How Did I Achieve An Over 1,000% Increase in Post Impressions within a month on LinkedIn?

On March 4th, the Integrated Marketing Association at New York University School of Professional Studies successfully held our first virtual annual CONNECT:ED Global Marketing Summit. It was a huge success for me, the marketing chair of the Integrated Marketing Association, as well because of how much I leveraged the power of LinkedIn and promoted this event to non-NYU audiences. To my surprise, the NYU IMA LinkedIn Page got a 1,269% increase in post impressions, a 179% increase in followers, and an 80% increase in page views from Feb 6th to March 4th. On top of the boost in our page’s performance, over 300 people registered on the LinkedIn event page. As a young digital marketer, I am mesmerized by these results and thus wanted to share what I did right to achieve such growth.

TIP 1: CREATE AN EVENT PAGE AND… ACTUALLY POST ON THERE

Though there are a handful of benefits to holding in-person events, online events actually allow more people to attend, regardless of where they’ll be tuning in. It goes without saying that most of the events happening now are online so I knew I must create an event page to get more eyeballs and answer attendees’ questions about the event. Here’s how the event page looked like:

The whole setup process took me about 10 minutes, but this event page's impact went a long way. For more instructions on the LinkedIn page setup procedures, please check out the official step-by-step guide and the FAQ page posted by LinkedIn. Also — don’t forget to post about this event page on your company page and consider pinning it to the top so more page visitors can see it.

Aside from creating the page, I also made sure to post regularly on the event page so anyone who joined the page would feel welcomed and encouraged to post their questions. I reused the graphics from the posts on the company page because why not? The messaging was the same and consistent. Note there’s also an option to “Notify attendees” — I didn’t use it every time to avoid annoying the attendees but only with the most important things that they should know.

TIP 2: LEVERAGE THE FUNCTIONALITIES OF LINKEDIN EVENT PAGE

After creating the page and posting on there, I explored and used other features on the LinkedIn event page. To start with, attendees can invite their connections to attend this event. As the first attendee of the event, I invited my connections who might be interested in marketing as the first step. I also encouraged the whole IMA team to invite their connections to this event page so there’s a larger ripple effect. If someone got invited to the event, this invitation would show up on their notifications panel. What’s more, if someone accepted the invitation and clicked “attending”, his or her connections will see this update in their notifications panel as well! Therefore, this is an effective method to expose the event page to more people on LinkedIn.

Moreover, there’s a meet-and-greet chat group that attendees can choose to be part of at the moment when they clicked “Attend” on the event page. I started to greet people when they came in. This chat group became extremely handy on the day of the event — people just typed in their questions which got answered by my colleagues and me instantly in this meet-and-greet chat group. After the event, I also sent the event survey directly to this group.

TIP 3: TAG, TAG, TAG!

You’ve seen enough of my tactics on the LinkedIn event page. But what did I do on our owned LinkedIn company page? First things first, because we had such an amazing panel of CMOs all over the globe, after getting their permissions, when I shared their profiles, I made sure to tag their individual profiles and companies so page followers can learn more about the speakers and the speakers can repost our posts to increase the influence. Some of the best-performing posts were reposted, commented on, and liked by the speakers and companies. On the left is a quick example of these best-performing posts.

TIP 4: PLAN OUT YOUR COMMUNICATIONS… AND BE SMART ABOUT IT!

We all know we need to schedule our posts. It’s more important to try every effort to stick with the plan and make smart changes as you get feedback along the way. For example, when I found that our speakers were getting a lot of attention, I decided to bring out a post-event quotes series, featuring quotes from every one of them during the summit, which helped with the page’s growth as a result.

TIP 5: POST A PERSONAL INVITATION, BETTER AS A VIDEO

If you can, please try your best to post video invitations. I chose to post our summit advisor’s video on our page and our academic director’s video on our stories. This is extremely crucial for a virtual event — we won’t be able to see each other face-to-face, but we can invite them with our welcoming faces and voices via videos!

There you have them — 5 Tips on how to better promote your LinkedIn company page and virtual events! Please let me know if you have any questions and/or suggestions and email me at mei.zhu@nyu.edu. I look forward to discussing more marketing-related tips with all of you!