that came from the Managing Director of the same business? That said, there are many ways in which you can utilise the power of LinkedIn and build your community through your company page.
We get lots of questions from prospects and clients, asking how they can increase the number of followers on their LinkedIn company page. LinkedIn briefly had a new feature where you could invite your connections to like the page, but this was quickly retracted as people overused it. The best way to organically grow the number of people following your business page involves some time input, but the key is consistency.
Update your LinkedIn Page
This is the first step to promoting your company page, as the information should be complete, up to date and be visually appealing to the type of prospects you are looking to attract. That means having an appealing and modern banner image, completed website information and correct contact details. Pages that are up to date and complete with information get 30% more views, and significantly higher engagement than those that aren’t.
Make sure it’s SEO optimised
The same way in which you would make sure pages of your website are adequately key-worded to rank highly in search engines, you should be ensuring you do the same with your LinkedIn company page. LinkedIn has extremely high domain authority, so use this to your advantage. Make sure your business description is key word rich for what you do and what you help people achieve, and you’ll be surprised how many more page views you get. It’s not uncommon for the company page to rank higher than the website if the website is small.
Engage your Employees
This is a crucial step for gaining the initial momentum and getting eyes on your company page is getting the content out there. Ask your team to share, like and comment on the content, as this puts it out to the entire network of every employee. Tagging the company page in all relevant posts is also a great way to get extra exposure for the page.
Add a follow button to your Marketing
Whether it’s the website or your marketing automation emails (or even in email signatures), something as little as ‘want to see more content like this?’ or promoting that you share hints and tips on your page will increase the number of people engaging with and following the page.
Post Content Regularly
Following on from your team members interacting with the content, this is most effective when there is regular posting on the page. Company pages that post at least once a week see double the engagement compared to those that don’t, and more engagement means your page will surface more and gain further traction. Visual and video content is a great way to increase engagement with your business and get more exposure. Vlogs are a brilliant way for people to get an insight into you and your business, and see a more human element to the business. This type of content tends to stand out more on someone’s news feed, so gets your LinkedIn page noticed.
Encourage Engagement
When posting, the best way to get engagement is to ask for it. Some people use the controversy tactic, which encourages a significant discussion in the comments and causes the page to be surfaced across vast LinkedIn networks. You can also ask questions in your captions for people to answer in the comments, get people to like or share if they agree, or even get people to vote for answers using the different reactions available. The more people that interact with your post, the more your company page will be surfaced across LinkedIn. Engagement is exponential, and increasing the number of people who see the post will increase the engagement, leading to further exposure.
Analyse your Competitors
Some of your competitors may have a great following and engagement rate on their business page, so take a look at what they’re doing and put your own spin on it. Their target audience will be very similar to yours, so taking a couple of pointers from their content strategy will give you a great headstart in improving your following and engagement on your posts.
Give them a reason to follow you
It sounds obvious, but content should be engaging and actually interest people, not just promote your business. Hints and tips that are relevant to your target audience, sharing blog posts that are relevant and readable (short enough for people to read in the day, whilst being informative enough to engage with and share). A super effective method is having a chain of content and promote that you publish it daily, so that people follow the page to see what’s being shared each day.
Engage with other Company Pages
Every company page that you visit, there is a section for similar pages or ‘people also viewed’. Find pages that sit in a similar space to you and might attract the same people as are in your target market without being a competitor and engage with their content. This will help your company LinkedIn page to surface in the suggestions when people visit those pages, increasing your reach.
Post your Vacancies
Use your company page to post about available positions in your company, as well as content. LinkedIn is actively used by both job seekers and recruiters, so this will add an extra degree of exposure. As well as this, anybody who does follow the page and sees the post may well tag someone they know who is looking for a new role, further increasing the engagement and reach of both your page and posts.
