Photo by KOBU Agency on Unsplash

Relatively recently (~ half a year) LinkedIn has introduced a new tool that makes it easier to grow the number of followers on your business page. It’s the invitations that you can send to your personal contacts, encouraging them to subscribe to the page that you administer.

What’s curious: first this function has appeared in profiles with few contacts, surely in an attempt to avoid massive spam. Thus, our content editor with 100+ contacts could already invite her friends, while our CEO with 1700+ contacts had to wait 3 more months to test the tool.

We have been using the tool for almost 3 months (during all the lockdown) and we have managed not only to increase the number of followers of the HelloMrLeadpage, but also learn to get a 100% off of it.

But first, the results. We have passed from 311 to 561 followers, thus gaining trust of a total of 250 people.

5 tricks to use the tool

1. Credits. Each business page has «credits» – 100 for a month – to exchange for invitations, 1:1 rate. When someone accepts, 1 credit is returned to you to use it again. Every last day of the month (May 31, June 30) your 100 credits are renewed. The challenge is to invite people who will surely accept at the beginning of the month and leave contacts with less probability of getting interested at the end of it, when you are just about to get 100 more credits. As you can see, if we have obtained 250 new followers in 3 months (=300 credits), we have proven this strategy very successful.
2. The daily invitation limitAt first you could only invite 25 people a day, but in June they have removed the limit (or something is malfunctioning, it would not be the first time).
3. The manual task. Yes, you can use the search line, but when we tried typing “marketing” we got just 4-5 contacts, while in reality there were many more contacts whose job positions include this keyword. So you have to do the manual scroll. This has its downsides, since the contact list remains the same, and if you’ve already crossed out the first part of the list, each time you’ll have to invest more and more time to just get to the undiscovered part. On the other hand, you stay entertained and you are getting to know your professional network… Well, the last thing is a lie, it is tremendously boring to spend 10 minutes scrolling down there.
4. Lack of automation. Correct, it is the consequence of the previous point. Since you cannot put any filter on the target, you will invite people according to your personal criteria. The good thing is that when your company (as in the case of HelloMrLead) is dedicated to marketing, you will avoid spending such valuable credits on trade marketing. And also you will not skip your friend who does the same thing as you but has described his job position as «Digital ninja». That is, improve the QUALITY of the invitations you send.
5. It does not affect engagement. Unfortunately, it is one thing to get people to see you and another thing – to be read, commented on and listened to. While for the first you only need to have good contacts, reputation and patience, for the second you will have to pay more attention to the quality of your content, regularity of posting, automated outreach and other tricks that encourage followers to interact. But the first step – increasing the potential audience – you will make for sure.

In conclusion

Personal invitations is a great tool:

1. Free
2. Efficient
3. Easy to use
4. Not abundant

Combined with a good content strategy and common sense it provides the greatest outreach.

There is another postponed effect – after a certain number of followers the page will appear higher in the search results and the growth will become more organic and easy. What is this magic number? We don’t know yet, but we will keep you informed.

And remember: with great power comes great responsibility. =)