How Will's LinkedIn company page went from 0 to 1,000 followers in under a year

A new company page for a new product

Will existed for some time as a feature inside Willow, but when we launched it as a standalone WhatsApp-based product in March 2025, it needed its own brand, its own audience, and its own content strategy. The HeyWill LinkedIn company page was created from scratch in April 2025.

Ludwig Dumont, our CEO, and Kjell Vandevyvere from marketing mapped out the content plan and started posting. They used Willow's own platform to plan, schedule, and publish everything. If the tool worked for customers, it had to work for them too.

Showing up before the audience arrives

The first weeks were quiet. With zero followers, even good content doesn't travel far. But we knew from our own research into LinkedIn consistency that showing up early and often is what compounds over time. So we kept posting two to three times per week, mixing product explainers, video content, educational tips, and industry commentary.

In May, we published 33 posts. In June, 29 more. The audience was small but growing. Views climbed. Engagement started to follow. The foundation was being laid.

Finding a format worth doubling down on

Alongside the regular content, we started experimenting with a listicle format: country-by-country profiles of top executives on LinkedIn. "10 Portuguese Executives You Need to Follow." "10 Danish Executives You Need to Follow." Each post profiled business leaders doing LinkedIn well, tagged them, and linked to the full article on heywill.ai.

The format performed immediately and grew even further over time. The Bosnian edition reached 10,613 views and 1,382 engagements. The Estonian edition pulled in 7,550 views and 598 engagements. From a page still under 1,000 followers, those numbers were disproportionate.

So we made a deliberate call: spend less time on formats that require more production effort and focus on the listicles. Noel joined from the start of the series to own the research and production, freeing Ludwig and Kjell to focus on other priorities. From that point, one person managed the page's entire content output.

Content that creates its own distribution

The listicles didn't just perform well. They created a flywheel.

Executives who were featured shared the posts with their networks, putting the content in front of audiences far larger than Will's own following. Every new country meant a new set of influential people tagging, commenting, and reposting. For most of the year, our page's reach grew thanks to only one person spending a few hours on it per month.

Over 12 months, we published 175 posts. Those posts generated 120,193 impressions and 10,544 engagements. The content also drove 7,519 clicks: people tapping through to profiles, articles, and links in the posts.

Most of that reach was entirely organic. Only in August and September did we experiment a bit with ads with the goal to get new users. We didn’t spend more than a few hundred euros on the ads and they only led to 11 new followers in total as a side effect. As you can see from the graph below, those were actually our slowest months in terms of growth. Is that a lesson on its own?

From content format to standalone product

The listicle research grew beyond a content tactic. Our team had profiled executives across more than 40 countries. That dataset was too valuable to leave buried in LinkedIn posts.

So we built CXO Watch: a directory of 900+ executive LinkedIn profiles across 43 countries, scored and ranked by audience reach, content quality, and professional authority. What started as a social media format became a standalone resource that reinforces Will's positioning as an expert tool for LinkedIn.

What 1,000 followers actually unlocked

The page crossed 1,000 followers in under a year. For most B2B company pages, that milestone takes considerably longer.

More importantly, the audience that followed was the right one: professionals who care about LinkedIn presence and personal branding. Since launching the company page, Will's user base has grown by 1,100 users, reaching a total of 1,374.

The team still uses Willow to manage the HeyWill page today. The content calendar, scheduling, and analytics all run through the same platform their customers use every day. And in the second year, we will add another content format to the mix: auto-generated content from Willow Create. More about that very soon.