Beginner’s Guide: How One Firm Fostered Growth, Engagement and Friendly Competitive Spirits on LinkedIn

It’s no secret that consistently posting organic content leads to more engagement on social media. Getting accountants, advisors and other employees at accounting firms to voluntarily post that content is a little trickier. At our annual meeting, Lumsden McCormick’s Marketing Department would remind the firm of the importance of visibility on LinkedIn to the firm as a whole, and we would see some activity: some company events from the company’s LinkedIn account would be reposted, and on occasion, those reposts would include a caption. We thought our employees could do better.

In 2024, we launched a new initiative – the first Lumsden McCormick LinkedIn Competition. We were certain that, with enough encouragement, our employees could use their LinkedIn activity not only to boost our analytics but also to give potential clients, existing clients and even potential employees a genuine glimpse of the kind of firm we are. From beginning to end, here’s how we handled it.

From the Top

As we discussed what this competition could do for our firm and our employees, we also wondered how it could even be quantified. We decided we could run it for six months, from June to November, and we would announce our top three winners in January 2025 at our annual firm meeting. Employees opting in to the competition would get points for profiles that were completely filled out, for following certain pages each month, for participating in training sessions, and for participating in the monthly challenges we set. Each month, the employee with the most points would win a gift card, but to prevent one or two people from immediately running away with the competition, “monthly” points would be reset, and “cumulative” points would count towards the competition as a whole.

We decided that monthly challenges would increase in difficulty over the six months of the contest, to ensure people were gaining knowledge and were comfortable with using different LinkedIn features.

We first approached firm leadership to greenlight the competition. Nothing stokes a friendly competitive spirit quite like a gift card and the good-natured bragging rights that come with it. With management’s approval, we invited staff at all levels from all departments to join the competition. In June 2024, we held the first of two LinkedIn trainings, LinkedIn 101 – Establishing Your Professional Presence. This training included an in-depth explanation of how LinkedIn could benefit staff, how to ensure their profiles were appropriately filled out, and how to build and engage a network on the platform. Our second training, Level Up Your LinkedIn, covered best practices for sharing content to maximize engagement, how to thoughtfully incorporate AI to maximize time spent on LinkedIn, and how to showcase publications and projects on employee profiles.

Once we were sure employees had the basics down, we began releasing challenges. Across the competition, some of our monthly challenges included:

• Following company and industry pages
• Tagging company pages in posts
• Using hashtags
• Sharing personal posts about causes, volunteer work, or firm events that mattered to employees
• Sharing photos in company swag
• Writing recommendations for other employees

Results and Takeaways

The first month of the competition, we saw a 35% increase in organic impressions on the Lumsden McCormick LinkedIn account. Ultimately, organic impressions across the time we ran this contest were 64% higher than the same months of the previous year, and engagement (reactions, comments and reposts) rose 118% compared to the same time in 2023.

With 43% of our firm’s employees participating in the competition, we thought it would be beneficial to survey them at the conclusion of the contest. Overwhelmingly, respondents indicated that the challenges helped them feel more comfortable posting on LinkedIn. One individual commented, “I thought I already understood LinkedIn before, but I learned things that I never knew throughout this competition!”

It has been more than a year since we concluded the Lumsden McCormick LinkedIn Competition, and although it is difficult to directly tie continued growth to the initiative, organic impressions, total engagements and followers have continued to climb and are consistently much higher than pre-competition numbers.

Make It Your Own

If you’re interested in increasing traffic and engagement on your firm’s LinkedIn, consider using the incentives that a LinkedIn Competition could provide. In our experience, gamifying LinkedIn participation was not just a way to boost metrics; it was also a fun way to engage the firm in a playful ploy for office glory.