One of the most frequently asked questions I receive from recruitment marketers and agency owners is ‘How can we increase the number of LinkedIn followers we have?’
Whilst regular webinar attendees and readers of our blogs will know that we often emphasise that focusing purely on followers is a vanity metric, there are a number of methods you can implement which will help you attract your recruitment firm’s ideal target audiences on the platform.
As part of your company’s on boarding process you should ensure that all new hires update their LinkedIn profiles. Not only is this important for their personal brand and making relevant connections on the platform, but when employees update the experience section of their profile and list your company they will automatically become a follower of your page and be listed under its people section.
Employee advocacy, the act of engaging staff to share their business’ content, is a vitally important method of maximising your brand’s reach and utilising your employees’ networks to increase the number of relevant followers.
LinkedIn’s own data shows that:
Make sure that your website features links to all of your social media channels and is easily accessible for visitors. It is not uncommon to see social links tucked away on the contact us pages of recruitment firms, however, it is far more beneficial to have these built into your website template so that they are present in the header or footer across all pages.
Make sure that your employee email signatures feature a link to your LinkedIn page as well as all of your other social media channels. This is a simple and effective way of generating new follows from candidates and clients you are in regular email contact with.
While your audience may be captive readers of your e-newsletters they may not currently be following your LinkedIn page. You should add include links to your social channels in all of your email marketing communications. I also recommend - depending on the content of your newsletter – to occasionally add a short section about your social channels alongside some simple copy such as ‘to read more articles such as the ones featured follow us on social media…’ to act as a subtle nudge.
When it comes to building an engaged following on social media, content is key. Here at BlueSky, we utilise the ‘Rule of Thirds’ model to produce content that is relevant, timely and engaging for recruitment agency audiences.
This is where:
While, of course, LinkedIn job posts are incredibly beneficial in generating candidate applications for vacancies, they are also useful in increasing your page’s follower count. This is because there is a pre-filled check box on the last stage of the application process that means unless the applicant unticks it they will automatically follow your page to stay up to date your company’s latest updates.
This is worth bearing in mind when it comes to reviewing your page’s followers as you should ideally cross reference them with candidate applications to help track where they are coming from.
When LinkedIn users visit company pages it’s rare for them to click ‘see more’ on the about section as they are far more likely to want to view the page posts to see what type of content the company shares.
Therefore it’s important that you are able to grab your audience’s attention within the first few sentences of the about section before the platform truncates it and adds the ‘see more’ link. On desktop the first 340 characters are displayed and on mobile it’s 220 characters. Focus on succinctly addressing the needs of potential candidates and clients within these restrictions before expanding upon them and providing more detail about your recruitment firm within this section’s 2,000 character limit.