We can often get swept up in latest trends and complex strategies, aiming to outdo ourselves with glossy campaigns and surpassing our KPIs. And while I’m an advocate for learning something new and trying the latest, it’s equally important to not overlook the power of simple steps.
This was me a few months ago when I looked at my personal LinkedIn connections versus the followers of the Hardman Communications business page. While my personal brand and the business are forever intertwined, the business page was lagging and I wanted to fix this for a few reasons:
- Raise the profile of the business as a specialist in the industries we operate in.
- Knit together my personal network with the Hardman Communications network.
- Give greater exposure to the content that we create as a team – further helping people to understand who we are and what we do.
- Prove to myself and the team we can move the needle on our metrics with conscious actions (data we review monthly).
We all know LinkedIn is a platform teeming with professionals and potential business opportunities. It’s easy to get lost in advanced features like LinkedIn Ads or in-depth analytics and sometimes pay more for that access. But with just a simple free membership (I’ve used Premium in the past but just wasn’t using all its features) I took the simple step to invite my network to follow my page. Not rocket science at all – but the point is that we sometimes forget the simple step sitting right in front of us.
If you are a business owner you can do this step yourself, or if you are responsible for a business page, talk to your leadership and LinkedIn super user colleagues and ask them to take these steps. I hope the metrics look as good for you as they did for me.
There was an immediate spike of 1,800% in followers on the first day, and an impressive 69.36% increase in followers overall from an investment of about 45 mins of my time. That is simplistic of course and undervalues the time spent gathering a network around me over many years – but any professional who has been on LinkedIn for a while has this same asset, ready to leverage.
The simple steps were:
- View your company page in Admin view
- Click Analytics on the left-hand menu
- Click on Followers and then scroll down to Grow your followers and click the Invite connections button
- Search for a connection using the Search by name field. Or use the filters to focus your search or select connections from the list. Then click Invite.
- Your connections will receive an invitation notification. The invitation will come from your personal LinkedIn profile. Depending on your set up you will have a certain number of free invitations per month. I had 250.
As professionals we meet new people all the time – we are constantly growing our network. Over time we can end up with a gap between our business / company pages and our own network. Hopefully this is a reminder to check if some opportunity exists and take the simple action.
If you need a health check on your social media fundamentals, you can learn more here or chat to us about our online health check program.
Sue Hardman