LinkedIn remains a platform devoted to job placement and B2B marketing. Your business’s LinkedIn Page is a tool with the potential of building awareness, authority, and trust with your given industry, attributes that increase as you grow your number of followers. Now LinkedIn is making it easier than ever for your business and its employees to be perceived thought leaders and industry ambassadors. Below are five organic tactics LinkedIn is sharing that will organically attract more page followers. Why is LinkedIn sharing this information? Because they know the future of their platform is becoming the nexus point for thought-leadership and industry dialogue.
1. Get the Basics Right
The first step is asking yourself why your LinkedIn Page is even worth following. No, this isn’t a trick to get you to give up and not even bother. And we don’t mean why someone would follow the page you have now—we mean the page you envision. Make sure your page is optimized for the types of users you want to be interacting with, keeping in mind both your ideal customer as well as other thought-leaders within your industry.
You’ll want to do the basics like filling out the overview, adding your logo, your organization info, and greeting a call-to-action button but be sure to optimize this info by adding pertinent keywords. Google does crawl LinkedIn Pages, giving businesses with keyword-optimized pages another opportunity to have customers find them.
2. Publish Thought Leadership Content
The people that make up the best of LinkedIn are a community of entrepreneurs, marketers, C-Suites, and decision-makers at their business. These are the people you want to have in mind while you’re developing content for your feed. The thing all these users have in common is a thirst for unique, insightful content they can engage with and use to expand their knowledge base.
Not sure what to write about? No problem! LinkedIn has a great tool to get us started. Their Content Suggestions tool helps you know what’s top of mind among specific groups of professionals within a set geography, allowing you to see what topics are trending among HR Managers in Texas or what articles marketing directors in California are reading.
3. Join Conversations that Matter to Your Brand
Nothing thrives in a vacuum and if the content you're producing isn’t driving conversations then neither will it. You want your business’s LinkedIn Page to appear as engaging as possible and LinkedIn’s Community Hashtag tool helps page managers do just that, allowing them to make their page more discoverable to LinkedIn users interested in certain hashtags. You can select up to three distinct hashtags. You can also follow those hashtags in the feed, and join relevant conversations from the point of view of your business.
While you’re at it, check out LinkedIn Events to both find and host events related to your target industry, as nothing beats interacting with potential customers in real-time.
4. Know and Grow Your Audience
One of the guiding maxims of digital marketing is that you can’t grow online if you aren’t measuring your reach and LinkedIn has made that easier through its Page Analytics. The tool allows page managers to review detailed, aggregated data regarding the demographics and traits of users who follow your page and those that have recently visited. Most importantly, this tool allows you to pinpoint which posts are driving engagement highest with whom and provide you with the ability to continually optimize your content’s audience alignment so that the right users will not only find it but engage with it as well.
5. Activate Your People
Do you know what’s cooler than a kick-ass content creator? An army of them. Your organization’s secret weapon in LinkedIn marketing is its employees. Encourage your employees to not only keep their profile up-to-date but to also post both content about the professional subject matter they’re most passionate about. Your business page can then re-share that content and show off all the industry thought leaders under your rooftop! In fact, LinkedIn has provided the following “four-pronged blueprint” for activating and elevating your employees in LinkedIn.
Re-share your employees’ best @ mentions and LinkedIn content
Notify employees of your most important Page posts to boost organic reach (up to 1x/day).
Personalize by recognizing team moments or employees with a shout-out from your Page.
Engage by fostering internal engagement through a trusted, employee-only community on LinkedIn via the My Company Tab.
According to LinkedIn, once a Page reaches 150 followers, the opportunity for growth becomes exponential. Try setting a goal of reaching this number of followers over a time period in order to unlock the benefits of LinkedIn content marketing for your business. LinkedIn has provided you with the tools and the guidance, now it’s on you to show your organization is up to the challenge!