Building the followers for your LinkedIn company page takes time so what do you do when you see the follower count drop?
As a leading PR and news agency which helps clients build their social media audiences, we know LinkedIn is an essential engine for connecting with potential customers.
Whether it is organic followers deciding they want to follow your page or you taking the time to use your monthly allocation of invitations to manually grow the audience, it can take time to curate a following.
But what happens when your follower count suddenly drops? It can be a shock to see the curated audience total go down but what you are seeing is the consequence of LinkedIn’s Inactive Account Filtering comes in.
It may be frustrating but the decline could be good news as it will ensure your efforts are focused on real, engaged professionals.
What is LinkedIn Inactive Account Filtering?
Simply put, this feature is designed to clean up your network data.
LinkedIn actively removes certain accounts from your displayed connection and follower metrics.
What gets filtered? The filtering primarily targets restricted and hibernated accounts.
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- Restricted accounts: Those removed from the platform for violating LinkedIn’s User Agreement and Professional Community Policies.
- Hibernated accounts: Profiles that members have voluntarily chosen to temporarily deactivate.
For more details on this process, see LinkedIn’s Help Center information on Deactivating and Reactivating Accounts.
By removing these inactive profiles, LinkedIn helps marketers gain a more honest view of their true reach.
Why LinkedIn filtering is crucial for marketers
Your company page follower count is not a vanity metric. LinkedIn has stepped in to benefit efficiency and accurate measurement.
- Ensuring message reach: When you’re sending personalised messages or running targeted campaigns, you want to ensure your content is landing in front of active users.
Messaging inactive accounts is a waste of time and budget, directly impacting your LinkedIn advertising performance. - Accurate campaign metrics: If your connection and follower numbers include thousands of dormant accounts, your engagement rates, click-through rates, and other vital metrics are artificially low.
Filtering provides an uninflated and true measure of your campaigns, helping you effectively track progress over time and justify your social media ROI.
How to leverage inactive account filtering
Smart marketers can use the principles behind this feature to proactively clean and target their audience:
- Develop your LinkedIn strategy: Losing accounts which add no value is a good move. But do you have a strategy on how to use LinkedIn and reach a wider or engaged audience? If not, take the time to develop one or get in touch with Osborn to see how we can help.
- Review your follower list to prioritise: Take the time to look through the list of people following your page. Are there followers with job titles in your buying audience, such as Directors, CEOs or Managing Directors?
Have you seen them engaging with your content with regular “likes”? If so, maybe the time is right to contact them directly for a potential conversation. Or if there are followers from specific sectors you can tailor your content to appeal to them, explaining how you can deliver for their business needs? - Recognise the value of your follower list: There are millions of company pages LinkedIn users could follow yet they follow your page. See them as valuable supporters even if they are not buying from you and look at producing content which they can share, like or comment upon, to amplify your audience and raise engagement.
- Optimise target lists with sales navigator: Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to its full potential. The tool allows you to filter search results and account lists by LinkedIn activity levels, enabling you to easily exclude or remove accounts that show no recent engagement.
- Proactive list management: While LinkedIn does the filtering on your public metrics, regularly review your own connection lists. You can manually remove connections you know are no longer active, ensuring your first-degree network is high-quality.
- Deepen audience insights: Leverage tools like LinkedIn Sales Insights for deeper audience analysis. This can provide not only activity levels but also crucial demographic data—job titles, industries, and locations—that helps refine your strategy beyond basic activity checks.
Moving forward with LinkedIn
LinkedIn’s inactive account filtering can be a jolt when you hope to see only growth in your company page following but it is a powerful move that supports the platform’s goal of fostering genuine professional connections.
For marketing agencies and brands, it’s an opportunity to embrace data hygiene, leading to more accurate reporting and significantly more effective marketing campaigns.
By focusing your outreach on an engaged audience, you generate more quality leads, sales, and revenue.
Need help integrating these insights into a LinkedIn strategy which grows an engaged audience? If you’d like to begin building credibility for your business on social media, please get in touch. We have more than 50 years’ combined experience in corporate communications and work with many clients to document their company’s success and raise their profile.