Introduction

LinkedIn now has over 310 million professionals using the platform every month.

This ever-expanding audience is something no growing startup can afford to miss out on, and building a solid LinkedIn presence should be on the to-do list of every startup founder.

However, LinkedIn is now a complex ecosystem that takes time to navigate – posts, articles, groups, LinkedIn Pulse, connections, messages, company pages, the list of things to keep track of keeps growing. Where should you start and how should you prioritize? This is the same question that we faced at AppRocket.

Research shows that the number of followers of a page directly increase the brand trust, brand attitude and brand purchase propensity, so we realized that it would be important to ‘seed’ the number of followers of our LinkedIn company page before other users would start considering it as a serious contender for startup services.

As a result of the simple hack that we did to gain approximately 400 followers for our company page within two days, we have now seen a gradual but steady increase in the number of followers of our company page.

Summary: Invite people from your personal connections to follow your company.

Step 1: Build a network on LinkedIn

This is fairly obvious and a critical first step. Push everyone in your company to build a strong LinkedIn profile and build a network of connections.
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You can add approximately 50-100 connections per day before LinkedIn will start rate-limiting your requests, so use your available bandwidth to expand your network.

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Connect with colleagues from school, university, your workplace and past employers, as well as friends of friends and family. We started off with roughly 1800 connections, but if you have a 5-people team you can easily cross that number within a week.

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Step 2: Identify what you’ll say

To reach out to your network, you should ensure that you are not spamming them and keep a professional approach.

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Follow LinkedIn’s professional community policies or violate them at risk of getting banned altogether from the platform.

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Ideally, your message would get your point across while also providing something in return so as to not be entirely promotional and self-serving. Here’s the message we used:

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"Hi!
Thank you very much for being connected. Can you please follow my company at linkedin.com/company/approcketllc - and I will do likewise.
I would really appreciate your helping my company grow!
Best"

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We offered our network to mutually increase our company’s following, since our network was primarily startup founders and small businesses. If you have worked at a large enterprise or your LinkedIn connections have a different demographic, you should change your messaging accordingly.

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Step 3: Send messages to your network

This is a fairly straightforward but tedious task. In the Network tab, click on the Connections on the left sidebar. This will open up an exhaustive list of all of your connections, sorted by the order in which you added them. Send a message to each of the connections to whom the offer in your message will add value. While this is time-consuming and tedious, it is definitely worth the effort.

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You can look into automating this process, but I would not recommend it. First, because of the obvious violation of LinkedIn’s terms of service, and second, because automation may not be able to bypass anti-spam checks that may be implemented. The whole automation exercise may not be worth the effort and might end up doing more harm than good.

If you’re still insistent, you could use some web scraping tools or macro recorder software like Pulover’s macro creator to get the task done. You have been warned.

Step 4: Watch the followers roll in

Here’s what we experienced within 48 hours of going through this exercise:

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While this is not a standalone growth strategy (it’s more of a one-time hack) and to continue increasing your presence on LinkedIn, you will need to build a consistent content posting and engagement strategy, it’s a great way to quickly add legitimacy to your company and use that initial boost to keep your trajectory growing.

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Since we started this exercise, over the following 2-3 weeks we have seen approximately 100 new followers organically follow our company website. Having sent messages to roughly 800 relevant connections, our conversion rate for this exercise was almost 50%.

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How have you worked on your LinkedIn presence? I’d love to know! Please shoot me a message at qasim@approcket.co or comment below.

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