Don't sleep on your company page. Here's why.

HOOKED ON LINKEDIN

Don't sleep on your company page. Here's why.

Happy Monday, and welcome to issue 1 of Hooked on LinkedIn.

I'll start with a confession. Up till last year, I strongly believed posting from a LinkedIn company page was a waste of time. Almost no reach. Almost no engagement. Why bother?

I was wrong. For the next three Mondays I'll show you how wrong, with our own numbers, the carousel formats we use, and the templates we paste in every week.

But first, let's talk about the gurus.

"People buy from people"

Every LinkedIn guru will tell you two things. People buy from people. And company pages are dead.

The first one is true. The second one used to be half true, for one boring reason: money.

A few years ago, running a company page properly meant paying someone. Planning, writing, designing slides, posting, reporting. A decent agency charged around $5,000 a month for that. Say the page brought 300 clicks a month. That's about $17 for every person who looked at your offer. I'd have told you to skip it too.

That cost has collapsed. A week of company posts now takes an afternoon. So here's my rule of thumb: if your page brings 100 to 500 clicks a month and costs you less than $500 all in, you're paying $1 to $5 for each person who chose to look at what you sell. I'll take that trade every single month.

"Fine, Junaid. But can a page actually get those clicks?"

Fair question. Here's ours.

The screenshot that changed my mind

295 people saw one of our company-page carousels. 90 of them clicked.

LinkedIn company page analytics for four carousels: 13 impressions and 2 clicks, 39 and 13, 295 and 90, 38 and 14. Click rates of 15%, 33%, 31% and 37%, compared with personal posts where 10,000+ impressions bring 20 to 50 profile views.

That's nearly 1 in 3. For comparison, my personal posts that reach 10,000+ people bring in 20 to 50 profile views. Same person, same topics, completely different behaviour.

When I posted this screenshot in April, I signed off with: "wouldn't be surprised if Linkedin's analytics for company pages are broken." I was half joking. Then the other three carousels in that table came in at 15%, 33% and 37%, and I stopped joking.

Here's what I think is going on. A profile view means someone is curious about you. A click on a company post means they want to see what you sell. Nobody follows a company page for poetry. They follow it to keep an eye on what you do, so when you show them, they click.

Now the part that will annoy the gurus even more: carousels are our least liked posts. Our typical carousel gets 1 reaction. Our other posts get 3. And across the 200 company pages we studied, carousels got 25% less engagement than image posts.

If we'd judged carousels by likes, we'd have stopped making them. The clicks kept us going.

By July I'd seen enough to say it on LinkedIn:

We analyzed our last 12 months of Company Page posts.

Short Story: You should 10/10 post using LinkedIn Company pages.

[...]

1/ Post carousels only,

[...]

3/ Don't be shy. You can be transactional in them.

[...]

6/ Prioritize it more than your "personal brand".

Number 6 is the one people argue with me about. My case: people do buy from people, and then they check the company before they pay. A page that has been quiet since 2023 tells them something too.

So, carousels. But which carousels?

The 3 carousel formats that work for company pages

We've tried a lot of shapes. Three keep earning their place. (You've seen number 3 a hundred times on Instagram. There's a reason for that.)

Each one comes with a mini example and two cover lines from the LigoSocial hook library. A good cover line says what the carousel is about and who it's for, in one read. The businesses are made up to show the shape. Your own numbers go in the brackets.

1. The listicle

What it is: "5 mistakes", "7 tools", "6 questions". One item per slide.

Why it works: it's educational, so nobody feels sold to, and it's the easiest kind of carousel to save and share. It's great for SEO too: the same list makes a solid blog post later.

Mini example, an accounting firm:

Slide 1: 5 tax mistakes that cost small businesses money every year
Slides 2 to 6: one mistake per slide, each with its one-line fix
Slide 7: We check returns for small businesses every spring. Want a second pair of eyes? Message us "CHECK".

Cover lines to steal:

[N] [mistakes] that cost [who] [what they lose]
5 hiring mistakes that cost startups their best candidate
(a recruiter)

[N] [tools] every [who] should use (most have never heard of #[N])
7 tools every small clinic should use (most have never heard of #4)
(a clinic software company)

2. The story

What it is: one real thing that happened, told slide by slide. The setup, the problem, the turn, what you learned.

Why it works: people read a good story to the last slide, and the last slide is where your name is. Stories also put a real person on the page. In our study, posts that featured a named person (an employee, a client, a founder) got 37% more engagement than the same page's other posts.

The catch: you need a hook worth swiping and a story worth telling. No story this week? Don't force it. Post a listicle.

Mini example, a recruiter:

Slide 1: How we kept our best candidate after she got a higher offer
Slide 2: Day 3: she went quiet. Another company had offered 15% more.
Slide 3: We asked her one question: what would make you stay in the process?
Slide 4: The answer wasn't money. It was a 4-day week in her first month.
Slide 5: The client agreed. She signed on Friday.
Slide 6: We fill sales and engineering roles for startups. Hiring this quarter? Message us.

Cover lines to steal:

Our biggest [your job] mistake: [the mistake]. Here's what it cost.
Our biggest hiring mistake: rushing the final interview. Here's what it cost.
(a recruiter)

From [where you started] to [where you are]: our [N] years in [N] slides
From 1 oven to 3 shops: our bakery's 9 years in 6 slides
(a bakery)

3. The how-to (my favourite)

What it is: "How to [get a result]" in 4 to 6 steps.

You've seen this one all over Instagram: "How to plan a week of meals. Step 3: use [app]." It's used that much because it works. Every time someone reads it, your product and the problem it solves get linked in their head. The next time they have that problem, they think of you.

Easy, then. Slide 1: "How to cut no-shows: buy our software." Done.

Wrong. That's an ad, and people swipe past ads. Teach the whole thing properly, and make your product one of the steps:

If you sell a product, mention it once, in the step it actually handles. Somewhere in the middle is perfect.
If you sell a service, teach every step, then use the last slide: "Want help doing this? Message us." The people who can do it themselves will thank you. The ones who can't will message you.

This fits company pages well for a reason. In our study, product posts were among the most reshared posts on company pages: 13 reposts per 100 reactions, against 4 for team posts. People pass on what they can use.

Mini example, clinic booking software:

Slide 1: How to cut no-shows at your clinic in 30 days
Slide 2: Step 1: Find the 3 time slots patients miss most.
Slide 3: Step 2: Send the reminder 24 hours before, not 1 hour.
Slide 4: Step 3: Let patients rebook in one tap. (This is the step [your app] handles.)
Slide 5: Step 4: Keep a waitlist for the slots that still go empty.
Slide 6: Track your no-show rate every Friday. Try [your app] for step 3.

Cover lines to steal:

How to [result] without [the thing they dread]
How to send an invoice in 30 seconds, without a spreadsheet
(an invoicing app)

How to [result] in [time]
How to close your company's books in 2 days every month
(an accounting firm)

Copy this: the how-to carousel

Here's the template. Six slides, one step per slide. Fill in the brackets:

SLIDE 1  How to [result your buyer wants] [in time / without pain]
SLIDE 2  Step 1: [the first thing to check or decide]
SLIDE 3  Step 2: [the step most people skip]
SLIDE 4  Step 3: [the step your product or service handles]
SLIDE 5  Step 4: [how to tell it worked, with one number]
SLIDE 6  If you sell a product: Try [product] for step 3.
SLIDE 6  If you sell a service: Want us to do this for you? Message us "[word]".

Do you need a designer for any of this? No. I filled it in for that accounting firm and pasted it into the chat on our LigoSocial home page:

The LigoSocial home chat: a 6-slide how-to carousel plan for an accounting firm pasted in, and the draft that came back with all six slides, ending on "Want us to set this up for you? Message us CLOSE."

The reply even told me to put a real client result on slide 1. Fair. A real number beats an example every time.

I clicked Generate Carousel and had six slides. Here's what a finished how-to cover looks like out in the wild, slide 1 of one we posted on our company page in July:

LigoSocial how-to carousel cover, slide 1: How to turn one productive Tuesday into a full week of LinkedIn content, with a 3D sparkle illustration.

The result in big type, one picture, and you know exactly what you get before you swipe.

If you have a LigoSocial account, copy the template, fill the brackets with your own business, and paste it into the chat on your home page. You'll have a carousel for your page before your coffee goes cold.

Your 2-minute move

Open your company page analytics, go to the posts table, and sort by clicks instead of reactions. Divide clicks by impressions for your top post.

Then look at that post. Was it a listicle, a story or a how-to?

Our best carousel sits at 37%. If yours is in double digits, your page has been doing its job while everyone was looking at the likes.

Next Monday, part 2

Next Monday I'll open up the weekly routine we use to fill our page: one idea in, five company posts out, with the template for each day.

And three questions from our study of 200 pages, answered:

Which post type do a quarter of all company pages publish, and why did it come out weakest?
Why does opening a company post with a question cost it 36% against opening with news?
Which two kinds of posts beat product posts by about 80%?

One ask: hit reply with your best click rate (clicks divided by impressions) from your last 10 company posts. I'll share the best ones in part 3, without names.

Talk next Monday,

Junaid

P.S. That weakest post type? It's the last thing our own page published. Part 2 is partly me marking my own homework.

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