Taking A Shot At Boosting Our LinkedIn Following

By Carly Bauer, Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing

For this first quarter of 2022 we had an internal goal to increase our LinkedIn following by 25%. Many of our current postings were around event promotions and content our president created or shared. We wanted to start incorporating content that represented our company as a whole and came from all members within our company. To get started I dove into researching the best ways to boost social media followings, specifically on LinkedIn. In this blog post I’d like to share some of the best practices I came across and how we are incorporating them into our social media strategy.

Analyzing Competitor Pages

So where do we start? What is going to make your page successful? What’s going to make it stand out and entice people to follow? Aside from researching best practices to boost page following, I dove into researching our competitors’ LinkedIn pages to see what they were doing and to get inspiration. One of the biggest things I noticed was the pages that posted consistently on a regular basis, shared content that was informational and insightful – regardless of it being thought leadership base or study insight based – these pages had the most followers. That seems pretty straight forward and kind of a ‘duh’ moment, right? Like “ya that makes sense”. But it’s something a lot of company’s don’t do, and it makes a big difference, to simply post content on a regular basis. Doing just this and nothing else will give you a good boost in awareness and engagement. To optimize from here is where other best practices come into play.

I found viewing our competitors’ pages helpful to find new ways to write and deliver content. Things that stood out included asset links in the comments instead of the post, writing thought leadership content as a post itself instead of just sharing an asset link, short product or service announcement videos, short how-to video guides to tools and products, and more. Now I don’t know how well this content does compared to other forms, but these were items that caught my attention and I found myself interested which is important to note. They stood out because it was different from the content I usually see and the content we were already doing. If your content doesn’t grab a viewer’s attention, it’s never going to be read.

Creating, repurposing, and sharing organic content to boost engagement with current followers

We had content to fill our newsfeed but there was definitely room to improve. We wanted content that would be engaging and interesting for our current followers but that also enticed new potential followers to be interested in our page. Any potential followers that have seen our content on a regular basis through ads or suggested content in their newsfeed are likely to browse our content on our page feed before they follow it. So, it’s important for them to see that all of our content is current, relevant, informational, and engaging. For new content, I started brainstorming items we could repurpose from our website and other social channels, items published by our team members, such as blog posts and video series. These are content pieces that provide current information, thoughts, and ideas to our news feed quickly to boost new engagement and keep topics relevant with our audience. We are still in the process of creating new content specifically for our LinkedIn page but sharing content from our other pages helps get it in front of a larger audience and keeps content fresh and relevant.

Creating ads to reach new audiences

I personally had a lot of fun coming up with the strategy for this portion. I started by researching the various types of ads that could be utilized on LinkedIn and their purpose to find the most beneficial ads to meet our follower goal. LinkedIn has some valuable information that takes you step by step to creating an ad campaign, determining your objectives and launching your campaign. You can click here for more information. They also list out the different ad options based on your objective goal, like brand awareness, website visits/ video views, website conversions, lead generation, and others, so you can see what is going to fit your needs best. To see what ads work for each objective, you can click here. Since we had a goal of increasing our page followers, brand awareness needed to be our objective. Under this goal I decided to go with single image sponsored ads and follower ads. Single image sponsored ads allow us to share content and assets in our target audience’s news feeds in a more natural organic way. These can also be known as native ads. Follower ads appear on the right side of a viewer’s newsfeed, featuring their profile picture and name next to ours with a ‘Follow’ CTA button below and can feature a short headline and ad description. Pairing these two ads together my strategy was to have readable content appear in our target audience’s news feeds, creating initial awareness and familiarity. This would then be followed by the follower ads on the right side of their newsfeed as a quick call to action to follow our page. Ideally, if an audience member saw or read the content in the sponsored post and liked it but didn’t follow right away, the follower ad would act as a reminder to follow our page for more content with a quick action option to follow.

 

Developing and implementing any strategy is an ongoing process. With new insights from research and seeing how audiences respond to current posts and ads it’s important to always be flexible and willing to change direction. I will create a post in the coming quarter to share the progress we’ve made and how we have had to change our original tactics to reach our goals. Until then, I hope this post provides insight into helpful ways to boost social followings and if you need additional insights I recommend this post: Creating LinkedIn Campaigns Efficiently and Effectively.