How to Gain More Followers on Your LinkedIn Company Page

Many marketing professionals struggle with their company’s LinkedIn page. While multinational companies receive attention from abroad, complaints often arise locally when there aren’t enough followers. It’s undeniable that having a low number of followers can give a negative impression, even for well-known large companies. However, it’s worth remembering that the quantity of followers isn’t always the best metric; it’s how they engage.

When someone clicks the “+ Follow” button on a company’s LinkedIn page, it expresses their support and sympathy rather than a commitment to regularly visit and engage with the page. It’s rare for users to “unfollow” a page later on. (Finding this option isn’t easy either, as one would have to click on the “Following” button and then the “Unfollow” button in a pop-up window. How many people go through this process?)

We tend to browse LinkedIn company pages “in reverse.” Suppose we see on someone’s profile that they work at an unfamiliar company. In that case, we click on the company logo and check how many employees they have, how many of them are active on LinkedIn and if we have connections with any of them, and how many followers the company page has. We may also look at the quality of their posts.

You can view the monthly “Visitors” and “Followers” metrics with admin access but be warned: you’ll likely find disappointing numbers. Even a company page with over 1000 followers will have low monthly visitor counts or follower growth.

As a meagre consolation, you can check the “Competitors” section to see that your competitors’ total followers and new followers aren’t any better.

So, how can you gain followers for your LinkedIn company page?

We understand that you may not be able or willing to explain all this to your local or foreign superiors, and the pressure to gain followers remains high. Don’t worry; we’ll provide some tips.

1. Invite connections to your LinkedIn company page from the admin panel. If you have admin privileges, go to the “Admin tools” dropdown menu on your LinkedIn company page and click the “Invite connections” option. LinkedIn aims to avoid spamming strangers, so you can only invite people from your LinkedIn network. You can filter them based on basic categories such as location, workplace, or industry.

LinkedIn restricts the number of monthly invitations to 250. Assuming a 5% conversion rate (a positive expectation), you can expect around 12-13 new monthly followers; this approach alone would take a long time to reach the first 1000 followers.

In most companies, a “junior” HR or marketing employee manages the LinkedIn company page and usually has fewer than 300 connections. Some of these connections may not be relevant to the company. Thus, they can’t exhaust their monthly invitation quota with their connections.

A good solution is granting admin rights to employees with more extensive and relevant LinkedIn networks. These are often experienced salespeople, commercial managers, or executives. (In some cases, even executives are willing to send dozens of invitations weekly.)

2. One reason for the low conversion rate of the method described in the previous point is that these invitations are impersonal. The text “XY invites you to follow the ZW page” under the recipient’s “My Network” menu will not excite many people. Another problem is the competition with group and newsletter invitations. 

You cannot send invite messages from the Admin interface, but there are other, better solutions. Employees with a more extensive network of contacts in the company (300+) can send a personalised message to their first-degree connections via the LinkedIn messaging interface. For example: 

“Dear Béla, I know that you are also interested in this topic, so I recommend you follow Nagy Kalap Ltd.’s LinkedIn page on mushroom cultivation, where we regularly discuss the latest nutrients, pest control, and the automation of mushroom cultivation” – followed by a link to the company’s LinkedIn page.

3. You can use Advertising to recruit followers, but the cost per follower acquisition might be somewhat high. We have a much better idea: persuade colleagues with a larger reach (500+) to post a message from their profiles encouraging others to follow the company page. (You could even write the post text to save them time.)

Don’t expect miracles; these posts won’t bring high numbers of followers to the company page, but some will undoubtedly become interested. Of course, for this to work, 1) there should be valuable content on the page (not just corporate self-promotion), and 2) the post should explain why it’s worth following the page.

Promoting company pages with opinion leaders

We know very well that for most people, experts, professionals, and industry opinion leaders are more credible than companies themselves. If these opinion leaders share posts from the company’s LinkedIn page, they will reach more people than relying solely on organic visits.

If only ten employees at a company agreed to act as opinion leaders and share posts from the company page, with an average of 300 connections per person, we could reach a (theoretical) audience of 3,000. Even if these posts only get 10% of the opinion leaders’ network, they will still have a greater reach than an average corporate page, and the audience will perceive the content as more credible.

You need shareable content

Many companies only post company news (exhibitions, awards, results, etc.). This type of content can quickly turn off followers.

If the posts focus on industry-related information, professional news, and exciting facts, opinion leaders will be likelier to share them, and followers will increase. If an exhibition or an award announcement follows every third or fourth post, it won’t bother anyone as much.

There is no instant miracle for increasing the number of followers. A company’s LinkedIn page cannot thrive with just one or two company news updates. It requires consistent effort, perhaps not at the junior level. However, those who follow this advice will be ahead of their competitors!

About the author ContentPlus is our B2B digital agency partner based in Budapest, Hungary. The agency’s primary objective is to increase the sales leads of its clients with a content-based approach. The agency’s tactical approach includes inbound marketing, ABM, social selling, influencer marketing (the first b2b influencer database was launched by ContentPlus in Hungary), social advocacy and SEO.