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. 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.
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.
