How to Get More LinkedIn Followers in 2023 [13 Simple Tips]

Published in

marketing-and-branding

12 min readOct 4, 2022

Do you want to get more organic Followers for your LinkedIn Company page? Check out this Step-By-Step Guide and reach your goals faster.

Do you want to get serious about promoting your business on LinkedIn?

See how, by following these tips, you can get a lot more out of your LinkedIn company page and grow your followers month over month.

LinkedIn is becoming a Content Powerhouse with many opportunities to build a strong following, organic, and via paid advertising.

In this article, we’ll mainly go into how to get more LinkedIn followers for your company page organically.

If you want to get a more holistic view, check out our LinkedIn Marketing Strategy Guide.

Let’s get started!

1. Why would anyone follow your LinkedIn company page?

Some organizations get a large following by simply sharing updates about their product or service. A lot of people follow Apple’s product updates. Chances are, you’re not yet in that league. You would need to ask yourself the question:

‘how interesting are my company/product updates?’

If the answer is: ‘quite interesting’. You can get some very loyal followers that want to know everything about what’s going on with your organization, what’s new, where they can find you, what’s up with your employees, etc.

Sharing only company updates will lower your potential though.

Why?<

Because chances are that you won’t get a lot of ‘top of the funnel’ new followers. Followers who would follow your company page because you are the go-to place for new inspiration, helping them to solve their problems, etc.

Examples of great B2B LinkedIn company pages

HubSpot sells sophisticated CRM software to organizations. They have a ton of product updates, but that’s not the only thing you see on their LinkedIn company page. They share a lot of interactive content, tailored to attract new followers in their target group. It’s not a coincidence that they have more than 800,000 followers on LinkedIn.

Here are some examples of posts from great B2B Linkedin company pages: MailChimp, Hootsuite, Slack

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share company updates. It means that, if you want to attract new followers that are not that well acquainted with your organization, it helps to provide content that is valuable even if they don’t use your product (yet).

Also, if there are influential people in your industry, and non-competing companies, that you respect and wish to be associated with, be sure to mention them in your updates. You’ll have a better chance to get in front of their network since they’ll be able to reshare your post to their followers.

2. Be consistent with sharing content and your branding

You probably have noticed in the examples above that the content HubSpot, MailChimp, Hootsuite, and Slack share is recognizable. If you want to build a loyal following on LinkedIn, it’s important to be consistent in your: messaging, posting frequency, and branding.

Let’s put it like this:

If you manage to get 1,000,000 content views with 100 pieces of content that are on-brand, people recognize it and start seeing a story a brand is trying to tell. If you get the same 1,000,000 content views with 100 pieces of content that are NOT on-brand. Your message get’s diluted and people would not even know that many pieces of content were from your brand because they did not recognize it. This leaves major gaps in the story you’re trying to tell.

It’s not just about how many people you have reached over time. It’s also about being consistent, telling a consistent story, and using on-brand messaging and visuals helps. Especially on Social Media where people scroll past content very quickly if it’s not engaging.

Free resource 1: Set up your Brand Guideline;
Free resource 2: How to create your Brand Story [Canvas included].

Create great Social Media captions

I understand it can be difficult to stay consistent with creating content and posting on LinkedIn. Therefore, I’m happy to be able to introduce this great Social Media Caption generator that can help you come up with new ideas and even entire LinkedIn captions. We do advise adding a human touch to your posts and never relying on it 100%. Nonetheless, using the generator helps a ton. No more starting with a blank page and you can get ideas from different angles. Check out the example below.

You can re-run the generator as often as needed and create a list of LinkedIn posts for the entire week or month. You can get started with a free trial to see if you like it.

Start with 15 free runs

3. Understanding the LinkedIn Algorithm to get better Organic Reach

After you came up with what content you would like to share, what story you would like to tell, and created engaging branded content, it’s time to post in a way that will maximize your chances of getting a high organic reach. Understanding LinkedIn’s algorithm is very important.

Basics LinkedIn Algorithm:

Share content that people would like to engage with and help LinkedIn to reach its goal of becoming a Content Powerhouse.

A couple of key points to their algorithm:

Receiving thoughtful comments should be your main goal if you want to increase your organic reach. LinkedIn loves comments the most because these will add even more value to a content piece and helps LinkedIn to become a Content Powerhouse. That is why you often see people asking questions and saying ‘link in comments’ (more on that on point 3).
The second best way to increase your organic reach is by receiving likes and shares.
LinkedIn wants to become a Content Powerhouse. This means they would like to keep people engaging and contribute more content on LinkedIn. Content that does not include links to get people off the platform, tends to perform better.
Interactive posts perform best. So text with images, carousels, etc. Not link posts
Receiving engagement in the first hour is key for how LinkedIn will score your content. More on LinkedIn’s filter and the scoring mechanism is below. Be sure to post content when your followers are most active. You can easily see in your data in which country your followers live. Make sure to tailor your posting time to them ;).

A broad overview of LinkedIn’s algorithm

Below, you can see how LinkedIn’s algorithm works in a broad sense. 80% holds true for just about any Social Media platform. The algorithm tries to define what is spam or low quality with its own tools, if the piece of content passes the test, it’ll be shown to a couple of real people. Based on the interactions, the piece of content will be shown to more people and the algorithm keeps evaluating how many people it should be shown to.

Therefore, gaining a lot of followers that will never engage is a big miss in your LinkedIn growth. People used to buy Facebook followers and soon found out that it was doing a lot of harm and stopped.

Let’s say you have a total of 5,000 followers of which 1.000 are following your company page because all employees invited all their connections and the invitees wanted to support you and accepted but will never engage. That means that you have 4,000 followers who did follow your company page because they want to receive your updates. This still doesn’t mean that those 4,000 followers will engage with each and every content piece you post.

In this situation. When you post an update, and it passes the low quality / spam filter and it’s being shown to a couple of followers, chances are pretty high that just a few people interact with your post, meaning it will not be shown to all your followers.

low engagement / reach does not always mean that you’re not posting quality content. Just keep that in mind. It can also be that the followers you have gained are just ‘supporters’ that never interact with your content.

4. Finding and using the right hashtags on LinkedIn

Organic reach on LinkedIn is really great compared to many other social media platforms. Using the right hashtags helps you to get in front of the right audience.

LinkedIn posts with 0 hashtags, will mainly be seen by your followers and connections of people that interact with that post.

LinkedIn posts with the right hashtags will be seen by people who are not following you yet and you’re not connected with them.

LinkedIn is even encouraging you to use hashtags. They want to catch up on being a content platform like Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. Work with LinkedIn and you will get rewarded.

When posting on your LinkedIn company page, you’ll see that the post-builder is helping to use relevant hashtags.

Using relevant hashtags is great to get better results, but if you want to get great results, you will need to also check the popularity of a hashtag.

If you have a small LinkedIn company page as we do. You shouldn’t (only) use the most popular hashtags because your post will never get seen in the big ocean.

But some hashtags seem nice but have 0 (or close to 0) followers. That’s also a waste of hashtag usage.

Homework
Make a list of hashtags that fit your LinkedIn company page and content you publish. The hashtags should be just right. Not too popular, but also don’t choose the hashtags that no one follows.

Check out your hashtags here:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/?keywords=[enter hashtag]

5. Let colleagues know that you’ve published a post on your LinkedIn company page

All platforms are aware that some content is great and some… isn’t. Listings on Booking.com, Tweets on Twitter, photos on Shutterstock, etc.

They all have an algorithm to boost great content up the ranking. Usually, they look a data provided by the users. In the case of Social Media platforms, the percentage of people interacting with a post.

Example:

Post that has been seen by 500 people and has received 10 interactions.

Is of better quality than:

Post that has been seen by 500 people and has received 1 interaction.

Even if you have 10,000 followers on your LinkedIn company page. That doesn’t mean that all your followers will see your post. You will need to prove to LinkedIn’s algorithm that your post is worth showing to all your followers and their connections.

You will need to raise the interactions, FAST.

How?

One simple way is to message your colleagues to let them know that a post has been published and that liking, sharing, commenting, and even clicking on the link is appreciated.

You’d want to show the algorithm as soon as possible that the post that has been published is great and all your followers should see it.

You can message your colleagues within your group app or on LinkedIn.

6. Educate your employees on how to get the best out of LinkedIn

Not all your employees or colleagues are marketers. It’s not their job to know about the best practices on LinkedIn.

Often time, they do want to help the organization they work at to get more followers and to build their personal brand.

Share a short explainer on the best practices and benefit from the collective power of your organization.

Here’s an example:

Also, be sure your employees are properly mapped to your Page (by citing it accurately in their Work Experience), because every time your employee makes a new connection on LinkedIn, the new connection will be prompted to follow your Page.

7. Interact in LinkedIn groups

Did you know that there are some great thought leaders in various LinkedIn groups? There are small- and large LinkedIn groups and you can even start your own.

You can share articles, comment on what others have shared and interact with people in your target group. Be sure to be present and mention your company page when it’s relevant.

8. Invite connections to follow your LinkedIn company page

LinkedIn had introduced this option for a short period, then removed it and has now re-introduced it.

You can invite your first connections to follow your LinkedIn company page. All team members that are page admins can use this function. You can invite an individual only once.

This can be a powerful tool to get more followers for your LinkedIn company page, but be sure not to spam people.

9. Interact with your LinkedIn company page

You can interact on various topics with your personal account and tag your LinkedIn company page.

Or.

You can simply interact directly with your LinkedIn company page (like, share and comment).

On your company page, you have the option to add three hashtags and change the hashtags as often as you like.

By clicking on these hashtags, you’ll enter a feed about the hashtag you selected and can interact with your company pages.

10. Publish long-form content on LinkedIn with your personal account

As I mentioned before. LinkedIn wants to catch up with other content platforms and is doing its best to help people reach a large audience on LinkedIn without having to pay for it.

One of the best ways to reach a large audience on LinkedIn is to publish long-form content with your personal account. Of course, be sure to mention your company page, add the right hashtags, invite your colleagues to like and share, etc.

If done well, this tactic can really help you get more followers for your LinkedIn company page. The people you’ll reach will at least have a LinkedIn account but will likely also be highly active on the platform. Following your company, there will make more sense than, for instance, on Instagram.<

11. Make it easy to share website content on LinkedIn

Aside from tactics, you can follow to get more followers from within LinkedIn, there are also tactics to utilize your assets and channels.

One of the most straightforward ways is to make it easy for people to share your content on LinkedIn.

First, it’s important to have the LinkedIn share button on your web pages.

Second, it’s important to have the LinkedIn O.G. tags configured properly.

If you have a visitor that likes your content and wants to share it on LinkedIn, it would be a shame if he would not do so, simply because the post looks really messy.

12. Ask people to follow your LinkedIn company page

You would be surprised how many people will follow your LinkedIn company page if you would just ask.

We’ve already covered the option to invite your first contact to follow your LinkedIn page, but there are several other ways you could go about it, depending on how important it is to you to get LinkedIn followers.

Many organizations add a LinkedIn follow button to their website footer and email footer, but they don’t ask to take action.

You could simply add a line of text in your email that goes something like:

“Be sure to follow our LinkedIn company page where we share the latest updates on [fill in the blank]”

Or.

You could add a pop-up on your blog with the same message.

13. Run ads to get more followers to your LinkedIn company page

If you really want to take it a step further, you should run LinkedIn ads. Make sure you know how much a quality follower is worth to you before running the ads and testing various tactics.

This is a topic for the next post.

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Originally published at https://storylab.ai on October 4, 2022.