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Every once in a while I get a sales message on LinkedIn that says something to this effect:
”Thanks for following our company page. Are you interested in …”
Of course, following a company page doesn’t mean that I’m interested in buying anything from the company. I may have followed them while I was looking for a job. But, following a company can be an indicator that you might be a potential prospect so I don’t hold it against the sales people for too long for reaching out.
For marketers it also can be insightful to take a look at who is following your page on an individual and aggregate level.
[Tweet “The better we understand our audience the better we can connect with them.”]
How can you tell who is following your company page on LinkedIn?
Up until recently you needed to subscribe to LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator function. In late June 2020 I also noticed that I can now tell who is following company pages that I have administrator rights to on the iPad app. I haven’t subscribed to Navigator in about three years.
Simply go to the page within the app and you will see that the follower count is now hyperlinked.
Click on it and you will get the list of followers.
Interestingly the follower count is not hyperlinked in the Safari web browser.
How to see who follows your LinkedIn page from a desktop browser
I’m not sure why the follower count number is not hyperlinked, but you can see who is following your page from desktop browsers as well.
- Go to your page and make sure you are viewing it as an admin.
- Click Analytics in the top page nav bar.
- Scroll down. Followers are listed below the metrics.
[Tweet “Share valuable content on your LinkedIn page to connect with customers.”]
There is value to invite people to your LinkedIn company page and you can also increase the following by employees potentially sharing content.
Read next: [LinkedIn] How to stand out on LinkedIn by sending voice messages
At the end of the day you have to set up a LinkedIn page to have followers. The next section talks about how to set it up and way to set it up.
[Tweet “Having a LinkedIn page is simply good branding.”]
How and why you should create a LinkedIn business page
Interestingly I’ve only created two LinkedIn pages from scratch.
I’ve worked with many LinkedIn pages for clients and my companies over the years but I’ve never created one from scratch myself. ?♂️
Of course all the instructions online when you Google how to do it were outdated. Things change so fast. Despite this fact, I was able to figure it out by simply going to settings and looking around for 15 seconds. At the time of this writing it was on the far right on my LinkedIn homepage and then I found the “create a new page” button. Of course I had to swear that I have the authority to create the page. Once I click that box creating the page was super simple and fast. Keep in mind that you do want to know what you want put in the company description box.
If your company has a link the approval process through marketing or some other similar department that could hold up the creation of the page.
Related: Don’t get stuck in Approval Hell
So I won’t go deeper into how to do it because the design will likely continue to change but let’s talk about why to do it.
First of all, creating a business page allows you to share content under the business brand on LinkedIn. You can also promote this content from this page using promotion dollars. Paid promotions are currently not available from personal accounts, though personal accounts can use the advertising platform to do what I would call dark paid posts and other ads.
In addition to distribution strategies and overall branding campaigns there is another reason why brands should create a business page on LinkedIn.
Take a look at my LinkedIn profile below:
All the positions listed have a nice looking company logo next to them. That happens because the companies have created company pages. So when employees add them to their LinkedIn profiles when they start a new job the company shows up in a drop-down menu.
Related: Consider this strategy when starting a new job (LinkedIn)
Then once the company is added to an employee’s profile when people click on the logo they actually go to the company’s page. Of course on that page you can explain what your company does, how many people work there and add a link to your website. In other words, you can somewhat control what people will learn about you when they check you out on LinkedIn. You can also add job openings.
One thing to keep in mind is that LinkedIn actually uses data based on employees adding the company to their profiles as an overview:
The network also lists reason management hires and notable alumni:
For the most part I would think that the positives outweigh the negatives of creating a company page and having the business logo looks much nicer for the employee and also for the companies. And the other thing is that companies can somewhat control what their company is called. For example, take a look at The Gazette Co. job listing on my profile. That company in 2017 is known as Folience and it actually says that in the listing.
Creating a LinkedIn page for your company is relatively simple and I would highly recommend it especially once you’re hiring employees.
Of course, I would also recommend to use your LinkedIn page to distribute valuable and informational content. In years past I’ve seen companies run very successful content distribution strategies on LinkedIn and do their network and out reach on that network as well.
If you are planning on reaching out to your followers please do it in a way that offers value to them.