Seven ways to increase your recruitment agency’s follower numbers on LinkedIn

Everyone wants a big follower base on LinkedIn. Not only does it naturally mean you will have a larger pool of available talent to engage, but it also helps to boost the credibility of the organisation and unconsciously signals to passive candidates and clients that this is an experienced hiring specialist with a successful track record. However, building a following shouldn’t be about chasing numbers, and quality certainly wins over quantity. Instead, the focus should be on creating an audience that will read your material, trust your views and then give your agency first dibs on briefings and candidates. But boosting numbers does have its benefits, not least internally, where agency marketers are constantly trying to prove their worth and highlight ROI on their social efforts. That’s why we have mapped out seven core ways all recruitment firms can increase their follower numbers.

How to increase your recruitment agency’s follower numbers on LinkedIn

1. Ensure all new employees add your firm to their profile

As part of your company’s onboarding 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, thereby boosting follower numbers.

2. Establish an employee advocacy programme

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:

• On average, employees have a network that is 10x larger than the follower count of the company that they work for
• When employees share content, it is viewed as 3x more authentic than when viewing it directly from the original company post
• Employee re-shares of company content have a click-through rate of 2.1x that of the original company post

3. Make consultants your engine

Equally, consultants aren’t just there to like and share content, and people are more adept at converting viewers into followers than companies. While not every individual will want to, a small handful of charismatic consultants should be designated as specialist content creators who can tell short, human stories and make their posting regular and consistent. To boost performance further, train them to write a strong opening line, lead with a concrete datapoint and end with a clear call-to-action. All this takes to be successful is the right choice of person, a template and 30-minutes per week to polish their content, but, over time, this approach will bear far more fruit and increase follower numbers further than a corporately-led process.

4. Link your channels

While your audience may be captive readers of your newsletters, for example, they may not currently be following your LinkedIn page. Therefore, agencies should include links to your social channels in all of your email marketing and indeed all external communications. It’s also recommended - 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. Similarly, ensure 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. This principle also applies to email signatures; by ensuring that employee email signatures feature a link to your LinkedIn page as well as all of your other social media channels, you are establishing a simple and effective way of generating new followers from candidates and clients you are already in regular email contact with.

5. Share interesting content

Well…duh…? Sounds obvious, but a surprisingly large number of firms exist purely in broadcasting mode, without actually taking a step to consider the content their audiences might actually want. 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:

• One third of your content promotes your recruitment business and converts the audience
• One third shares curated content
• One third is branded content

This approach helps to provide a blend of content that aligns with audience interests and should support increasing follower numbers. LinkedIn has approximately 35 million users in the UK, but that’s only useful if content is presented for a real audience. Therefore, bin the bland brand statements about your ‘tech-driven solutions’ or ‘partner-led approach- and publish material that solves problems, such as a salary guide that offers clarity for particular roles, case studies that outline a challenging task and the process that fixed it, or three CV red flags to avoid, for example. The choice is yours, but don’t press on with content that’s of interest to your boss, but no one else.

6. Utilise LinkedIn job posts

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, meaning that unless the applicant unticks it, they will automatically follow your page to stay up to date with your company’s latest updates. This is worth bearing in mind when it comes to reviewing page follower numbers, as these should ideally be cross-referenced with candidate applications to help track where they are coming from.

Scaling up follower counts is no easy task, but by following the right processes and developing a consistent programme, candidates and clients alike will become increasingly familiar with your brand, and begin to hit the ‘follow’ button.

If your agency is seeking advice on boosting its followers and increasing its social media footprint, get in touch with our team today.

Read more of our blogs here

Take a look at our case studies