7 organic ways to grow your social media clients’ LinkedIn followers (with examples)

2024 is the year of LinkedIn communities. 

We're seeing brands (and personal brands!) grow like wild on the platform. 

LinkedIn has been around since – this might surprise you – 2003! Its popularity has ebbed and flowed since then, but it's undoubtedly a favourite amongst many social media managers and community-conscious brands right now. (Yes, really! The platform is reportedly experiencing record-level engagement this year.)

LinkedIn is home to over 1 billion users from over 200 countries. And, according to the platform itself, 82% of B2B marketers achieve success on LinkedIn. 

If you're a social media manager who wants to grow your clients' organic following on LinkedIn, you might be wondering, "How do I do that, exactly?" 

We’ve got your back! This guide covers 7 organic strategies you can use to increase a brand’s LinkedIn follower count. Let's dive in. 

How to grow your clients’ organic followers on LinkedIn

Here are our top tips for building an engaged community on LinkedIn.

1. Get your team on board to grow your brand’s followers on LinkedIn

People trust people. So consider making employee-generated content (EGC) part of your LinkedIn content strategy. There are tons of reasons brands should encourage team members to post on LinkedIn, but we’ll focus on one here: brand awareness!

Encourage your team members to post day-in-the-life content, thought-leadership content, and content that celebrates their personal and professional milestones. 

You can also put these tips into action:

• Have your team optimize their LinkedIn profiles by adding a badge to their intro section. It will boost brand recall (and your team members’ credibility!).  

• Add your brand’s LinkedIn Company Page link to your business and marketing collateral, including email signatures, website footers, and more. 

• Encourage your team members to invite connections to follow your LinkedIn Company Page. According to LinkedIn, you can invite up to 250 connections each month.

• Get your team leaders to set the tone! Team leads can welcome employees into LinkedIn communities by @mentioning their team members in posts and celebrating their team’s achievements.

2. Be consistent to grow your clients’ followers on LinkedIn 

LinkedIn recommends brands post a piece of high-quality content every day. For some brands, that’s doable. For others, maybe not so much.

If you can only schedule a LinkedIn post once per week, don’t worry. Companies that post on LinkedIn weekly grow their followers 7x faster than companies that post on a monthly basis. 

In even better news, being consistent on LinkedIn doesn’t just come down to the frequency of your posts. The type of content you post matters just as much.

LinkedIn suggests following a 3-2-1 content strategy. Your schedule should include 3 industry-specific posts, 2 posts to empower your community or employees, and 1 promotional post. (Psst! A powerful social media scheduler can help you and your social media agency schedule these posts with ease. Hi, we’re HeyOrca.)   

Another key to developing a consistent LinkedIn content strategy is to know your goals. As marketing pro Emma McCosham explains below, if you want to grow your followers on LinkedIn, you should post content that connects (think: memes, trends, and ideas that get people talking). 

3. Make it easy for your community to engage with your brand on LinkedIn

While it’s important to keep your message consistent on LinkedIn, there’s always room to experiment with different content formats. You want to give LinkedIn users an opportunity to engage – without making them deliberate on their response for ages.

Try switching things up by posting questions, carousels, polls, or short-form videos . . . like this one created by our very own social media and community manager, Qetsiyah.  

‍

As community expert Christina Garnett notes, it’s also important to define your brand’s rules for engagement. With your team, answer Christina’s questions: 

“What are the rules that the audience shouldn't break? What about the brand? What behaviours will result in being blocked, muted, praised, reposted?”  

4. Be engaged to grow your clients’ followers on LinkedIn

Don’t just rely on your community to engage with your posts. As a social media manager, it’s your job to engage too! 

To grow your brand’s LinkedIn followers, be sure to reply to comments, share user-generated content (UGC), and join conversations by seeking out relevant posts to comment on. 

You can even @mention industry-specific thought-leaders in your brand’s posts; however, you’ll want to use this strategy sparingly to avoid being “spammy.” 

We had a lot of fun engaging with comments on this post. Provided it fits the context and your brand voice, you can keep your comments light-hearted and conversational. 

5. Stay on-brand to grow your clients’ followers on LinkedIn

Be sticky. That’s a recommendation that comes straight from LinkedIn. You want LinkedIn users to recognize your brand whenever it crosses their feed. 

It’s easy to put this tip into practice. Use a consistent brand voice and don’t deviate from your brand colours when you create your graphics. Here’s an example of an on-brand LinkedIn post by Emma McCosham. (Can you recognize it’s the same brand from tip #2?) 

‍

6. Use LinkedIn’s built-in tools to grow your clients’ followers

Are you using LinkedIn to its full potential? Here are some LinkedIn tools we recommend trying out:

LinkedIn Events: If you’re hosting an in-person or virtual event (like a webinar!), use LinkedIn’s Events tool to activate your community. 

LinkedIn Newsletters: If your brand has 150+ followers, you’ll have access to LinkedIn Newsletters, which you can use to share updates, industry news, and other value-driven content with your community. 

LinkedIn Product Pages: Boost your brand’s discoverability by creating a LinkedIn Product Page for your products or services. We love the “Featured customers” section, which you can use to showcase your brand advocates and increase your credibility.

LinkedIn Recommendations: Did you know you can invite LinkedIn users to provide a testimonial or recommendation for your brand’s LinkedIn Product Page? This hidden gem of a feature could help you build your brand’s social proof. 

7. Report on your performance to grow your brand’s followers on LinkedIn

Finally, it’s important to keep tabs on what’s working for your clients’ brands . . . and what’s not working. If follower growth is your primary goal, here are the metrics you’ll want to watch:

• Total followers
• New followers
• Impressions
• Engagement (likes, comments, shares, clicks)
• Engagement rate (total engagements / total impressions x 100) 

You can use LinkedIn’s Analytics page to report on your performance and follower growth. But if you manage multiple clients or social media accounts on different networks, a powerful social media scheduler will help you be more efficient. 

With HeyOrca, you can keep all your social media reporting in one place: LinkedIn reports, Facebook reports, Instagram reports, TikTok reports, X (Twitter) reports, cross-channel reports, competitor reports, and more.

As an added bonus, HeyOrca can help you keep clients happier with built-in tools like Automated Reports – a game-changer that automatically emails PDF reports to clients or team members on the schedule of your choice. 

‍

Summary

You’re all set to grow your brand’s followers on LinkedIn! Use these strategies to boost your organic growth. And be sure to subscribe to our FREE daily newsletter, the HeyOrca Brief, for more social media management tips, updates, and resources.