Innovation, visible social responsibility, valuing employees and video: new analysis says these may be the most important factors to amass a following for your company on LinkedIn.

Kylee Lessard—LinkedIn’s own Associate Product Marketing Manager—has profiled and analysed the 10 most followed companies on LinkedIn and says we should all learn from their performance.

Lessard’s Lessons to Impress

From her analysis, Lessard identifies five simple content strategies that help Pages succeed:

1. Drive views and engagement with video.
2. Socially responsible initiatives.
3. Diversity and inclusion.
4. Spotlight talent and elevate employee voices.
5. Showcase innovation.

Lessard empasises that companies should show their human faces. This can be done by sharing employee stories and amplifying issues that are important to them. Via their own staff, an organisation can demonstrate relatable human authenticity and organically expand its reach.

Lessard also says it’s important to capture the imagination with stories of organisational achievement and innovation. To do this, she says you must find creative and compelling ways to convey your company’s progress and plans.

Content and how it comes

Of course, Lessard says ‘a steady cadence of new content’ is key to any Page strategy.

Predictably, she says video content works. She emphasises the importance of short runtimes, attention-grabbing hooks, and captions.

She also explains that LinkedIn members are often won over by displays of corporate social responsibility. Content emphasising sustainability, equality and enlightened stances on matters of diversity and inclusion can work wonders, especially when appealing to Millennials and Gen Z audiences

Companies that can’t produce a constant flow of unique content should aim to identify and share relevant third-party content. Lessard recommends LinkedIn’s Content Suggestions feature as an easy way to find the right sort of shareables.

Who to emulate?

Of course, the LinkedIn Pages that Lessard analysed have plenty of resources to keep making their own content. They (and their follower numbers) are:

1. TED Conferences (12.5M followers)
2. Google (12.1M followers)
3. Amazon (8.6M followers)
4. LinkedIn (8.2M followers)
5. Microsoft (7.8M followers)
6. IBM (6.4M followers)
7. Unilever (6.2M followers)
8. Nestlé (6.0M followers)
9. Accenture (4.4M followers)
10. Facebook (4.4M followers)

In total, LinkedIn has just over 645 Million users. So, around 2% of the LinkedIn userbase are following TED Conferences on the platform. 

What LinkedIn left unsaid

LinkedIn Pages reach out to multiple audiences, including potential talent and current employees as well as present and future clients. This can be good, but Lessard’s analysis does not say which strategies most effectively hit each target. Instead, it treats the aggregate follower count as an end in itself.

SMK readers and other canny marketers will see through that. They'll continue to seek more pointed and proven methods to achieve specific objectives. If the platform can’t provide, they may look elsewhere.

On your LinkedIn page, do you strive for authenticity, quality content, visibility of achievement and leveraging the reach of your own team? Or, do other comms priorities shine through?

Copy Transmission is a Melbourne-based agency :: Better Brands. Loud & Clear.