Updated on January 31, 2020
LinkedIn is an important social platform to reach audiences around the world and build interest in your company. Every piece of content you publish reaches a larger audience, so make sure it counts. Building followers doesn’t happen overnight. it takes time, patience, and a good strategy. We’ve compiled these nine tips to help you build a successful LinkedIn presence in the long run:
1. Have a Killer Company Page
Your company’s page on LinkedIn can be used as a window into your business for prospective employees, so making sure it is complete and consistently updated is vital to your success on the platform.
Make sure to add details, descriptions, visuals, and sharing content. Companies that have completed pages get 30% more weekly views. Also, make sure to link your company’s page on other social media platforms to draw in more traffic. Use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to hit that larger audience.
Asking your employees is another good way to advertise your page. If your team posts or shares through their own channels, they’ll be helping to cast a wider net and funnel in more traffic.
2. Sharing is Caring
A great, fast and easy way to get more traffic on your LinkedIn page is to have a LinkedIn share button on your website. By having that share button on your website, it allows the audience you bring in to spread your content through their LinkedIn connections, thus increasing the reach of your business’ information.
LinkedIn offers unique social features that can become an advantage for your business that you won’t want to miss. You can learn how to add the share plugin here.
3. The Follow Button
The “follow” button for LinkedIn can be directly used on your company’s website for the audience of your content to follow you on LinkedIn without having to navigate to the social platform. This is very convenient for the customers because it gives them the “one-click” option to have all your content come right to their LinkedIn feed. This also is beneficial to the company because with convenience comes more customers, which then obviously drives the consumption of your content.
According to HubSpot, LinkedIn has a 277% higher visitor-to-lead conversion rate than Twitter or Facebook, which means increasing your reach on LinkedIn will likely increase your website’s traffic.
4. Make Your Employees Count
It’s always a good idea to keep your valued employees up front and center. While it’s important to want to put the customers first, customers will certainly be interested in a company with dedicated employees. Make sure you ask your employees to list themselves a part of your company.
Create content that features your employees and tag them in these posts. This gets those posts in front of their connections too. You will also want to allow some employees to be admins of the company page to add their own perspectives.
5. Content, Content, Content
A LinkedIn page that shares weekly content will receive 2 times more engagement. Whether its adding links to your posts, using documents or images, talking about upcoming events or just mentioning people in posts, there are many ways to expand the reach of your content.
Posts that include things other than words – like videos, images, and infographics – are way more likely to draw in viewers. If the content is created internally, it also drives more traffic to your company. Outside of your company page sharing this content, it’s very beneficial to have your employees share the content as well to broaden the audience that it reaches.
6. Showcase Your Assets
From the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions website, a showcase page is an “extension of your company page designed to spotlight a brand, business unit or initiative.” This means that companies can promote specific things about their business or market to a specific target audience.
A good example of this feature is Microsoft. Microsoft uses showcase pages to highlight their product lines such as Office and Windows. Check out the Microsoft LinkedIn page to see how these pages work.
7. Track your Audience
Knowing your audience also allows you to create content tailored to what they want to see. LinkedIn gives your company a review of data over a specific period of time to see what visitors and followers engage with on your page.
You can use this data to analyze what works for your company and what doesn’t. You can find this data under Visitor Metrics. This data can go a long way for your team to understand what tactics you’re using that are working or not working. That knowledge can be used to adapt your strategy to focus on what you do well and strengthen what you don’t do well.
8. Treat Others Like You Want to be Treated
As with all social media, if you give likes and share posts from others, they are more likely to return the favor. Building that kind of loyalty is a great way to engage with further audiences. People also tend to like companies that engage with their audiences more than ones that don’t because it feels like you’re interacting on a more personal level. So follow your 1st connections, like their posts, make some comments, share some content, and follow your clients too.
9. Use the Tools LinkedIn Provides
LinkedIn is a platform that is constantly changing to help customers and businesses alike have the best experience possible. There are some great new features that LinkedIn has added, like an action plan for small businesses. They also have a great feature that shows you what kind of content is trending in specific locations, industries, and jobs. This allows your company to filter content directly to your audience even further. You can also sponsor your posts, allowing you to advertise to professionals, and build more future clients.
If you follow these fairly basic steps for your LinkedIn company pages, you will increase your followers and traffic on your company’s original website. LinkedIn is a great tool for building your company’s image and reaching more clients. It also allows prospective employees to learn more about your company. You do not have to do everything on this list but the more you do, the better chance you have of building a larger follower base.