Episode 374: How to Grow a Following of Your LinkedIn (Company) Page

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

00:01:05:14 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Howdy. Welcome to today’s Making Sales Social Live. I’m Stan Robinson, Chief Coaching Officer here at social sales link. Bob and Brynne are both traveling today. Today we’re going to be talking about building your following on your LinkedIn company page. So we’ll be offering several tips on how you can gain more followers for your page. What are you going to jump right into first?

00:01:37:10 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Optimize your company page profile for lack of a better term. So you want to make sure that your company page includes your logo, an attractive and engaging banner. You want to make sure that your description is a thorough description of what your organization offers, who you help, what differentiates you from your competitors, and he value that you bring to your audience.

00:02:06:14 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Also want to make sure that images that you use are compelling. They’re clear as far as your messaging, and you want to take the time to optimize your company page with keywords that are optimized to help you be found in search. So that was the first one. Optimize your company page profile. Secondly, regularly post, you want to make sure that you’re regularly posting quality, relevant content that is of interest to your particular audience.

00:02:46:00 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So this can include, for example, things like industry insights, company news, because one great thing about your company page is it’s similar to your website in that people do expect to come to it to find out about what your company offers. And so you do have the opportunity to be promotional on your company page because people come there expecting to find out about what you offer and why they should purchase from you.

00:03:16:06 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So other types of content includes educational articles, visuals. You can post videos as well. You want to make sure that you mix up the formats just to keep things interesting. You can include text images, videos, infographics, and longer articles. But again, keep in mind that it should be content that’s relevant for your audience. Next, encourage your employees to follow the company page and engage with it, as well as sharing what you post on your company page to their own personal profiles.

00:04:03:15 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So one of the things about most organizations, if you have a team of any size at all, is that when you look at the reach of your team in aggregate, in terms of how many connections all of your team members have on LinkedIn as compared with how many followers your company page has, the number of connections that your team members have on LinkedIn will far exceed the number of followers of your company page.

00:04:36:01 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So there’s a term called Employee Advocacy, which is basically encouraging your employees to engage with, share content with, and otherwise promote your company page to their network, which in turn builds your visibility and will build your followers. Next, when you have a company page. This may not be immediately obvious, but you can engage with content that’s posted by individuals and by other company pages as your company page.

00:05:20:07 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So when you’re admin and administrate order on your company page and you go to someone else’s post, you will see the option. And usually the default is your personal profile, but you’ll see a dropdown. And when you hit the dropdown, you’ll see the option to keep the default, which is your company, your personal profile, or select your company page and engage as your company page.

00:05:50:14 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So when you do this, it raises the level of visibility for your company page, and that’s one that many people may not be aware of. So of course you can engage in any of the different forms that engagement takes. You can react to your company page, and you can comment as your company page, which is even more effective, and will gain you more visibility when you do comment as your company page.

00:06:20:27 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): You can tag other people. So if you want to increase the reach of your comment, go ahead and tag some of your own employees or team members who are willing to encourage them to engage with the posts that you’re commenting on. Related to that. Next, engage Back. Now, we always talk about this in reference to your personal profile. When you post on your personal profile, make sure that you do not post and ghost.

00:06:57:27 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): In other words, about 30 minutes or depending on how active an ad network you have 15 to 30 minutes after you post, make sure you’re double checking for engagement on your post. Because if someone engages with your post, you want to make sure that you reply to their engagement, particularly if they comment. So the same logic applies to your company page, whenever someone engages with your company page, go ahead and engage with them, which in turn helps to increase the reach of that particular post.

00:07:42:22 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So next you can cross-promote your company page on other pages, so you can partner with companies that have products that are complimentary with yours so they don’t compete directly with you, but their products are addressed to the same audience as yours. So they may be products that one of your clients would purchase after they purchase from you, or before they purchase from you.

00:08:20:03 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So you can partner with complementary organizations like that, support the content that they post, and you can of course do that as an individual, but you can also do that as your company page and also encourage them to support the content that you post on your company page. If you have a good relationship with someone that you’re a complementary partners, so to speak.

00:08:48:23 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): If you post something on your company page that you particularly want to make sure is visible to the largest possible audience, you can always dm them with a link to the company page post and say, Hey, would you mind adding to the discussion on this particular post? Next, you can offer LinkedIn events through your company page, and when you do that, of course, it’s an opportunity for people to register, sign up for the event, and they can in turn share the event with their networks, which builds your visibility and helps to build your following.

00:09:36:16 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So of course, when you host events, you want to make sure that they are relevant to your audience, that you’re providing valuable content to your audience and that it’s the type of content that your audience would like to share with their networks because it offers value to them. And of course, you can promote these events on your company page.

00:10:01:17 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): You can also promote them on your website via email, in newsletters and with your partners. So lots of ways to promote events that you offer via your company page. Next, you do have analytics, of course, which shows you demographic profile of who’s following your page so that you can make sure that your intended audience are indeed the ones who are following your page.

00:10:35:25 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So take advantage of the analytics that are associated with your company page to get a sense of, okay, what’s the profile of people that are following my page in terms of industry, geographic location and other metrics along those lines as well? You can look at company size for your followers, you can look at location, seniority, job function, and all of that is valuable data.

00:11:11:01 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Next is company pages do offer some premium features. So if you really want to accelerate the growth of your company page and use it as a tool and you’re willing to invest in some of the premium features of company pages, those are available to you. And one of the most valuable ones is the ability to see who’s visited your company page.

00:11:40:29 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So you can see up to seven LinkedIn members who visited your company page each week. Now they do have to have that visibility open in their settings for you to be able to see them. But the point is, LinkedIn’s premium offerings include the ability for you to actually see who’s visited your page, and there are additional offerings in terms of premium offerings as well, like a custom call to action and you can use testimonials on your company page as well to help you attract new followers.

00:12:20:07 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So those are the ones that we wanted to cover in terms of ways that you can build your following for your company page. Again, make sure that you optimize your company page profile. You post relevant, valuable content consistently on your company page. You encourage your employees to engage with your company page. You engage as your company page, and you make sure that when people do engage with your company page, you reply to them and acknowledge that their comments and their reactions to your company page take advantage.

00:13:05:01 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): The opportunity to cross-promote your company page with complimentary businesses. Use the events feature through your company page. Take advantage of the analytics and if you want to invest in premium features, there are benefits to that as well. So I hope this has been helpful for you. If you would like to keep up with all of our podcasts through social sales link, go to social sales link dot com slash podcast and make sure you subscribe so that you’re notified when new podcasts drop.

00:13:45:15 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Again. I hope this has been helpful and look forward to seeing you next week, and when you’re out and about, make sure you remember to keep your sales social.

Outro:

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