5 tips to increase LinkedIn followers

Accordingly to the statistics, LinkedIn drives traffic to a company's website 4 times more (64%) than social networks such as Facebook (17%) or Twitter (14%) – which instead guarantee a bigger engagement in terms of shares and comments.

This means that LinkedIn is probably the best social network when it comes to attract prospects and turn them into actual customers.

1. BE CONTENT-FOCUSED

The most important thing to do in order to increase the number of followers is proving the audience with relevant, high-quality and especially varied content. Company-branding, career opportunities, tips and best practices, quotes, numbers, pictures,... these are just a few examples of the typology of content that can be published on a corporate LinkedIn page. The content has to provide the audience with added value and solicit a visit to the company's website. The content should focus on how the company can solve the customers' problems, through short and sharp updates. Pictures are always preferred but a good option could be also posting videos, since they are one of the 2015 trends in Digital Marketing.

2. SET UP AN EDITORIAL CALENDAR

It is important to post frequently on the basis of a strategic and structured editorial calendar. The content should not be posted in the evening or late afternoon and during the weekends. The ideal would be to update the page 20 times per month (so basically everyday, excluding the weekends): in this way it will be possible to reach the 60% of the followers.

3. ENGAGE YOUR EMPLOYEES

Employees need to understand the importance of guaranteeing visibility to the page: they should like, share or comment the updates. In this way the content (and consequently the page itself) will have a better visibility and the number of followers will increase.

4. ENGAGE YOUR AUDIENCE

Ask questions and invite your audience to participate to discussions about topics related to the industry or to the company itself. The company should follow the LinkedIn pages of its current clients and partners and take part to the discussions that are posted on other groups related to the industry/market where it operates in.

5. INFORM & PROMOTE

It is very important to inform everyone about the presence of the company on LinkedIn. Everyone within the company should add the link to the LinkedIn page in their corporate email signature. Also on the corporate website it should be added the 'Follow' button: in this way who will visit the website will be automatically informed about the presence of the company on LinkedIn. It could be a good idea also sending an informative newsletter to the current clients/partners with an invitation to follow the page.

On LinkedIn it is possible also to set up 'Follow AD campaigns' that guarantee a bigger visibility of the page with a consequent increase of followers.

In order to solicit the audience to follow the page, it could be offered also an incentive: for example an additional report or an e-book about an activity or an initiative set up by the company.