Linkedin is now a whopping 20 years old. It’s the dominant B2B platform and by far the most trusted platform by users.
A massive 65% business decision makers have a profile. So if you’re not engaging with them, you’re missing out.
A great 2022 for Linkedin
2022 saw increased revenue and more features being rolled out across the platform. All signs that businesses are taking Linkedin much more seriously.
In fact we know businesses are investing more in the platform both in organic content and paid content through boosted posts and ads. But people are also investing more in the platform in terms of interactions, with comments and reactions up across the board by more than 20% in a single year.
The rise of business pages?
To date, most of the success has been found with personal pages. Influencers or thought leaders have been amassing huge numbers of followers. Sometimes these are business leader, but often not. Leaving businesses underrepresented.
With this focus on personal pages, business pages have played second fiddle and often been entirely neglected. Sound familiar? Perhaps you’re not posting all that often and your follower growth has stagnated after some initial enthusiasm?
The good news is it’s a relatively easy fix. And the pay offs are going to be huge as Linkedin has started to show company pages some love.
Your checklist for Linkedin
Get your Linkedin page up to date
Bag some followers
Explore Linkedin features that will work for you
Produce good content that appeals to your intended audience.
Get your Linkedin page up to date
Take a long hard look in the mirror. Or rather, your company profile page.
Is it complete? There’s a handy (if slightly annoying) checklist at the top of your company page telling you if you’ve completed all the necessary tasks.
Is it a bit dated?
Are all your staff on Linkedin and connected as employees?
Are your contact details on there?
Do you have a call to action button set up?
Have you posted lately? Have you posted at all? What did your content look like and ask yourself, honestly, would anyone have found it at all interesting?
Completeness is pretty important on Linkedin. According to the platform, complete pages get 30% more impressions. Worth taking a few minutes over, especially as Linkedin is always adding new features which require action from you in order to keep your profile complete. New features like the Products tab, where you can show off your products, and the Life tab, which allows you to show your working culture to appeal to potential recruits, have been added lately and you should at least give them a once over.
Making sure your page is complete also helps beyond Linkedin itself. The about section can be read by google, maximising your company’s chances of visibility on search.
Bag some followers
If you’re like most businesses, your company page doesn’t have a huge amount of followers. In fact I bet your personal profile has more connections.
That’s natural. People care about people. Especially people they know. So people you know have an existing incentive to connect with you. Your business doesn’t have that luxury, it has to earn its followers. The only way to do that is to produce content worth engaging with, that people choose to see more of by following your page.
How to grow your followers on Linkedin
In the short term, you can leverage your personal relationships by inviting your own connections to follow your page. A number of kind hearted souls will definitely take you up on it. You get 250 per month as a page admin (so most of us will have exhausted our connections list within three or four months). You can game the system a bit by adding more of your staff as admins of the page so they can do the same. You can always remove them as admins after this.
Thinking long term though, it’s not really about numbers. It’s about finding the right people.
Especially in the B2B world, marketing is about finding the right audience and tailoring your message to them. If you have the right people following your page, they’re more likely to engage with your content which tells Linkedin to put your content in front of more and more people. So if you want to do it properly, invite only those connections that you think are relevant i.e. your target customer or partner audience.
Stay on top of new features
Linkedin doesn’t make a song and dance out of their updates. You basically have to just discover them or yourself. (Although you can join the linkedin page admins group)
Try in 2023: Page Notifications
Take a quick look at the top right hand corner on a company or personal page, you’ll see a little bell. This allows you to choose to receive notifications when a page posts something. You can select all posts, top posts or no posts when you follow a page.
For our followers this means they can choose to be notified every time you post (if it’s worth it!). So encourage them to turn on notifications from time to time to maximise the chances that your followers see your content.
Even better. If they get the notification and engage right away, that’s a nice little boost for your post. Linkedin is very selective about what content it puts in front of people, and getting early engagement on a post goes a long way in telling the Linkedin algorithm that it’s a good post, worth pushing.
Try in 2023: Link Stickers
This is a great new feature for conversions. Unlike other platforms who want you to spend as much time in their universe, Linkedin has acknowledged that they can’t get away with that. Businesses need to link out to recruitment pages, for example, and so they’ve leaned into it to maximise conversions.
Recently they introduced interactive stickers for image posts. They’re easy to add and they act as an interactive CTA, linking out to any external page.
Use this link to drive email signups, website visits or even to kick start a purchase journey. Finally you can start putting our Linkedin followers to good use!
In the past, Linkedin has penalised posts that include an external link in the post copy, but it looks like introducing these stickers could be a signal of a strategic shift to turn Linkedin into a less siloed platform.
As with all things. Don’t overdo it. Low interaction will hurt your impressions so keep it focused and use it when you need it.
Creating content worth engaging with
It’s true that content on your personal pages will do better, in general, than your company pages. But your company page can do things your personal page can’t, and it provides content your whole team can share with their own network.
One of the reasons Linkedin prefers personal content over company content is because company content is often so boring, often focused more on the company than on what’s interesting to the audience.
Audience first content
Most people who follow your page are doing so to get something of value in return. They have little interest in your business itself, but what you can offer them.
What you can offer might be ideas, or education, or news that they can put to use in their own lives. Of course there’s room in there to talk about yourselves and your product, but it’s about balance.
Become known as a source of good quality, useful content and people will come back for more.
Coming up with content ideas
You want a good balance of content across content of business value and content that builds positive brand perception. Business value could be thought leadership, trends or data. Brand perception could be more about your team, charitable activities, culture. These work together to build an image of your brand as one your potential customers might like to do business with.
You then deliver the “right hook”, as Gary Vaynerchuk would say, with a sales message.