LinkedIn Hacks - Need followers? Start by hiring your buyers

It's day one of your startup's social exposure, and you just set up your company's LinkedIn page. Now what?

Growing the following for your LinkedIn Page is one of the most valuable steps you could take in the early days. Increasing this total number of followers can lead to greater organic reach. It will help you demonstrate to future customers and investors that your company is attractive to a vast crowd. Like most startup companies today, building a community on LinkedIn is probably one of your primary marketing goals.

First, why is LinkedIn one of the most important social platforms for a new startup to focus on?

LinkedIn is a social media platform that can build brand awareness and relationships with your market and constituents like potential customers, investors, analysts, influencers, and employees.

From making valuable connections with your targeted personas to generating leads and boosting your brand awareness and visibility, you can do many things with LinkedIn that make it an invaluable tool in the early days. Unlike Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram who operate mainly in the personal space of your targeted audience, LinkedIn is a professional platform designed to help you establish and reinforce business relationships, with a little bit of personal flair.

LinkedIn is less about selling or marketing your products and services than other social platforms, and blatantly pushing your business, spamming and obvious hard-selling is highly frowned upon. Yet, it can become one of your most valuable marketing tools when done right.

What objectives should I set up for my LinkedIn strategy?

First, understand that using LinkedIn for marketing is about playing the long game. There are rarely quick wins that make an immediate impact. I differentiate between my LinkedIn platform goals and my LinkedIn campaigns goals. One is designed to grow your brand visibility over time, and the other is to support demand or recruiting initiatives.

LinkedIn platform long-term objectives:

• Support company brand visibility
• Support the company's employer brand visibility
• Serve as a thought-leadership distribution platform
• Serve as a platform for employee personal branding using company content and information
• Attract potential employees
• Attract potential investor
• Attract potential business partners

The numbers will measure the performance of the platform and your initiatives. It is always a numbers game. For example:

• How many followers did we add this week?
• How many members read our content?
• How many members engaged with your content?
• How many members took action from our content?
• How many direct inquiries did we get from potential employees, investors, and business partners?
  

How to recruit your first group of followers?

LinkedIn offers advice and lists the basic steps you should take to recruit your first followers:

• Optimize your Page for SEO
• Engage your employees and ask them to share posts frequently
• Add a Follow button to your website
• Add a Page link to your email signature
• Add a Page link to your personal LinkedIn profile
• Post content to your Page regularly
• Join topical conversations with hashtags
• Enlist help from customers and brand advocates
• Adjust your content based on your Page analytics
• Mention influencers and companies you admire in Page updates
• Share plenty of videos and visual content

If you follow these basic steps, you will start a following. They will come from different backgrounds and locations and will have varying interests. Some of them may be potential buyers.

When I evaluate my company's LinkedIn performance, I always look at the makeup of the company page followers. Followers are the first group of LinkedIn members exposed to your content. To expose other members to your content, you will need to cross-reference with other members or groups and probably invest heavily in sponsored posts and ads on the platform that will cost you thousands of dollars every month.

If your followers don't have the right makeup, your content will be wasted on the wrong audience, and it will take longer to bring it to your targeted audience's attention.

Hack: How can recruiting your buyers help your sales efforts?

The number one priority of every startup is sales and making our growth numbers and goals. SDRs and sales execs use LinkedIn extensively to reach out to potential buyers or develop a long-term relationship with one that will eventually translate into a sale.

I found this LinkedIn hack to be most successful when setting up to increase the number of LinkedIn followers that could eventually become my customers. The hack assumes that we all use LinkedIn to manage our careers and as one of the main tools for finding our next role.

Use promoted hiring posts to attract potential buyers.

Target your buyers, champions, and organizational ecosystem by posting recruiting ads and role descriptions. Except for specific niche buyers, it can work for most companies.

For example, my company marketer targets CMOs as the budget holder and targets potential users like content managers, product marketing managers, or performance marketing specialists. When I started posting recruiting posts and promoted ads for these roles, I noticed many potential candidates began following the company, even without applying for the position. Savvy professionals follow the progress of the company before considering working there. These professionals are not just my recruiting targets but also my sales targets. Now that they are followers, they are exposed to every piece of content my marketing team will place on the platform immediately—no need to spend money to reach them.

This hack could help your sales team in the early days. Let's say you're a startup developing a groundbreaking tool for software developers. Naturally, you will be seeking software developers to join your company, but you are also targeting them as users of your product. Your recruiting followers become leads and prospects for your sales team.

What's the hack? In the early days, you are a hustler. You may not have the headcount for the role, but it doesn't mean you can't post you are recruiting for it. Try it and let me know if it worked for you.

Good luck!

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