Want To Grow On LinkedIn? Ditch Company Pages
Why LinkedIn has engineered pages to not grow and what to do about it
A 192.9% increase in followers and a 61% increase in engagement- were the results I created for an HRTech company.
While they may be impressive to some, they weren’t to me. Followers didn’t grow by even 200% over 4 months. These results were not nearly enough to justify hours of tedious research, writing, and, editing.
I would have blamed myself for it.
But then I began working on LinkedIn profiles and a similar amount of effort was creating viral posts regularly.
For those unaware: LinkedIn profiles are meant for individuals and LinkedIn pages are meant for companies, schools, and NGOs
What you see above is a snapshot of LinkedIn analytics just after a day of a post going viral. Within these short 24 hours, the post had already brought in 694+ followers and 750+ likes.
However, I hadn’t been doing anything much different compared to when I started creating content for LinkedIn pages. And that’s when I discovered a fundamental truth about LinkedIn.
A truth that I have sworn by for the last 1.5 years to successfully build several LinkedIn brands:
No matter how good the content on your company page is, the algorithm won’t push it to a sizeable audience. Forget showing it to a new audience.
Don’t believe me?
Publish the same content piece on the page and the profile, both at the same time. The one on your profile will have at least 2x more impressions and as a result higher engagement.
This may seem absurd and contradicting. Why would an algorithm limit the reach of specific content on its platform?
The Doom Scroll
To understand why LinkedIn limits the reach of pages, we need to understand how people discover and engage with posts on LinkedIn.
They are quite different for pages and profiles.
Scenario 1:
You come across a post (from a profile) that you really like
If you like the post, you may head over to the said profile to learn more about the person who posted it.
If the profile and its content resonate with you, you follow and move along to scrolling. Compare this to what happens with a page.
Scenario 2:
You come across a post (from a page) that you like.
To know more, you head over to the homepage.
If you are interested in what they are doing, you click on the view website icon and head over.
And this is the problem for LinkedIn. Company pages take users away from the platform. Thus, hindering their goal of maximizing advertising revenues.
The longer you scroll, the more time and opportunity LinkedIn has to show you personalized and targeted ads. Thus to retain users on its platform for as long as possible, the algorithm holds back page posts.
Networking
In its own words, LinkedIn is a professional website for individuals.
Individuals is the keyword here.
LinkedIn wants people to network and interact with people, not companies. Thus profile content rules over page content, helping folks find each other.
Advertising Dollars
Like all other social media platforms, LinkedIn monetizes the eyeballs it and its creators capture. They do so through advertising.
But LinkedIn is different in this regard.
LinkedIn Ads cost an arm and a leg compared to other social media platforms. The average cost-per-click for LinkedIn ads is around $5.26 per click, while Facebook’s average CPC is just $0.97.
And with good reason. 53% of U.S. LinkedIn users are high-income earners and more than 80% drive business decisions. Thus advertising on LinkedIn is infeasible or even out of reach for most individual creators trying to build their freelance career or small business.
Hence, ads from big corporations with deep pockets are the only ads that can be seen on the platform.
Even then, LinkedIn tries to retain most of the audience on the platform. Losing as few users as possible to company websites.
The LinkedIn algorithm has compartmentalized organic growth for profiles and paid growth for pages. Marketing efforts directed otherwise will be similar to pushing a boulder uphill.
Conclusion:
Does this mean you should not have a page for your company/ school/ NGO and create a profile instead?
Absolutely not!
It will look creepy and suspicious. Almost as if you are trying to impersonate someone through the profile.
Moreover, you can only create job postings and advertisements through company pages.
So the most practical and beneficial thing to do would be to create a company page just for hygiene purposes and concentrate all your content creation efforts on profiles.
People are also more likely to trust and interact with content from profiles than pages.
An example of a company that leverages this strategy well:
If you notice, there is hardly any content being posted on the company page. However, the content efforts through the founder’s profiles are exhaustive, with a post going up every single day.
This way, they are concentrating their marketing efforts in the most efficient ways and driving the most amount of discoverability possible.
And you too should adopt this strategy to get the best results for your LinkedIn marketing efforts.
P.s. I do not mean to condemn LinkedIn or its practices through this post. Every social media platform has its own rules and if you want to succeed on the platform, you must play by their rules.
Want to harness my LinkedIn expertise for your business and save months if not years figuring it out by yourself? Reach out to me here
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