310
310
Read it in 12 minutes
Table of contents
Every B2B business worth their salt is on LinkedIn – marketers know the value of this social media channel; 80% of all B2B leads come from LinkedIn and 94% of marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content.
And while the LinkedIn algorithm generally prioritises content from individual contributors over company pages, most companies do follow some form of posting strategy through their company page.
After all, with 810 million professional members on LinkedIn, your business can’t afford not to leverage LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where your existing and future customers, employees and supporters are (not to mention your competition).
But how can you better use your page to accomplish your business goals and attract more followers?
With the right content strategy, brands can grow their company page following, build their reputation, strengthen customer relationships and ultimately influence revenue.
There’s no magic hack or secret sauce to organically growing a relevant following on LinkedIn.
It all comes down to your approach and content strategy.
“You get what you repeat”
James Clear, Atomic Habits
I can’t emphasise this enough. If you’re serious about growing your company page following, it’s essential to recognise that you need to be consistent.
Defining a posting schedule and sticking to it takes organisation but the results will speak for themselves. You’ll get much more visibility on member feeds.
Ideally, you should be sharing a post every day, 5 days a week. If you don’t have the resources for this then aim for 2-3 times per week.
By sharing your content on a regular basis, not only will you improve your potential reach, your followers will come to start looking forward to your updates.
Where’s the proof?
In a previous role, our team grew our company following by 40% in 6 months by posting consistently (5 times a week, with only a few exceptions).
A single person within your marketing team – often someone in a content role – needs to own your overall LinkedIn strategy. Larger organisations may even have a full social media team but in smaller businesses, people are likely to be wearing more hats.
The LinkedIn owner should keep the content calendar up to date, ensure the design team is aware of the graphics required and should be responsible for scheduling posts and reporting on performance.
Always run posts past a second pair of eyes to avoid any typos slipping through the net.
When planning the schedule, make use of national/international days, especially where relevant to your business or industry and keep your eye on evolving trends so that you can jump on these.
*Top Top: As a content creator, I find it easiest to write a full week’s social posts in one go as it’s much more efficient. Of course, there’s always a degree of flexibility with a social calendar and you might need to make a last minute switch and draft something new but you don’t need to waste something you’ve already created – just push it to next week!
Repurposing is your best friend.
You’re likely already sitting on a goldmine of content – from existing blogs to webinars and even team photos – so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
Audit your existing content and consider how you can make it work smarter, not harder.
For example, you can pull out key points from a blog into a carousel or chop up a webinar into key snippets to share through your company page.
Although you’ll still want to be putting out evergreen content on a regular basis to ensure that you’re seen ahead of the curve and talking about the latest trends, you can save time, money and resources by reusing, updating and repackaging what you already have.
To keep your content interesting and grow engagement, it’s best to use a mix of different content formats, including:
*Top tip. If you’re sharing a link as part of the content you’re promoting on LinkedIn, put it in the first comment rather than the main post. The LinkedIn algorithm likes to keep people in-channel.
88% of business decision-makers agree that thought leadership content plays a crucial role in uplifting their perception of an organisation.
Leverage expertise within the business, especially from the C-Suite, to share insights on key topics and trends. Write opinion pieces and share learnings from your customers.
Interview your customers to find out what’s important to them, dig deeper into their challenges and think about how you can solve this. When posting thought leadership content, try and keep the focus on them, not your brand. If you can share a case study to support your content, even better!
To be a thought leader, sometimes you need to say something different or go against the status quo. Of course, you don’t want to say anything that would damage your brand image but done in the right way it can help you stand out.
Always try to be authentic and provide your audience with real value.
The thing that really makes your brand unique are your employees.
Think about how you can channel your brand’s personality through your company page to speak to your followers on a human level.
Do you have a charismatic CEO who is willing to step in front of the camera? Can you interview team members or ask them to share their experiences in a blog or video?
Your future customers and employees (as well as your existing ones) want to see what your values are, what it’s like to work for you or do business with you.
There’s a quote in the marketing world that gets quite overused: “people buy from people.” And as much as it’s overused, it’s very true.
Showing the people behind your brand helps you to build trust, makes your business more human and will mean people are rooting for you much more than if you keep this side of your company hidden.
Since the pandemic, there’s been a real shift in the kind of content that does well on LinkedIn. Personal content that you might once have expected to see on Facebook or Instagram is drawing huge engagement.
So where to start? Take pictures and videos at company social events, show a day in the life of your employees, celebrate new hires, work anniversaries and more.
This point is short and sweet. But important. ?
Use emojis in your social posts – they help break up your text, can be used to add emphasis and humour, or function as bullet points. They inject fun, help convey your tone of voice and make your posts stand out on the LinkedIn feed.
😊🤣😎😱😮
So far this blog has been telling you to post, post, post!
But engaging with others is another essential ingredient for growing your LinkedIn following – and keeping your followers engaged.
Whoever owns your LinkedIn strategy should regularly be looking for ways to engage your followers, customers, employees and other brands.
For example:
Whenever you’re sharing content that features or involves another brand or individual, make sure you tag them so that they see it and are more likely to engage/amplify your post.
*Top tip. There are several reasons why you should avoid using scheduling platforms for your LinkedIn posts: as well as the fact there’s some consensus LinkedIn may penalise content scheduled through a tool, scheduling tools often don’t enable you to tag people or individuals which is a huge missed opportunity. They also don’t tend to support scheduling for all content formats such as carousels.
Not to be forgotten, hashtags are another way to boost your reach organically.
If you’re wondering what hashtags are relevant to your organisation, you can conduct some hashtag research. Look at what other companies and thought leaders in your industry are using.
To see if a hashtag is in use or if it’s relevant, use the search bar to look it up. If there aren’t any results then this hashtag is less likely to be a valuable one to use.
In some rare cases, however, you might want to invent and promote a new hashtag – such as for an event or major product launch, and encourage others to use it. For example, HubSpot creates one for their Inbound event every year; this years was #Inbound22
Next you might be wondering how many hashtags you should include?
LinkedIn expert Richard van der Blom states that between 3 and 5 hashtags is the sweet spot, any more or less and you could reduce your reach…
*Top tip. If you’re attending an event, ensure you’re always using the relevant event hashtags in your posts so that attendees can easily find your content, see what’s going on at your booth and connect with you.
There are a few settings both within LinkedIn and on other channels that you can optimise to help ensure you’ve set your company page up for success.
Did you know that pages with complete information get 30% more views?
Here’s a checklist to work through:
Test different ideas and content types and then repeat what works well.
Regularly review and track your page analytics to assess engagement, follower count, demographics and more. The demographics section will help you analyse whether you’re being followed by people with relevant job roles.
Don’t panic if something flops!
Not everything will resonate with your audience but make sure you learn from successes and failures so that you can continue to up your content game.
Develop your own unique tone and ensure your posts are in keeping with this. Gone are the days of super stuffy LinkedIn posts lacking in personality. Today, the company pages that do best have a sense of humour, are human and they even admit to their mistakes.
If you need some inspiration on how to strike the right tone, post consistently, use different content formats and drive a load of engagement with your company page, look to these five brands for inspiration:
If in doubt, pet pictures are a universally agreed safe bet! (but don’t overdo it).
You can ask your employees to support your efforts by manually inviting their network to follow your company page. Especially if you’re just starting out, this can help boost your company page numbers.
As well as sharing employee content, ask your employees to engage with and share your company page content to amplify it.
Even more importantly, encourage them to develop their own personal brand and share their own content more regularly – this helps them be seen as thought leaders and builds momentum for your organisation to attract new customers, employees and industry experts. It benefits them and the business; a win-win!
This post was written by Natasha Hemmings. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
Sign up to receive B2B Search Marketing Insights direct to your inbox
Book a call to discuss your business' search marketing needs
Book a call