Succeeding With LinkedIn Company Pages : Social Media Examiner

Want more people to follow your LinkedIn company page? Wondering how to improve your LinkedIn content marketing?

In this article, you’ll discover a LinkedIn content strategy that works for company pages.

This article was co-created by Michelle J. Raymond and Michael Stelzner. For more about Michelle, scroll to Other Notes From This Episode at the end of this article.

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What’s New With LinkedIn in 2023?

Last year, LinkedIn celebrated its 20th birthday and the social network for business has achieved a lot in those two decades.

LinkedIn is the leading social network for B2B, by a long way.
Users consistently say that they trust LinkedIn more than any other social platform.
65% of business decision-makers have a LinkedIn profile.
LinkedIn has become both a platform and a source for thought leadership in business, especially via its annual reports on the state of B2B.

LinkedIn has seen record revenue over the last couple of years, and it’s continually adding more features to support organic content, boosted posts, and ads.

But there’s one thing missing from this picture. While plenty of influencers and decision-makers have found fame with their personal profiles, official company pages on LinkedIn have been neglected.

Chances are, your small business already has a company page but you don’t update the profile regularly, you’re not excited about the content on it, and you aren’t seeing any follower growth.

Sound familiar? Things can be different. With a few insider tips and tweaks, you can use your LinkedIn page to grow your audience and create a reputation as a leader in your niche. Even if your create a company page today!

LinkedIn Company Pages: First Steps for Small Businesses

There are four things you can do right now to start developing your LinkedIn page:

Update your LinkedIn page. It’s about time!
Grow your follower count. We have a few insider ideas to try.
Discover new features. Help LinkedIn help you.
Create better content. Learn how to plan and format your content for a greater audience of LinkedIn members.

#1: Update Your LinkedIn Company Page

First things first: mosey over to LinkedIn and have a look at your company page. Really look at it.

Are there any empty sections? LinkedIn will prompt you to fill these company details out.
Is any of the information out of date?
Is it easy for people to contact you if they want to?
Can people find your company website?
When did you last share a post? How much engagement did it get?

LinkedIn pages that have all the sections completed get up to 30% more impressions. Pages that are regularly updated and active get 11 times more clicks. Checking that your page is up to date might only take a few minutes but it can make a huge difference to the success of your LinkedIn marketing efforts on the platform.

If you haven’t checked in for a while, you might be surprised at how many new features and sections have been added.

For example, the Life tab gives people an insight into your company culture. In the Products tab, you can showcase specific products for potential customers.

Only got a few minutes? Then stick to the essentials:

Check that all of your contact information is accessible, up to date, and accurate.
Fill in your About section. This will help qualify incoming leads—and it can be read by search engines.

#2: Grow Your LinkedIn Company Page Follower Count

How many followers does your LinkedIn page have?

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It’s probably a lot fewer than the connections on your personal profile. Company pages grow slower but the rewards are worth it.

If you’re running a small business or working in a small marketing team, then 1,000 followers is a good goal to start with. You can grow your page through invitations, events, and content.

Let’s start with invitations. LinkedIn gives you 250 free invitation credits per page admin: so if you have one page admin, then you can invite 250 people to follow you. If you have two admins, then you can invite 500, and so on. Every time one of those invitations is accepted, your credit gets “refunded” to use again.

So invitations can be a powerful tool for growth. You just need the right strategy to maximize them.

First, invite only your ideal customers. Use the LinkedIn search filters to track down your dream audience.
Next, look for your potential audience. These are people who might not match your ideal buyer persona but they could still become valuable leads.
Finally, use your invitations to reach out to other people in your industry or niche.

When you follow this sequence, then you should get back lots of credits to reuse. That’s because you’ve started by targeting the people who are most likely to respond positively.

#3: Discover and Utilize New LinkedIn Company Pages Features

Like any other social network, LinkedIn adds new features all the time. Unlike most other social networks, LinkedIn isn’t very proactive about notifying you of those new features.

That’s just one of the reasons why you should regularly review your LinkedIn page. You never know what might have been added!

You can also keep up with new releases by joining the official LinkedIn group for page administrators. This LinkedIn group is a great place to find out about updates, ask technical questions, and tell the platform what you think.

For now, we’ll look at two recent features that are invaluable to page administrators: page notifications and link stickers.

Page Notifications

LinkedIn has added a new, subtle feature to both personal profiles and company pages. Have you spotted it yet?

It’s that small, grey bell icon in the top right-hand corner:

When you tap it, you’ll have the choice to receive notifications about all posts, top posts, or no posts from that personal linkedIn account or page.

This is a really useful tool, especially given the vagaries of LinkedIn’s main feed. When someone rings the bell, you can guarantee that they’ll get notifications about your content.

And there’s a hidden bonus. If someone gets notified about one of your posts and reads it right away, then great, you have one reader. But the fact that they engaged with the post early on also sends a signal to the LinkedIn algorithm that this is valuable, important content which should be shown to more people.

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Of course, not every single follower on your page will choose to ring that bell. But you can maximize its effect by asking people to ring it as a call to action on some of your posts.

Link Stickers

Growing followers on LinkedIn can only get you so far. Eventually, you’ll want to convert those followers into email subscribers, website visitors, and customers.

LinkedIn has recently made this easier by adding clickable, customizable links to your image posts. You can overlay the link on an image, just like adding link stickers to a post on Instagram.

You only get 30 characters to name the link so make sure that you choose a highly effective call to action! Only use links like this when you have a specific campaign in mind. If you overuse the links, then people will stop clicking.

#4: How to Create Better LinkedIn Content: The 3-2-1 Method

Content on your personal profile may perform better. That’s just the way LinkedIn works right now.

But your company page on LinkedIn still needs content, too.

A lot of content from business pages gets ignored because it’s dry, irrelevant, and above all, focused on the company instead of on the audience.

You can stand out by writing posts that put your audience first. When you create content that’s all about your audience—offering them ideas, understanding, and value they can’t get anywhere else—then you become an important industry source. Your posts might not go viral but people will come looking for content on your page when they need information or insight.

Most people who view your posts won’t be committed customers. They don’t care about your dry business updates! Instead, you’ll need to nurture them toward a purchase… again, through that powerful thought leadership and relatable content.

Let’s talk about how to plan content and find the right formats for your LinkedIn page.

So how exactly can you plan LinkedIn content that will nurture casual readers toward a sale?

We’re going to use the 3-2-1 formula. In this framework, you post six times every 2 weeks. You can slow down the frequency if your team is really small. The most important thing is to post consistently, even if you can only manage six posts over a month.

Those six posts are divided into 3, 2, and 1 posts of different types: good to know, good to feel, and good to buy.

3 “good to know” posts. In these posts, you’ll share industry knowledge, trends, and news. You can share posts to other links and videos in these posts so they won’t take too much time to make. You’re a curator as well as a creator!
2 “good to feel” posts. These are posts that help people get to know, like, or trust you. You’ll share content about things like your company values, purpose, charitable activities, office culture, and employee stories. The most engaging content on any business page is photos of employees.
1 “good to buy” post. Yes, lead nurturing takes time and tact. But don’t forget to actually tell people what you’re selling! Once you’ve done a good job of showing your expertise and connecting with viewers, show them exactly how your business can make their lives better.

All of these posts can take a range of formats: photos, quick text posts, longer articles, videos, and more.

However, the most valuable content formats on LinkedIn are Live Events and Newsletters. Let’s look at those two formats in more detail.

LinkedIn Live Events

What are LinkedIn Live Events? They’re not the same thing as just going live on the platform.

A live event is run through your business page. While you can use events on LinkedIn to advertise in-person meetings, they’re most useful for online events such as panels, product releases, webinars, and masterclasses. You can sign people up via LinkedIn, then use a third-party service such as StreamYard to livestream the event.

What’s more, the event will be recorded on your page even once it’s over. People can discover the event and watch it long after it happened. That’s a much longer shelf-life than most posts or livestreams on social media.

Because live events are participatory, they’re great for feedback, customer research, and most importantly, building a sense of community. That feeling of community will keep people coming back to your LinkedIn page, especially if you run regular or repeat events.

Just like gaining page followers, you can game the LinkedIn system to get as many invites as possible. The platform gives you up to 1,000 event invites every week. So if you’re running a LinkedIn live event, make sure you set it up several weeks in advance and send out another 1,000 invites every week.

Newsletters

Newsletters are the other most valuable format on LinkedIn and they’re valuable for pretty much the same reasons as events. The content sticks around and it builds a stronger community around your brand.

To create newsletters, you’ll use the same familiar editor that you’re used to from LinkedIn articles. You can embed images, videos, podcasts, quotes, links, and slides; use key hashtags or tag relevant people; and even collaborate so multiple employees can contribute to the same piece. Just like LinkedIn articles, newsletters get indexed by Google so you’ll get an SEO boost even if your reach within the platform seems small.

But unlike articles, newsletters help you build a subscriber base. Your subscribers get notified every time you mail out an edition of your newsletter; some may even get email alerts! So your content is more likely to get more views and engagement than if you were simply publishing articles to your page.

LinkedIn is very keen to push this format so they’ll give you lots of help to maximize your reach. For example, your newsletter will be featured on your company page, encouraging new visitors to sign up.

linkedin-newsletter

Even better, the first-ever edition of your newsletter will automatically send a notification to all your followers… whether they’re subscribers or not! This is such a valuable boost that if your follower count is low right now, it’s best to grow your followers before you launch a newsletter. You’ll never get such a major boost again.

The secret to growing a LinkedIn page is to stay up to date, share valuable content, and make the most of all of those new features and hidden benefits to reach more followers. It will take time to build your audience but your business will feel the benefits.

Michelle J Raymond is a LinkedIn strategist and trainer who helps B2B companies achieve better results with LinkedIn. Her latest book is called the LinkedIn Branding Book. She’s host of the Good for Business Show, and her courses include the LinkedIn Foundation Masterclass and the Page Admin Course. Find her on LinkedIn.

Other Notes From This Episode

Connect with Michael Stelzner @Stelzner on Instagram and @Mike_Stelzner on Twitter.
Watch this interview and other exclusive content from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.

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