In the past, LinkedIn was simply used to connect with other businesses and find local talent or employers.
However, it has grown over the years. It is now much more than a recruitment platform.
Although still a professional network used to connect and find employment opportunities, LinkedIn is a place where you can go to find helpful industry knowledge and insights.
It is a social network that is making today’s professionals far more productive and successful.
This is in large part due to the content that is shared throughout the platform. The content on LinkedIn has 15 times more impressions than the job postings.
Home to more than 700 million members, LinkedIn is where you want to be and where you want to spend your social media marketing dollars.
However, you want to ensure your efforts are realized, which means you’ll need to know how to increase LinkedIn followers.
There are probably hundreds of different things you can do to get people interested in following your brand. Here is what you’ll learn in this post:
1. Post Great Content Regularly
To increase the number of followers you have, you need to give them a reason to follow you. This can be done with quality content on a regular basis.
Just as posting content regularly to a blog will gain a consistent following, the same is true on LinkedIn and any other social media platform.
When your audience knows you are going to post something on X day, they are going to be waiting for it — assuming you provide valuable content.
In addition, the more frequently you post, the more likely your profile is going to show up in the feed.
This will make your brand far more appealing, increasing the chance of a new LinkedIn user following you.
As you get started with posting content, you may need to post every day or, at the very least, every other day.
This is to ramp things up and get your profile seen as quickly as possible. Once you’ve gotten the momentum up, you can take things down and post a couple of times a week.
Just never let the quality of your content suffer.
Different types of content
To help take the pressure off of yourself or your marketing team to create unique, first-rate content every single day in the beginning, consider sharing content from some other brands, photos that are related to your brand, as well as simple text updates.
In doing so, it adds some variety to your updates and feed, creating more of an appeal to your audience.
In fact, adding an image to some of your posts will increase your engagement by half. Larger images have a 38% higher click-through rate, so go big or go home!
And don’t overlook the importance of video posts.
These are 20 times more likely to be shared by LinkedIn users. If you are looking for a way to increase the chances of your posts being shared, it’s in the video content.
Always remember people appreciate great content and want to connect with brands who post it so they can stay up-to-date with what’s being shared.
Therefore, you won’t want to overlook this particular strategy.
2. Add a Link to Your Email Signature
You and all of your teammates probably send out hundreds of emails every single day. You may even send out thousands.
Regardless of the number of emails that are being written, consider what your email signature looks like.
Does it include a link to your LinkedIn profile page? If it doesn’t, why not?
Keep in mind the people who are reading your emails are online already. Therefore, your email signature serves as the perfect place to attract new followers to your social media account (and this goes beyond just LinkedIn!).
By adding a link to your LinkedIn page to your email signature, you are simply adding one more avenue for your clients as well as potential clients to find out about your brand.
The good news is that you only have to do it once and then it is done for you every other time. Adding a social media link to your email signature is probably the easiest tactic of email marketing.
3. Add a Link to Your Blog, Portfolio, or Website
Just as you should add a link to your LinkedIn profile to your email signature, the same is true for your blog, portfolio, or website.
The reasons are the exact same with one extra.
When people are on a blog or website, they often want to learn more about a company and its brand. In a sense, they want to make sure you’re legit.
So, what better way to do this than to check them out on social media?
Well, if you don’t have links to your profile, the user will have to put in the work to search for you. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t want to do this.
They would prefer to simply click on a link and be taken directly to where they can access the info they desire.
Again, this is a one-and-done thing. It’s not like posting content regularly. You do it once, and you’re done, yet it continues to work for you and bring potential followers to your page.
4. Join Conversations Using Hashtags
When you share an update on LinkedIn, make sure you are using relevant hashtags before you hit post.
Without those hashtags, you are missing out on a huge audience that you could be reaching.
By adding up to five hashtags, you can join conversations related to your brand and reach people who have never heard of your brand before and likely never would have found you otherwise.
Aside from simply adding hashtags to your own updates, you can even associate your company page with relevant hashtags. This is all done in your Communities Hashtag panel.
In this panel, you can click on a hashtag that you follow, enter its feed, and then comment or react to conversations.
This helps to expose your brand to new and like-minded audiences that have no idea you exist.
Once people within this community see your interest, they’ll visit your profile and potentially follow you if they see what they like.
5. Mention Companies and Influencers
Think hard about your industry. Are there any particularly influential people that you can think of?
Are there any non-competing companies that you may want to be associated with?
If so, you could start mentioning them in your updates.
This will not only allow you to potentially be seen by their networks, but it will increase the chance of them seeing you and then resharing your post to their feed.
Just make sure that these people and companies are ones that you respect and would want to be linked to. In addition, you don’t want to do this too much, as it could be seen as spammy.
6. Get Your Employees Engaged
Your employees are the heart of your brand, so it makes sense 30% of a company’s engagement is actually from their employees.
Employees want a company to succeed, so they will engage with posts to increase the chances of them being seen.
If your employees are not currently part of your overall LinkedIn strategy, then you need to include them.
Encourage them to share your updates, share your content, comment, and just get active with your brand on LinkedIn. The more active they are, the better.
Believe it or not, employees are 14 times more likely to share their employer’s content than other LinkedIn content.
If necessary, run a contest with a prize each month for the top contributors. This will give them something to look forward to. Plus, healthy competition in the office is always good for morale.
7. Run an Advertising Campaign
Did you know that LinkedIn actually has advertising campaigns that are associated with increasing your followers? It’s true!
There is a follower ad format when you run an ad campaign on the social platform, and when you tap into those 200+ targeting capabilities, the amount of relevant traffic that comes to your LinkedIn page can be amazing.
These follow ads are designed to ultimately support both the top and middle levels of the sales funnel.
This is great news when you consider the fact that LinkedIn ad exposure can boost the intent of purchase by 33%.
This means there is a chance that these ads could lead to a sale later on. As we said, LinkedIn isn’t just about recruitment anymore.
Follow ads can also be used for engagement and brand awareness, which is the goal when trying to increase your page followers.
8. Optimize Your Page for SEO
A lot of people don’t realize it, but it is possible to optimize your LinkedIn Page for search engine optimization (SEO).
This is a step you don’t want to forget because your LinkedIn company page and profile actually shows up in Google SERP!
By optimizing your page for SEO, users who are searching for certain keywords — keywords that are related to your business — will be able to find your page in the SERP.
So, you will want to ensure you are strategically placing keywords in your company profile and page that users will use to search for your business.
While these keywords can be placed anywhere within your company details, you will want to make certain they are placed in the tagline and the about section.
More importantly, make certain your profile is complete.
Companies who have completed their entire LinkedIn profile — and are active — get 5 times more page views on top of 7 times more impressions and 11 times more clicks per follower.
Therefore, it is imperative you maintain an active, up-to-date page.
Wrap Up: Now You Know How to Increase LinkedIn Followers
LinkedIn is a social networking platform that is growing and doesn’t appear to be slowing down. But are you?
This platform can be used to your advantage to:
- Increase brand awareness.
- Expand the reach of your LinkedIn profile and page.
- Increase the number of followers you have.
- Foster strong relationships with your followers.
- And simply grow your business.
Remember: your followers are ultimately qualified leads that are ready to be converted into a customer that will hopefully keep coming back and remain loyal to your brand.
If you are ready to make the most out of your marketing campaigns, connect with us about improving your ad performance!
