Imagine achieving astonishing follower growth, doubling your count on LinkedIn in less than a single year. It's not just a dream — it's our recent success story.
And now, the time has come to share the strategies that propelled us from 5,000 to over 10,000 followers in a mere 10 months.
In this article, we will be sharing the game-changing tactics that Heidi Bordal, the brilliant mind behind our thriving community at Storykit, has used to grow our LinkedIn following so fast.
This includes her organic posting strategy, daily work hacks, and all the insider tips you need to create a LinkedIn game plan that yields genuine, tangible results.
How to grow followers fast — step-by-step approach
Growing your followers quickly doesn't require rocket science or spending millions at an agency, according to Heidi Bordal, Community Manager at Storykit. It simply takes quality and consistency.
And a content plan can help as well.
The first half of the 10-month period, Heidi didn’t have a specific content plan when it came to posting on LinkedIn.
“Until the beginning of this year, I didn’t have a concrete strategy like I do now,” Heidi shares.
"Even though I managed to grow our account without a structure initially, having a more organized plan definitely sped up our growth and made it easier for me to consistently share valuable content."
Whether you have a content plan or not, Heidi always recommends following these two best practices:
- Post at least once a day on workdays
- Post 90% in video
1. Plan your content topics
The first step towards success on LinkedIn is understanding your brand's values and the type of content you want to promote. Without a clear direction, you risk overwhelming yourself and your audience.
"We take a top-of-funnel approach when distributing our content," explains Heidi. "We aim to avoid being too sales-focused or product-focused."
The goal is to educate your audience on topics that genuinely interest them.
Choose audience-relevant topics that align with your product's solutions
“To create a structure, we identified 10 daily challenges or topics that our target audience faces. Then we created an article for each topic.”
Here is a list of our topics and the corresponding articles:
- Brand awareness: 5 steps (and 3 templates) to make your Employer Brand shine
- Employer branding/recruitment: Your guide to recruitment marketing with video in 2023
- Event marketing: 9 video ideas to market your digital, physical or phygital event on social media
- Corporate comms and reports: Create a successful corporate communications strategy in 5 steps
- Content marketing: Elevate your digital content strategy: Maximize results with video
- Internal comms: 12 creative ways to use video for internal communications
- Ads/conversion: Maximize social media video ads: The full-funnel approach
- Product/service marketing: No more excuses: How to easily make product videos for marketing
- Thought leadership: 5 videos you can make to establish your brand as a thought leader
- Social selling: How to actually get started with social selling on LinkedIn
These articles serve as evergreen content that can be updated, recycled, and reused. They form the core of the Storykit posting strategy, which will be covered in detail below.
Case studies
Utilize case studies to showcase your customers and subtly promote your product.
“At Storykit, we try to release a new case study every month, while also highlighting previous ones on a weekly basis.”
Heidi highlights the value of case studies on LinkedIn, stating that, "Tagging companies and interviewees in case studies works wonders for reach."
Employer branding content
Employer branding content tends to perform exceptionally well on LinkedIn. Companies often understate how much people love to see people. This is one of the best ways to humanize your brand and really make connections.
“To strengthen our employer branding, we feature a colleague each week,” Heidi explains.
"When we started featuring our employees, I noticed a big increase in followers. People really enjoy engaging with this kind of content. We always tag the person we're highlighting and sometimes mention their previous company, which helps the post reach their network as well."
You can easily use these types of videos to show different teams, your company culture, work environment, and more.
2. Work in two-week sprints
Implementing a schedule structured around two-week sprints is an excellent approach to enhance focus and productivity. By organizing your tasks and content planning within this timeframe, you can effectively streamline your workflow and achieve better results.
Heidi explains, “Our marketing team operates in two-week sprints. When it comes to content preparation, our content team creates the article [as mentioned earlier], which serves as the foundation for the majority of our posts in the following two weeks. Then we supplement it with other relevant content we have planned.”
“Once the two-week period ends, we switch to the next topic on the list and repeat the process.”
3. Create videos based on your content
When it comes to daily content planning and creation, Heidi adopts a flexible approach. She shares, "I try to batch-plan some content, but for other tasks, I prefer to work on a daily basis, taking it day by day."
Here is how Heidi uses the content mentioned above to create engaging LinkedIn posts.
Videos for the 2 week sprint articles
As mentioned earlier, one article becomes the primary focus for a span of two weeks. Heidi makes a bulk of the content out of this.
When it comes to having one article to focus on for two weeks, Heidi says “It’s great because it ‘forces’ me to create a lot of smaller pieces from one longer article, ensuring it gets the distribution it needs and deserves.”
“It’s also nice to know exactly what you should and can publish for two weeks. No need to look for inspiration or have to grab a topic out of thin air.”
How do you use one article to make 2 weeks' worth of different videos?
“I have a good idea of the types of videos that work well with different articles. So for me it's pretty easy to approach.”
How do you decide what to put in the captions?
“I usually just take text from the content.”
Here are a few examples of the types of videos Heidi makes from Storykit blog articles:
Content trailers
“Content trailers are the easiest thing to make. I can easily make a short trailer by using the title and doing something like, 'This is how you make great product videos,' with a CTA. That is more like an eye catcher and you can do one of those every day if you want to.”
Listicles
“Another example is listicles. Almost all articles we create include some kind of list. All I have to do is grab the list, put it in the video, and I’m done.”
One slide videos
“Sometimes I will just grab a well-written paragraph or even just the preamble and make that into a one-slide video. These are often overlooked but they are really engaging.”
Summary videos
“Now that we have Storykit AI as well, I can easily make summary videos, or videos that answer questions from different angles just by copying and pasting text into the AI.”
“Just from these examples, you can see that I can easily make at least 10 posts out of one article.”
Do you post the same content over again within the two-week period?
“Not usually. I will normally create a brand new video or if I do want to reuse something then I will duplicate it and change some assets or the first slide.”
Case study videos
“Turning case studies into videos is great for LinkedIn because they're easier to understand than plain text and our customers love seeing themselves featured in videos, so it's a fantastic way to engage and excite them,” says Heidi.
Are case study videos hard to make?
“No. Case study videos have always been fun for me. I have a ready-to-use template that simplifies the process, and there are plenty of fantastic quotes that are easy to highlight.”
"What can take a bit of time however, is writing the captions for case studies. I always want to make sure that I am presenting the company in a humble and flattering way."
“It’s worth spending extra time on this,” says Heidi.
Now, thanks to Storykit AI, case videos have become even easier. All you have to do is put in the text and the AI will generate a summary, highlight a quote, etc.
Employee videos
“At Storykit we love showing off our employees. We always try to feature new hires but also make sure to track down the OGs and put them in the spotlight,” Heidi shares.
“Employee videos are a breeze to make since we have a set template that we use every time.”
Do you have trouble getting colleagues to do these?
“No really. Only in the beginning because they think that they need to speak in front of the camera. But when they realize they don’t, it’s totally fine.”
Heidi explains that the process for creating these videos is quite straightforward.
“We start by sending someone a set of questions via Slack. Then, we film them going about their daily activities in the office, capturing moments of work and conversations with colleagues. Finally, we overlay their responses to the questions onto the footage.”
Other types / unplanned content
While it's important to have a plan in place, every marketer is well aware that unexpected things and new ideas often arise along the way. Heidi is always flexible and ready to add more content into the mix if it arises.
Do you post anything besides video?
“Sometimes I will throw in a standard text post just to switch it up, but we know that video performs the best so that is why we generally stick to that format.”
“Memes do well too. People like to have a laugh so I try to make some that are loving and relatable to us — like SDR and Marketing giving Sales the side eye.”
How do you make your memes?
“I just go to a meme generator, find a trending meme and write some text about us.”
Do you feel stressed if more things come up sporadically?
“No, not really. If the tech department asks me to share about an event or if someone sends me something fun or entertaining via Slack, I usually take the time to prepare content for that. Since I already have an idea of what's planned, I can easily incorporate these additional elements on top of my existing content.”
Pro tip: If you don’t feel like you have your own content to work off, don't sweat it. Take ideas from awesome sources like HubSpot and Hootsuite. Just remember to give them a shout-out. Your mission is to enlighten and entertain your audience, so why not sprinkle in some valuable tips from other providers?
4. Avoid overthinking your posts
This is the biggest setback that most marketers face: overthinking what they’re posting and why. To help shift your mindset, we asked Heidi some common questions that often hinder others from truly making an impact on LinkedIn.
Do you have concerns about people becoming annoyed when they see the same type of content for two consecutive weeks?
“I was in the beginning, but then I realized that the LinkedIn algorithm will push out the content that you post to the most relevant people. For example, event promotion content will go to people interested in that and the same goes with brand content.”
“This is a misconception that a lot of marketers have. However, I quickly learned that you will never be able to bore someone if you post organically because the chances of your stuff actually showing up for everyone is small from the beginning.”
Will you lose followers if you post content that isn’t relevant to everyone?
“No. When I get this question, I always think about how I behave online. Sometimes I might see something from an influencer that is super relevant to me and sometimes that influencer might post something about parenting, for example, that isn’t relevant to me. But then I just scroll past it. As long as the other stuff is good and it’s visually pleasing, that makes up for it.”
“So many marketers have a fear of posting something that doesn’t resonate with their audience, but I think that high activity and being active and posting consistently wins over anything else.”
Will you lose followers if you post something that isn’t super high quality?
“I say this in webinars and this is also something our CEO Peter Bonnier says and I love it so much: Quality and distribution are intrinsically linked. So if you post something that is good, LinkedIn is going to make it seen by more people, more people will share it and it will get a way bigger reach because it’s a good piece of content. But if it’s bad, then no one will see it because it will go to a place where bad posts go to die.”
I think that this is an important thought to keep in mind because the world is not going to end if you post a “bad post”.
How long should a video be?
“LinkedIn says that a good story for consumption in the feed should be 40 to 60 seconds. An example of this would be a listicle with about 5 things in it. But don’t let these numbers consume you. If you make a great video that is a little over or a little under it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you’re posting.”
5. Encourage your colleagues to actively engage with your content
“At Storykit, everyone is super great about engaging on LinkedIn with all of our posts. I definitely think this makes a difference for reach — especially when people repost. I’ve started to value that more than any other type of engagement but also comments for sure!”
“I think that is a reason that our growth was so much slower in the beginning when we were like 30 people at the company.”
“However, continuing to post, even during slow periods, really made all the difference because it quickly helped me understand what was working and what wasn't.”
6. Respond to comments and engage with your followers
How important is it to engage with people?
“Really important. I always make sure to answer all of the comments, even the bad ones.”
Last year, LinkedIn expert Richard van der Blom found that if you want to take the full advantage of LinkedIn’s algorithm, you should answer comments within the first 12 hours.
“LinkedIn made it so much easier to comment as a company a couple months ago as well. So I make sure to like or love or celebrate everything that is made in Storykit from our team and also our customers.”
Do you comment on anything random or content that we are not really associated with?
“Not really. That might be something I try doing more in the future, but for now it hasn’t been a priority.”
Ready to double your LinkedIn followers?
Hope you're feeling motivated and ready to start growing your LinkedIn followers. Remember, you don't need to overthink it. The secret is to do what Heidi does and focus on creating good quality content consistently.
With Storykit, you can easily turn your existing content into engaging videos and take your company's LinkedIn profile to the next level. Seize this chance to unlock your brand's potential and capture the attention of your desired audience on LinkedIn.
