A funny thing happens when you work in a marketing agency. More often than not, your company’s own marketing isn’t up to scratch. It makes sense, though – clients come first, and the working week is only so long. But any agency needs to practise what it preaches. That’s why our team at BGM have worked extra hard this year to dedicate time to demonstrating the value of company marketing – from our Amazing podcast series to Freemium mode and even blogs from our founders.
But for me, LinkedIn is the big one. With over 67 million companies on the platform, and all manner of professional contacts, having a strong presence on this site is hugely important. I often share a lot of guidance with my clients on best practices, scheduling and strategy, but it’s another thing entirely to do it for your own company. So, we thought it’d be helpful to give you a peek behind the curtain and show how beneficial LinkedIn has been for our own agency.
1. Post with a plan
If you’re in charge of your company’s LinkedIn, you’ll know what a challenge it is to post regularly. Hitting your ideal posting frequency can mean different things for different people, but even posting once a week can give you five times more followers than not. However, for the biggest benefit, you want to be posting between three and five times a week – ideally on working days when people are actually using LinkedIn. At the same time, you need to provide at least 18 hours of time between posting to maximise engagement.
For us, this was a big hurdle to overcome. With various teams working on multiple projects, it was easy for things to be missed or multiple updates to come in on a single day. It’s here that we needed to create a calendar document that allowed us to plan our posting. Gaps in the week were raised on team calls and discussed collectively, allowing us to post the best material every day.
The benefit? Our impressions and engagement took a sharp rise. Content remained fresh and engaging, synching up with timely things that were happening at BGM – from cracking company meet-ups to polished podcast clips. It also made the whole process of posting on our company LinkedIn easier: Instead of quickly moving away from client work to post a company update, we could plan ahead and schedule content way in advance.
2. Invite your connections
Like anyone on social media, we wanted our content to go beyond our current follower numbers. While posting frequently organically grows a LinkedIn account, our aim was to supercharge it and increase the number of people interested in our BGM updates. More followers would mean more opportunities to engage with people and increased visibility in our sector. A winning formula, indeed.
The solution? We invited people.
I know, I know, doesn’t sound that impressive, right? But the surprising thing is that most companies don’t do this – even if they’re keen to increase visibility on LinkedIn. Every month, the platform gives its admins 250 ‘credits’ to spend on inviting connections – one invite = one credit. If that person accepts your invitation, you get the credit back. The trick was encouraging our team to invite people in their network and spend all those credits before the month ended.
Regardless of how many people accepted our invitation, it was good practice for people to rediscover connections that may be relevant for a call or a coffee and remind old contacts of our company. If people accepted our invitation, that would be a bonus. Internally, this made everyone at BGM engaged with our LinkedIn, sharing the load and making it far easier to grow the channel.
And grow it did. Not only did we see a nice rise in followers, but we also saw our content gain awareness in the broader industry – most notably our 2024 Game Journalist Survey that was discussed at GDC during TriplePoint’s annual Mixer.
3. Learn and improve
Keeping a social channel moving forward requires proper evaluation. It’s something we say to all our clients using LinkedIn. While you may want to post about your last company social or promote a blog, it’s important to know if that’s actually working.
Every month we looked at the data, identifying what was doing well and what needed improvement. Evaluating this kind of content takes a bit of practice, and it’s not always clear why some posts have over or underperformed. However, regularly looking at our metrics and adapting our approach ensured our platform would grow month on month.
As part of that improvement, we also saw how other marketing activities could feed into LinkedIn. The most obvious one was utilising LinkedIn’s newsletter function as a weekly wrap-up of our daily newsletter. What started out as an experiment quickly became a very popular element of our channel, gaining new followers each week and a healthy number of views with each release.
4. Taking charge
Perhaps most importantly though, the biggest takeaway from improving our own BGM LinkedIn was making sure someone took charge of things. More often than not, those responsible for social sit outside main business operations but, at the same time, need to know activity at every level of the company in order to plan an appropriate strategy.
Working with my team, we made sure to have regular catch-ups with senior management to discuss long-term planning, corralled the various other BGM-ers together to know what was coming down the line, and updated the wider team on a weekly basis to make sure everyone in the agency was supporting our channels.
It can be a daunting task having to chase your founder for that blog he was going to write, follow up on design assets due in the next hour, or remind your line manager that they still need to record a video. However, doing this has made our content more interesting, helped our wider company marketing, and ensured that things were delivered on time. The major benefit is that now our team are all aware of how our socials are doing, what the plan is and where we’re going next – something that means no matter how busy things get here at BGM (and they do get busy), our internal work won’t stop.
Practising what you preach can be a hard thing to do – especially when you’re juggling client work as well! But it’s been a huge benefit to see that our guidance and strategy work just as well for us as they do for our clients. Beyond the increased followers and impressions, it’s also important that we do this – taking pride in a service that we offer to our clients shows we know what we’re doing and (hopefully) gives others the faith that we can do it for them, too.
