So you have a new company page on LinkedIn for your startup, but now what? How do you gain new followers organically? We run into this challenge all the time for our clients, so we did some research, added in our own knowledge, and came up with a list of tips that only you, the CEO, VP of Marketing or other executive at a company can do. Your PR firm can help you with them, but your engagement is like no other.

To start, here are eight tips that are pretty easy to implement. If you do it over time and keep a checklist by your side, you could do them all inside a month.

• Add a link to your company LinkedIn page to your email signatures – Try something like “Follow us on LinkedIn” with a hyperlink to your page.
• Ask your PR firm (and other partner companies) to follow your company page – Every little bit helps!
• Add a call-to-action at the end of blog posts on your website asking readers to follow your company page – Include a link and a logo.
• Ask customers, partners, friends, colleagues to follow your company page – This can be done informally and/or as part of a newsletter or other campaign – followers beget followers!
• Encourage customers, partners and friends to Like and Share company updates and articles – Sharing gets more engagement than Liking, but both will help build engagement and followers.
• From your personal LinkedIn profile, write a short update requesting connections to follow your new company page – Include a link and a company logo – this is very important for you and other company executives because you probably have the most appropriate connections on LinkedIn…don’t waste them!
• Like and repost your company page updates – This seems obvious, but we often have to remind execs – and ask them to remind their employees – to repost and Like for amplification of your updates.
• Excerpt your company website blogs and post as a LinkedIn article on your personal profile – This help with LinkedIn engagement and since it’s only an excerpt, add something like, “Read the full article” to the end with a link to the blog. You should add “Follow us on LinkedIn” with link to your article. I know, it sounds time-consuming, but it really isn’t. LinkedIn articles are very nicely formatted and very easy to post. You just need an image properly sized for the header (744 x 400 pixels) and then you can drop in the text.

 Want to go a little deeper on engagement? Try one or two of these tactics:

• Pose questions to page followers to get conversations going – Make a provocative statement or ask a question that might be a little controversial – both are good conversation starters.
• Share video (from YouTube) – Video gets great engagement, but it’s more difficult for a startup to produce. But when you do create a video, make sure you leverage it in every way possible.
• Join and engage in LinkedIn groups – Company pages cannot join groups and your PR firm team cannot do this for you – it’s not allowed. This is probably one of the best ways to start conversations and let people know about you and your company, though it can’t be overly promotional.

We find clients tend to think they don’t have time to engage on LinkedIn, but you are your best company networker! Your PR team can lead the way and help to create content, but you and your company team are a very important part of the social media mix.