LinkedIn growth experiment pt II: Company pages
LinkedIn growth experiment pt II: Company pages
Season 8, Issue 8: How I overhauled a company page
📬 In this issue:
Why are you posting on LinkedIn?
An analysis of Adiona and action plan
A 6 week, and 12 week check in on how those actions went!
If you’re reading this the day it comes out, Steptember is matching donations today so there’s never been a better time to donate for cerebral palsy research!
This issue’s referral reward is a Mehdeeka picnic blanket! To potentially get one of your own you will need to be physically in Australia and refer Mehdeeka to a friend or colleague using the button below.
Last week’s lucky Mehketeer is Yune Wen - look out for an email from me!
Ahoy hoy Mehketeer,
I had a weekend away and wrote this issue while on top of my Mehdeeka picnic blanket, so it seems fitting to be this week’s referral bonus.
This week is also a continuation of a previous issue: experimenting on my own LinkedIn page. If you haven’t read it but are interested in growing your LinkedIn presence, I can guarantee you the advice in it does not include “post every day”:
This time we’re focusing on company pages. Notoriously a pain in the ass, it often feels like the only way to grow a company page is to pay. Since May I’ve been experimenting with Adiona’s company page.
To give some brief context, Adiona is a last-mile delivery route planning software. It tells delivery drivers where to go, in the most efficient manner. The business is pretty much built on a mathematical problem (if you’re up for reading about it, this wikipedia article covers it: the travelling salesman problem.) All you really need to know is it’s an algorithm with a really practical application — this context will come into play later.
Back to LinkedIn experimenting.
Why do you want to grow your LinkedIn?
And by “you”, I mean, what does your company hope to get out of it? Large companies that are hiring a lot get most of their follower growth from people applying for jobs and automatically being subscribed to the page.
If this is you, you kind of just have to accept that a large portion of your audience is going to be talent and potential candidates. In which case, you’ll probably already be using your LinkedIn for employer branding.
Other options are, you’re fully aware that your prospects are researching you before buying, and LinkedIn might be somewhere they visit or follow for a while. It could also be where they discover you, but might not be where you can track them as a lead.
There’s also founder branding and building in public, and the last options are lead generation and brand awareness.
Organic lead generation is pretty difficult to nail down, especially since LinkedIn hates external links, but your overall LinkedIn presence can be geared towards the sales funnel as opposed to the talent funnel (or other.)
In Adiona’s case, we have a lot of industry people following the page already (thanks to the founder having a great approach to adding anyone and everyone and then inviting them to follow the page.)
Step one is to have a clear idea of your goal
For Adiona, it’s:
Build authority and credibility
Show expertise and superior functionality, especially in comparison to incumbants
Grow audience, aimed at prospects/users
With these goals in mind, I had a look at what we were posting when we didn’t really have a plan for it. (For transparency, posting is managed by our CEO’s virtual EA.)
An analysis of our LinkedIn company page
Much like I did for my personal page analysis, I took the last 66 posts and listed them in a simple table where the columns detailed the overall topic, post type, number of impressions, engagement rate, and a “notes” section.
Then, I used the notes to highlight the highest performing posts in terms of impressions and engagement. As I found with my own page, posts that had high impressions rarely equated to high engagement — it’s one or the other.
Key learnings:
We were posting almost daily
Post formats were mostly links or images
Post topics included industry news, ad-like posts (i.e. heavy on the self promotion), speaking announcements, case studies, announcing new features, and highlighting use cases
A lot of the posts came across as very passive - “this thing is happening or happened” without much agency or stance on it
With 2,000 followers, the average impressions on a post was 339 views, and 2% engagement. Over the previous five months, there was 23,000 impressions.
The best performing posts were speaking and awards announcements, case studies, new features, and multi-image posts from events and conferences.
The worst performing posts were posts that read like ads, e.g. industry news articles where because we weren’t offering an opinion or interpretation, it looked like promotion for the company being featured or the news story itself. Basically, posts where we weren’t saying something.
The post-analysis hypotheses
Based on my finding that posting less for personal pages increases the reach of each post (however, could result in less accumulative views for the account), I wanted to test reducing the posts from ~daily to six posts per fortnight, with room for non-scheduled bonus posts (days picked randomly to see how they performed):
The topics were limited to education 1 (industry information, reposting content from existing blogs, trends) with a rule that we had to state an opinion and not just passively repost, education 2 (about Adiona as a company or the product, including repurposing interactive demos), case studies and testimonials, and announcements of award nominations or attending or speaking at an event
Out of the six posts per fornight, a maximum of two could be “promotional” in vibe
Doubling down on post formats that performed the best, i.e. PDF carousels and long text
And lastly, a hypothesis that varying the post type (experimenting with polls, the LinkedIn newsletter, and image vs text only) would allow us to clearly identify what works well.
Once I had the schedule, post types, and topics mapped out, I wrote two weeks worth of posts myself to show our EA (who’s writing the captions, designing the assets in Canva, and scheduling the posts) exactly the styling, tone, and level of detail I wanted in the posts. It took a couple of weeks of her trying out the new style to totally get it, and now she sends batches of posts one week in advance and needs hardly any tweaks to them. She has the full access to our entire internal and external catalogue of content and self serves herself to pull the topics for social.
Results at 6 weeks
After six weeks, I made another table with the same columns (post format, topic, impressions, engagement, notes) and repeated my basic analysis. There were:
19 posts
Engagement ranged from 2.84% to 40%, with an average of 9.76% (up from 2%)
Impressions ranged from 84 to 555, with an average of 343 (up from 339)
This post was the best performing (555 views, 40% engagement)
The most popular post topics were how-tos and explainers (repurposed from blogs and turned into listicle style carousels), and the post format with consistently high engagement was the PDF carousels. The engagement on promotional posts was better when it was more sparse in comparison to the “before” period.
The worst performing post formats were polls, the newsletter, and reposting posts from employees.
Results at 12 weeks
Another six weeks later, and another 22 posts, we reduced the number of polls and underperforming formats, and doubled down again for these results:
Average of 358 impressions per post (up from 343 in previous period)
Average engagement of 12.94% (up from 9.76%)
This post was the best performing in the second period measured (488 impressions, 30% engagement)
The numbers of the whole 12 weeks, instead of the two six week periods are:
15,000 views (compared to 23k in the prior five months)
Average of 11% engagement (but continuing to grow, not plateauing)
Gained ~140 followers
There were no job postings or hiring during this time, so the audience remained prospects and industry people.
Final thoughts and analysis
A reminder of the goals:
Build authority and credibility
Show expertise and superior functionality, especially in comparison to incumbants
Grow audience, aimed at prospects/users
We didn’t increase impressions or grow subscribers that much, but the increase in engagement has been incredibly tangible. In that regard, the goals do feel like overall they’ve been met!
Secondly, what became even more clear in the second check in was that the more technical a post gets, the consistently better it performs, not just as a spike. Up top I mentioned Adiona is built on maths - the industry and prospects get the math. They want to see it! We’re working on building out a process to make posting about the technical details easier for our social media poster.
Our engagement rates for the 5 months preceeding the review:
Our engagement rate in the past 12 weeks:
One of the biggest compliments we get at Adiona is when prospects learn how lean the team is and say something to the effect of “your social media/website gave me the impression of a much bigger team.”
I think these small, regular reviews of what we’re doing contribute to that a lot. We cut things that are not meeting the right level of time investment vs outcome (like daily posting) and double down on the things that are delivering outcomes aligned with our goals.
If you want to do your own analysis, my recommendations are to only look at the past month or six weeks of posts to get timely data. Social media is always changing, so don’t go too far back into the past — what worked then won’t necessarily work now. Keep your analysis simple, categorise your post topics broadly so you can group them into meaningful buckets, and not have a 20 posts with 20 different “categories”.
I’d set aside two hours to do this - you can do it in two chunks, the first being putting your spreadsheet together, and the second looking at the results and formulating your own hypotheses.
Four issues of Season 8 left
It always feels like a Mehdeeka season is both very long, and very short. It’s a mad writing dash for me, yet 12 is not a very big number and getting to “four issues left” feels like not a lot.
I’ve got a couple of asks of you to help me in this home stretch.
I’m planning for the final issue to be an in depth look at how I run my business as a fractional marketer - if you have questions either leave them in a comment or reply to this email. I’ll make sure to include it!
Don’t forget I’m partaking in Steptember and raising donations for cerebral palsy research! Donate here (and thank you!)
I’m starting the reader survey early so I have more opportunities to bug you about it. Over the seasons I have added a lot to the issues based on requests and feedback, so please do tell me what you think here
Don’t forget to share this issue if you would like the chance to get a Mehdeeka picnic blanket!
Ah bye bye,
Kayla
Great issue Kayla! A couple of Qs:
- How do you find clients to work with/how do clients find you?
- How do you assess whether a client is a good fit?
- How do you work with clients to define your scope of work in the 1-2 days a week you're working with them?
Ahhh k, first question is 1) how did you demonstrate / build credibility when you first went freelance?
2) I've heard arguments in both directions about leaning on family and friends connections wherever possible when starting your own biz, and I've typically landed towards "it's who you know" - what was your experience in this?
3) typically when starting a biz, there's this bit of paralysis of too many actions that would have a big impact and only enough resource to attack a small portion of it... a bit like what you do in marketing with smaller teams and limited marketing resources. What can you share about making a start and getting over that hump? And 4) does that hump keep recurring down the line?
5) a lot of founders struggle to fill the gaps where their skill set is weakest (and later on, as their team grows, they struggle to delegate where their skill set is strongest). Do any core business functions present a weaker area for you, and if so, how did you fill them as a solo operator?
6) how many is too many questions?