On LinkedIn, monitoring activity from customers, partners, and competitors is crucial to understanding your industry’s landscape and growing your network.

Companies use information from LinkedIn feeds for business development, competitor analysis, and communication strategies. Engaging with other accounts’ posts, for example, can also boost your company’s profile and enhance relationships.

In my last blog post, “How to Interact with Customer Accounts on LinkedIn for Business Growth,” I explored leveraging your business’s LinkedIn profile to increase your organization’s presence.

That post said that company pages could not follow other LinkedIn accounts. Since then, however, LinkedIn has updated its platform to allow companies to follow other business accounts as well as their employees. This blog post provides background information on this new LinkedIn feature and how to start using it.

New Company-Following Feature Overview

LinkedIn’s new feature allows businesses to monitor and engage with accounts more efficiently. After following companies via your business account, the companies you follow are then displayed under “Feed” on your business account’s toolbox on the homepage. Before, you had to manually monitor your customer and partner feeds. Now, the activity of accounts you follow are displayed in one place.

Access to this feature is limited to page admins who manage their company’s LinkedIn page. It’s important to note that you can only follow business accounts and your company’s employee accounts, not personal accounts of other LinkedIn users.

Impact on Business Engagement

The collective feed allows page admins to see content published by customers, partners, and competitors. With one feed, admins can quickly view and interact with posts, allowing for timely responses and up-to-date assessments of activity. As discussed in my previous post, engaging with customer accounts fosters lasting relationships and increases your organization’s presence.

The feed is organized into two views: “Following” and “Employee Posts.” The “Following” section shows posts from businesses your account follows, while “Employee Posts” displays what your company’s team members are posting.

Responding to employee posts promptly builds rapport and demonstrates a supportive company culture. It also makes tracking employee posts easier, ensuring no one is left out when engaging with posts.

Getting Started

Now that we’ve covered the importance and background of this new feature, let’s review how to set up and use the tool.

1. Ensure Admin Access: Make sure you are an admin on your company’s LinkedIn account. If not, you won’t have access to this feature.
2. Go to Your Company’s Homepage: On the left side of the homepage, you will see menu options. Click “Feed.”
3. Manage Following: Select “Manage Following,” then search for and select the accounts you want to follow, such as customers, partners, competitors, and industry publications.
4. View Activity: Once you follow these accounts, their activity will display under “Following” in the feed. Employee activity will automatically display under “Employee Posts.”
5. Interact with Posts: Begin liking, commenting, and sharing content. To learn more about effective LinkedIn interactions, refer to my previous post.
6. Adjust Following: You can follow and unfollow accounts at any time.

LinkedIn’s new company-following feature helps users enhance their business’s engagement and visibility on the platform. This more organized and streamlined way of monitoring accounts will encourage LinkedIn admins to interact more effectively with their network.