LinkedIn for startups: 11 proven strategies for success (2024)

11 most effective practices for LinkedIn for startups

 LinkedIn as a platform is constantly changing so your strategy will likely change over time too, as what worked in the past might not work for you now. However , it is important for startups to know how to make the most out of LinkedIn, so let’s have a look at some effective ways that you can utilize LinkedIn as a startup:

Publish relevant, high-quality content

This first one is a no-brainer –  you can’t grow your company page (or your startup) if you don’t publish content. 

Create a content strategy and when starting, post at least once a week. Once you get a glimpse of what your audience likes and what drives growth, increase the number of posts – 2-3 posts per week are optimal for remaining consistent and staying top-of-mind. 

The content should be relevant to your industry and target audience. How do you make the content relevant and high-quality? You address their problems, pain points, concerns, misconceptions, and objections. 

Educate your audience through your knowledge and experience, and share unique insights – this will position your startup as a leader in your industry. You will slowly build trust and eventually, trigger action.

Don’t forget to humanize your content. Entertaining and humor are powerful ways to build genuine connections with your potential customers. Another one is storytelling. Share your startup’s story, your wins and challenges, how the idea for the business came about, your team’s successes, etc. 

Experiment with different content formats 

LinkedIn supports multiple content formats for a reason. Use a mix of text, images, carousels, and even videos, and see what resonates the most with your audience. 

It’s important to know that the platform prioritizes some formats more than others. For example, LinkedIn launched carousels in July 2022 and they’ve been all the rage for a couple of reasons. 

First, they’re great for increasing brand awareness because you can add your logo, visual branding, and contact info to the document. Users can also download them to view later. 

Second, they increase your visibility and get more reach. As your audience flips through the pages of the document, the retention rate and click-through rate of the post increase thus, boosting your reach. 

For images and videos, make sure they’re high-quality and visually clear at first glance. Posts with images tend to get twice as many comments as text-only posts. And short-form videos have 5x engagement than text-only posts. 

But make sure the idea and presentation of it are on point. You can’t save a bad post with formatting alone. 

Leave comments

One of the most powerful LinkedIn exposure tactics for startups is also the most underutilized – leaving comments. All it takes is to leave 10 meaningful comments a day on LinkedIn for one week on popular industry posts.

Doing so will get you exposure quickly, will build your authority in your space, and provide you with content for your own posts. This same tactic works so well that one of our partners used this and gained 400 connections in 24 hours from just one comment.

Comments are similar to posts – it’s a way for your business to be seen. Obviously, comments are usually shorter than posts. But they work. The best thing is that the more you comment, the more likely people are to see your posts in the future.

Utilize newsletters and collaborative articles 

Newsletters are growing rapidly on LinkedIn. As of 2023, there are 63,000 newsletters on the platform – 10x more than the previous year, and there’s a good reason for it. 

Newsletters not only help you grow your audience but also provide a deeper connection with them. Make it worth their while – offer exclusive insights and benefits that they can’t find in your regular posts. Use it to maximize your content distribution and engage in consistent conversations with your followers.

You can create a LinkedIn newsletter by activating Creator Mode, or create one from your company page. The best part? When you create a newsletter, you can invite all of your followers to subscribe with one click. It’s best to already have a certain number of followers to achieve faster growth. 

Collaborative articles are another great and easy way to get more eyeballs on your company page. Find articles that are relevant to your audience and add your 2 cents – share your expertise and position your startup as a solution to their problems. 

Optimize your company page for SEO

Use relevant keywords to boost your SEO and draw in more audience in everything you create on LinkedIn – your personal profile, company page, posts, articles, and newsletters. 

Your company page needs to be strong enough to top the search engine and keywords will do the magic. Remember that everyone uses keywords to search for things.

Add them to the beginning of your tagline, optimize your About section, post long-form content like newsletters and articles to match search demand, and update it regularly to signal that your content is always fresh. 

But there are more useful SEO tactics aside from keywords. Your company page needs to be filled out completely – profile picture and banner, info about your product/service, relevant links, custom URL, and accurate, up-to-date information are a must. 

Encourage employee engagement for growth

According to LinkedIn, employees have up to ten times the number of connections as your company page’s followers. Hence, employee engagement is one of the most effective strategies to grow on LinkedIn.

Encourage your employees to interact with the company’s posts and make it part of your content strategy. They should comment on the posts, and tag other people who would be interested in it. If one of your coworkers has @mentioned your page, you can re-share those mentions to draw attention to them. 

Remember to train employees and share knowledge about why engagement is so vital. Start with your company goals – whether it’s to gain more visibility, generate sales, or raise brand awareness, there’s a lot you can do when using LinkedIn for startups.

Drive traffic from your personal page

If you’re a startup founder and you want to build a successful LinkedIn company page you might want to consider posting content yourself. 

Posts shared by the founder or the employees of a startup get 561% more reach than posts from company pages. But don’t get discouraged about your company page – it still has huge benefits. 

People want to connect with people, not logos. For example, if you’re doing cold outreach from your company page, you’ll likely get a lot fewer replies than your personal page. This is because it’s a lot harder to connect to a company than it is to an actual human.  

So consider publishing content yourself – you can be more personal and thus, generate more leads and talk to prospects directly. Make sure to tag the company page when you mention it in your posts and direct your audience to it. Share it and amplify its content. 

Drive traffic from external sources

This one is very simple, low-effort, and underrated – driving traffic to your startup’s company page from outside sources. 

You can add a follow link to your email signature, place an eye-catching follow button on your website, and when you attend industry events, remind people to check out your company page when engaging in conversations.

Make it easy for people to do so – use simple links, buttons, and QR codes that lead directly to the company page. 

Use sponsored updates

Companies pay to have their posts appear on a LinkedIn user’s feed via sponsored updates – think of your standard social media ads. 

This ‘pay-per-click’ or ‘pay-per-1,000’ impression feature has demographics similar to those found on other social platforms, but the difference is the option to tailor depending on the company name, job title, job function, talents, schools, and organizations.

A sponsored update with a well-built call to action is an efficient approach to promoting thought-leadership, helpful to the targeted demographic. People no longer want to see pure advertising and instead prefer to receive something favorable for free.

Create showcase pages

Think of Showcase Pages as an extension of your main company page. They’re sub-pages dedicated to different audiences, sub-brands, products, campaigns, or departments. 

They’re easily customizable to specific target audiences and their preferences. This is super useful if you don’t want to overload your main company page with everything your startup has to offer. 

Let’s take LinkedIn itself as an example. The platform has many products and features. If they post all of their updates for all their products and initiatives (Sales Navigator, LinkedIn Jobs, LinkedIn Learning, etc,) on their main company page, it will get overloaded very quickly. 

So if you have a diverse customer base, an array of different products and verticals, or you want to highlight a specific campaign, Showcase Pages are the way to go. 

Share real customer reviews and testimonials

Nothing works like magic for conversions like reviews and testimonials. The ability to share real customer reviews and testimonials on LinkedIn is an incredibly effective method to get more followers and clients

Companies are getting unique in how they do it so finding your own way to share these reviews is up to the startup. Especially early on when others require evidence of success from others, these methods can be really helpful in establishing yourself on LinkedIn.

For a written testimonial, you could include the text on a branded graphic. It’s also effective to share videos or even link to a website where a review exists.

Try a variety of ways before deciding on a permanent method to share these reviews and then run with it. People want to hear from others – that’s why you need good ratings and reviews on Amazon and Google.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, LinkedIn for startups has plenty of possibilities for promotion, reaching the target audience, and even finding investors for your fast-growing startup. LinkedIn strategies above are proven effective for companies before, so they are most likely to work great for your startups as well.