How to Grow a LinkedIn (B2B) Company Page
Let me teach you how to grow your company LinkedIn page to +32K
The importance of creating an organic B2B social media strategy is often overlooked, but your social media presence contributes to your brand image and presence.
Your company is likely convinced of the effects of paid social media marketing, but your CEO might not be as convinced of the value of organic social media marketing and of hiring a person to take over this role.
That’s where this article comes in. In this article, I’ll be taking you through the process of creating a great organic strategy that works!
Yes, it works. This isn’t just theory, this is the story of how I with the occasional help of my content and design colleagues got a B2B company’s LinkedIn to grow to over 32K followers in 3 years with most of the growth coming this past year.
Use this knowledge and transform your own organic social media marketing strategy into a major success, that will get everyone in your company acknowledging the power of organic social and contributing to its success.
Where do I start?
The first step is the most difficult part, but it has to be done. Before you start with your strategy you need to determine which social media channels your business wants to focus on. For the B2B organization I worked for, we decided to focus mainly on LinkedIn organic as it was/is the platform that performs best for B2B.
So first you need to start with what I like to call the brains of your strategy — creating goals and pinpointing your target audience. Once you have the brains of your strategy — everything else will fall into place.
Creating goals and pinpointing your target audience
For the B2B organization I worked for we decided we wanted to accomplish 3 things:
1. Align the content with your tone of voice — Creating brand awareness
Our social media before I joined had been a cluster of things, mostly promotional and not really showing how the organization was. We wanted our content on social media to reflect the fun approachable company that we were.
Most B2B organizations present themselves in a very stiff manner online, even when it might not be how the organization is with its employees and customers. We wanted to show our audience on social media what it was like to be an employee and customer of the brand.
2. Increase engagement (focusing on our target audience)
We had a suboptimal organic engagement rate on LinkedIn, even though it was above the standard 1% in the B2B industry I knew that it had the potential to enter the 10% zone and be up to par with B2C engagement rates.
3. Increase Followers (focusing on our target audience)
This might be one of the biggest goals we had for our LinkedIn channel. It also was a personal goal I had, to grow the channel and increase the brands’ authority and thought leadership with the channel.
It also ended up making the brand more human but that’s a story I’ve told in my last Medium article, which you can read here.
The results
Of course, it wouldn’t be fair to say, “Hey, look at me I’m an expert” without telling how these strategies worked out.
So, here’s the bit you’ve all been waiting for.
What happened:
Organic Engagement Rate
The organic engagement rate has gone up since I first started implementing my social media strategy, it’s good to note that it went up steadily and this huge jump wasn’t built in a day.
As I love to say on LinkedIn social media growth takes time, and you won’t get people to engage by posting boring content.
I love to increase engagement by sharing more human posts, this includes stories of employee successes or events we organize.
Of course, that’s been a type of content that I’ve had to get innovative about in 2020, but you could always post about online events your company organizes and include screenshots of the calls. (If you get permission from the people included in the screenshot of course!)
Showing a human side of your company is a fantastic way to increase engagement and honestly, I recommend it to any social media manager trying to be successful with their company profile.
Another type of post that works wonders is if you post multiple images, my golden number is usually 3–5. Posting 2 images on LinkedIn looks terrible so avoid that.
Increase Followers
Growing your following on a B2B LinkedIn page is tricky and it won’t happen overnight.
I might sound like a broken record but it’s true. From late 2018 to 2021 the growth was not a straight line up. It had its bumps, there were times that we weren’t growing fast enough.
2019 was especially tough because we were growing more than ever before but the strategies I put in place weren’t working fast enough to my liking.
So in 2020, I virtually attended the “Social Media Marketing World” by Social Media Examiner.
It’s the biggest social media event of the year and it’s always packed with speakers that you probably look up to and some which you’ve never heard about but then go and tell you things that completely change your view on social media.
For me, the session that changed the way I looked at B2B social media marketing was Mark Schaefer. His session and his book “Marketing Rebellion” changed everything for me. I discovered how to humanize the brand on social media and this was the catalyst for our tremendous growth in 2020 and 2021.
We went from 5K in 2018, to 7.8K in 2019, to 14K in 2020 to 32K in 2021.
The numbers don’t lie.
Making your brand friendlier, informative, and helpful makes your numbers grow on social media. It also shows that your brand cares about its audience and wants to help, instead of only pushing sales content.
Posting sales content on social media won’t get you far, no one wants to buy something from a brand they don’t have a connection with.
Think back to everything you’ve ever bought, you buy things from brands you trust right?
Well, it’s no different for B2B buyers.
That’s why you need to create a strategy that will positively connect with your buyers on social media.
Organic Social Media Marketing is the hardest route to take in terms of marketing because it takes time but it’s also the BEST route to take because there is less competition and because you can connect with your audience.
