How to Increase Followers on a LinkedIn Business Page (Easily)

Traditional advice to increase LinkedIn company page followers includes:

• Post regularly
• Use the right hashtags
• Share content that’s educational (not just promotional)
• Optimize your LinkedIn page (add a link to the company website, tagline, branded image, etc.)
• Regularly check page analytics to see what content performs best

While all this advice is good, it’s more or less a collection of best practices everyone is already doing.

So if you’re already following all of these best practices, this post will introduce you to a strategy that your competitors probably aren’t using to increase your company’s LinkedIn follower growth rate.

Use Employee Advocacy

If every employee in your company shared every branded LinkedIn post with their audience, your follower count would probably grow significantly because:

• Each post would generate more total reach as each employee engaging with your post would introduce their network to the branded content.
• Your employee’s connections are a warm audience and, therefore, much more likely to follow your company page than a cold audience.
• The LinkedIn algorithm will likely further increase your content’s organic reach, as it will view the initial engagement from your employees as a positive engagement signal.

An employee advocacy strategy is basically an organized effort to have employees consistently engage with the company’s LinkedIn content.

However, executing an effective employee engagement strategy can be tricky. Most managers begin the strategy by sending a mass email or Slack message to remind employees to hop onto LinkedIn and engage with the latest posts.

This strategy might be effective at first, but you’ll probably see a steady decline in engagement over time.

While it’s easy to be frustrated, it’s also understandable – your co-workers have plenty of other high-value tasks they need to execute.

So we built GaggleAMP to remove the friction involved with hosting an employee advocacy strategy. Specifically, GaggleAMP:

• Enables you to assign each employee a personalized list of relevant posts in minutes.
• Lets employees complete the engagement assignment directly inside the platform and schedule it to publish later.
• Measures the ROI of each campaign and tracks employee engagement so that you can reward the most engaged employees

Here’s a brief overview of how it works.

Step 1: You Assign Specific Posts to Specific Employees in Seconds

Mass email/Slack messages are easy for employees to ignore and quickly become noisy, but sending individual messages to specific employees to engage with specific posts is time-consuming.

So instead, GaggleAMP makes it possible to assign a specific engagement activity to specific employees in minutes.  

To do so, select an engagement activity, add the link to the LinkedIn post you want them to engage with, and any additional instructions that you think are necessary.

From there, you can either assign each post to a group of employees (such as the sales team or executives) or cherry-pick a handful of specific employees. In fact, GaggleAMP even tells you the total social reach of each employee so that you can assign critical posts to those with the most reach:

So rather than spending hours sending personalized messages to each employee, GaggleAMP helps you accomplish the same end result in minutes.

Once you assign the posts, each employee will receive a notification alerting them to check the Gaggle and engage. (Note: you can customize notification settings depending on how often you use them to ensure they don’t become noisy.)

Step 2: Employees Execute Engagement Activities Inside The Gaggle (In a Matter of Minutes)

The success of any employee advocacy strategy depends entirely on how much your employees engage – so the key to improving your strategy’s success is to eliminate as much friction as possible that’s preventing employees from engaging.

We identified a few key friction points that typically prevent employees from participating:

1. Most employees know they’ll easily get distracted if they log into LinkedIn and therefore put it off

2. When employees do log into LinkedIn, most are paralyzed by so many branded posts and don’t know which one they should engage with – or what they can say

3. Most employees are willing to engage once per week, but most don’t have time to engage daily

So we built GaggleAMP to eliminate all of these key friction points.

First, when employees log into GaggleAMP, they are greeted with a personalized list of engagement activities (curated by you). So rather than being paralyzed by many different posts to choose from, you’ve already chosen posts for them.

While it may seem small, removing one more decision they have to make can significantly improve participation rates.

Another key benefit is that employees can complete the engagement activity directly inside the Gaggle – so they never have to log into LinkedIn to complete the assignment.

In addition, employees can schedule the engagement to go live at a future date/time. This is incredibly powerful as they can spend just five or ten minutes inside the Gaggle on Monday, and their engagement activities can go live daily throughout the week.

Want to increase your company page’s LinkedIn followers with employee advocacy? Schedule a demo of GaggleAMP today!

Step 3: Track Campaign Performance and Reward Employee Engagement

GaggleAMP also tracks each campaign for you so that you can accurately attribute revenue to your employee advocacy efforts.

Here are just a few of the key metrics you’ll be able to see in GaggleAMP:

• EEMV (estimated earned media value)
• Number of shares
• Total reach
• Number of social interactions
• Number of clicks
• Most active members

GaggleAMP also gamifies the process by tracking the most engaged employees and posting the score on a public Leaderboard.

You might have noticed in the engagement assignment stage that you can assign a certain number of points to each engagement activity.

When employees complete each engagement activity, they receive the corresponding points. Then, Gaggle tallies each employee's total points and ranks them accordingly.

This way, you can offer a prize to the most engaged employees (and for more competitive employees, seeing the leaderboard rankings is typically enough to drive them to engage more).

We’ve found that employee advocacy is the easiest way to significantly increase the number of followers to your LinkedIn business page with minimal additional effort.

So if you’re serious about increasing your company’s LinkedIn followers, consider scheduling a demo with GaggleAMP today as it’s an effective tool to ensure your program’s success is sustainable.

Build Your Executive’s Personal Brands

People naturally tend to engage with other people more than brands on social media platforms. In addition, LinkedIn wants companies to pay for LinkedIn ads, so they limit the organic reach of company pages.

Fortunately, you can use that to your advantage.

Instead of using only your company page to post content, you can leverage executives' personal profiles to amplify branded messages and generate more followers for the company's LinkedIn page.  

John Bonini, the Director of Marketing at Databox, is an excellent example of how executives can significantly help a brand's initiatives. He mostly publishes quality thought leadership posts about content marketing, but he will occasionally publish a post like this one designed to help Databox's initiatives:

So how do you help your executive team improve their personal brand so that each company message they post has more impact?

One easy way to help them out is to send them a post prompt. Here are a few examples:

• What's one thing you learned this week that surprised you?
• What's your opinion on (recent industry news) and what can people take away from it?
• What's one thing you wish you knew when you started as a (job title)?
• What’s a contrarian opinion you hold regarding (subject)?
• What’s a contrarian opinion you hold regarding social media?

If you don't want to bombard them with constant emails, you can use the Question feature in Gaggle. This way, they can complete the posts in one sitting and schedule them to go live throughout the week:

If your executives still aren't finding time to complete the prompts, you can even write a post for them, and then all they have to do is read it and approve it or edit it.

This way, even the busiest executives can find time to build their personal LinkedIn profiles.

The key to creating great content for an executive's personal profile is to ensure only a portion of the content promotes company initiatives. The majority should be purely insightful/educational content.

Want to try GaggleAMP? You can schedule a demo or sign up for a free trial today! 

Collaborating With Industry Influencers

One of the easiest ways to get in front of your target audience is to partner with others who already have your target audience's attention.

There are plenty of different ways you can do this, including:

• Podcast/video collaborations
• Live stream collaborations
• Written content collaborations (like data studies)
• Promotional post swaps

The key to making a collaboration successful is to partner with people who:

• Have a similar audience size (if their audience is significantly larger, it won't benefit them nearly as much as it would benefit you, and they probably won't appreciate it)
• Have your ideal target audience (i.e., if you're selling to in-house content marketers, make sure their audience is in-house content marketers – not content agencies)

Clearscope (a content marketing tool) is an excellent example of a company that leverages influencers to grow its brand (and LinkedIn following). They have marketing agency founders and other marketing influencers host webinars on their platform, and many of the influencers share the content with their connections:

​​They started this strategy about ten months ago and have been doing it fairly consistently since then, so it's safe to say it's probably working!

You can also leverage LinkedIn groups by answering key questions related to your product or service. If you don't have time to scan through groups daily, you can always use a social listening tool to alert you when someone mentions a keyword related to your product.

For example, we offer an employee advocacy tool, so we might use a tool that alerts us whenever someone mentions "employee advocacy." Then, if there's an opportunity to add value, we can do so.

Leverage Other Channels

Another super easy way to grow your company's LinkedIn follower count is to leverage other channels you already have traction on.

For example, Alex Hormozi only started posting on LinkedIn six months ago. Today, he has over 21,000 followers.

One thing he has done to grow his following is telling people on his podcast, The Game, that he wants to grow his LinkedIn profile and that the audience should hop over to LinkedIn and follow him. (Even though he's growing a personal brand, the strategy works for brands too.)

So if you have an audience on a different platform (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), ask them to jump over to LinkedIn and follow your company. You could even email your list and ask them to follow the brand on LinkedIn.

Another tip is to add a CTA in your email signature that says to connect with the company brand.

You can also add a follow button to your website and A/B test various styles, locations, and sizes with a tool like CrazyEgg or Hotjar.

Creating High Quality Content Consistently

The average lifespan of a post on LinkedIn is about 24 hours, which means you have to post content consistently to remain relevant.

If you've ever tried publishing consistently on social media, you know it can be challenging when other projects arise and take precedence.

So rather than just telling you to post consistently, here are some hacks to make it easier to publish content consistently.

Repurpose Content

Repurposing content is simply taking an existing piece of content and posting it on a new platform or in a new format.

For example, if you recorded a video podcast episode, a great way to repurpose that content is to chop it up into smaller clips and post it on LinkedIn.

Repurposing content can also be as simple as taking a video and publishing it across multiple different platforms. Here's an excellent example of a video that Rand Fishkin posted on LinkedIn and various other channels.

The key to successfully repurposing content is to always post it to LinkedIn natively. For example, if you just share a YouTube video link, it probably won't perform nearly as well as if you upload the video file to LinkedIn.

Republish Content

Another option is to republish evergreen content that already performed well on LinkedIn. To do this, look back at your analytics and see what content performed the best. You can then reshare that content or adjust it slightly before publishing it again.

Many people worry about republishing content as it could bore their audience, though we've found that because the average lifespan of content across a variety of social networks is so short that most of your page's content isn't seen by the majority of your followers.

Some statistics estimate that only about 7% of your audience sees your LinkedIn posts.

So if you have a piece of content that performed well in the past, consider posting it again because your potential customers probably didn't see it.

And if you’re using an employee advocacy platform like GaggleAMP, we make it super simple to find the content that performs best and reuse the activity to serve to your teams.

Schedule Content in Advance

Finally, consider using a social media scheduler tool that enables you to schedule content to go live at a later date.

While it’s always good to stay on top of industry trends and post content related to current events, having a steady stream of content that’s always ready to go is an excellent way to prevent yourself from falling behind.

Optimize The Post For Maximum Visibility

Finally, here are a few optimizations you can make to each post you publish to ensure it achieves maximum visibility:

• Avoid adding links or the website URL in your post. If you have to, post it in the comments.
• Include 3-5 relevant hashtags
• Use compelling copy to get people to pause and click "see more"
• Include high-quality images or videos to capture attention

Here's an example of a well-optimized post:

Start Increasing Followers to Your LinkedIn Business Page Today

There are plenty of different hacks to improve your LinkedIn marketing efforts, though real results require a consistent strategy with strong systems and processes.

That’s why we created GaggleAMP.

We wanted to make it easier for managers to create a sustainable social media marketing strategy that significantly impacts key metrics. While posting high-quality content consistently is important, we’ve found that leveraging employees to create and engage with content that aligns with the brand’s initiatives is one of the most effective and sustainable ways to move the needle.

If you’re looking for an employee advocacy platform that makes it easy to assign specific engagement activities to key employees in a matter of minutes and track performance, consider scheduling a demo of GaggleAMP today.