The LinkedIn Growth Playbook: How to Skyrocket Your Company’s Followers (Without Wasting Time)

Owners and Executives seeking to expand their company presence on LinkedIn are often faced with a unique challenge: their competition is growing an engaged audience while their own content is largely ignored. What gives?

If you want real follower growth and engagement, you need a strategy that leverages your network, creates content people care about, and uses the platform’s tools to maximize reach.

If your company page isn’t growing as fast as you’d like, this guide will help. We’ll break down the most effective strategies to gain more followers and increase engagement so your company and the brand you’re building stand out on LinkedIn.

1. Encourage Employees to Repost Company Content

Your employees are your biggest LinkedIn asset. When they repost company content, it reaches way more people than if it just sits on your company page.

Why It Works: LinkedIn favors personal profiles over company pages. When employees share content, it reaches their connections first—expanding your company’s organic reach.

How to Get Your Employees Involved:

Don’t Mandate—nobody likes being forced to repost, so lead by example and offer encouragement instead. Let them know why you’re asking them to repost (have them read this article).?

Make it easy—send them pre-written captions or key points so they don’t have to think about what to say.

Show the impact—highlight engagement metrics and success stories so they can see it’s working and how they’ve managed to contribute.

Recognize contributors—shout out employees who actively engage with your content. This works especially well if you’re shouting out gift cards or special lunch requests.

Pro Tip: Employees can send invites to their connections to follow your company page. If every employee successfully invites just 10 relevant people, your follower count could skyrocket.

2. Use Automation Tools (Wisely)

There are third-party automation tools that helps grow your network by connecting with the right people, 24/7. But before you give it a go, you need to understand how to use it strategically. You can’t actually use this to grow your company page, but you can use it for the people who work at your company, which will in turn expand the company's reach when employees repost company content.

Why It’s Important: LinkedIn’s algorithm favors connections, not just followers. By expanding your employee’s networks with meaningful connections, you increase their visibility and drive more people to your company page when they repost company content.

Here’s How it Works: Start by automating connection requests to target professionals who are most likely to engage with your content and eventually, your company.?

Once they accept, follow up with personalized messages to build a genuine relationship rather than just pushing your content. Nobody wants you to sell them something on LinkedIn–even if it’s a perfect fit for them.?

Over time, see how you can be of service to them (first) then gradually introduce them to your company page by sharing valuable insights, inviting them to follow, and engaging with their posts to create a natural connection.

A Word of Warning: Some of these tools can be aggressive. If overused, it can feel spammy. The key is to make sure you’re actually building relationships and not just blasting out requests or trying the old “follow for follow” tactic that never worked to build an audience who cares about you. Keep your outreach sustainable, focusing on real engagement.

3. Stand Out With Thought Leadership??

People follow people, not just brands. They legitimately want to hear what other leaders in their field have to say… if it’s interesting and relevant. That’s why thought leadership is critical to your LinkedIn growth strategy. It’s important to actually take the time to formulate original content to post, and not just rehash what everyone else is posting (that’s thought followership).?

Make sure you keep any thought leadership for your company page on-brand, and on-topic. Instead of just reposting company thought leadership across employee LinkedIn pages, employees can offer their unique summary and spin

Why It’s Important: Thought leaders humanize your brand, making it more relatable and engaging. Instead of just posting company updates, thought leaders share insights, opinions, and industry expertise that spark conversations. You don’t have to have an opinion on politics or pop culture, but you should keep up with news that’s pertinent to your company’s niche.

How to Build Thought Leadership:

• Identify key employees or executives who can share personal insights on industry trends.
• Post consistently using a mix of stories, data, and lessons learned.
• Engage in discussions by commenting on relevant posts and starting conversations.
• Make sure you respond to anyone who chimes in on the comments. Don’t engage with trolls, but be professional and dig deeper when someone offers a point contrary to your point of view.

Pro Tip: If a company leader shares engaging content, the company page can repost it for added exposure. This creates a cycle of organic visibility.

4. Optimize Your Content for Engagement

Posting often isn’t enough (especially if it’s getting very low or no likes and shares). You need to post content that people actually want to engage with. Please re-read that last sentence–we don’t need any more fluff on LinkedIn.?

What Do People Want More Of?

Strong opinions & insights – Take a stand on industry trends and explain your stance.

Polls & open-ended questions – Encourage audience participation. Don’t fill in the blanks, let them actually have their opinions, then discuss.

Employee stories & behind-the-scenes content – Humanize your brand by offering unique insight into your day-to-day, especially if it’s valuable, unexpected, funny, or dramatic.

Short, value-driven videos – These get more reach than text-only posts, but as with text, they need to become content people want to engage with.

Be Different: Instead of just posting more, focus on posting better. Content that sparks conversation will always outperform generic company updates. Don’t forget that your comments count toward the engagement–and what’s the point of posting thought questions or inciting responses if you’re not going to join the conversation?

5. Use LinkedIn Ads for Targeted Follower Growth

We all know you can run LinkedIn ads to promote specific offers and boost your marketing outreach. But if you’re serious about scaling your LinkedIn following, consider LinkedIn Follower Ads.

Why It Works: Unlike organic strategies, ads let you control who sees your content. Instead of waiting for people to find your page, you can put the best content in front of the right audience–and more of them.

Best Practices for LinkedIn Ads:

• Target the right audience—focus on professionals in your industry who would genuinely benefit from seeing your content.
• Use a clear CTA—“Follow our page for the latest insights” works better than generic messaging, especially if you got the first part right and offered them insights that were valuable.
• Run A/B tests—test different ad variations to see what drives the most engagement. Once you have a clear winning, continue optimizing by running A/B tests again with two slightly different versions of the winning ad.

Pro Tip: Combine organic engagement + paid ads for maximum reach. Ads bring people to your page, and engaging content keeps them there.

6. Build a Community

Follower count is a vanity metric if your audience isn’t engaged. 10,000 super fans will support your company much more than a million bystanders. The goal is to build a community that interacts with your content and sees your company (and your thought leaders) as a valuable resource.

How to Create the Community They Need:

• Engage with others – Don’t just post your own content and leave it out there for the world to bask in your glory—go read and comment on other thought leaders’ industry discussions and continue responding to comments on your posts.?
• Create LinkedIn Groups – There are people out there seeking guidance, so make a space for them. A niche industry group positions your company as a leader.
• Use DMs for networking – Offer to DM anyone who asks for help, which can naturally become a conversation. Personal connections lead to real engagement.

Go With A Blend of the Above: Try mixing high-engagement content, employee advocacy, and strategic paid ads, all of which you can bring into your community. This will systematically grow your page while ensuring your engagement remains strong.

What You Can Do Right Now (the Checklist)

Step 1: Get employees to repost company content and invite connections.

Step 2: Find and use an automation tool to build connections and invite them to follow your employee pages.

Step 3: Develop thought leaders who engage audiences on LinkedIn.

Step 4: Focus on high-engagement content instead of just more posts.

Step 5: Engage like a human—comment, interact, and build relationships (this goes for your employees who repost, too).

Step 6: Run LinkedIn Ads to target the right audience.

Don’t expect immediate results, but start tracking your engagement now to see your progress over time. By following these six steps, your company will gain more followers, increase engagement, and establish a lasting presence in your industry.

Need some love for your LinkedIn pages? Comment below or DM and let us know how we can help.