LinkedIn finally has its first company with a million followers: Hewlett-Packard.

HP announced the milestone yesterday on its LinkedIn profile page, and LinkedIn followed up today with its own announcement, and more background on how and why HP uses the social network.

The company has benefitted from LinkedIn’s follow button, which rolled out about a year ago and let companies grow their fan bases similarly to how they do on Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn also says that HP used targeted Follow Ads to add about 300,000 followers over a two-month span.

“LinkedIn has been critical for HP in successfully reaching and building relationships with our community of customers, partners and prospective employees. Our 1 million followers are connected to over 43 million people on LinkedIn, roughly one-quarter of the entire LinkedIn population,” says Natalie Malaszenko, Vice President of Digital Marketing for HP.

Of course, follower counts are meaningless unless those followers are also helping to drive revenue, profit, etc. That topic is addressed to some degree in an infographic that LinkedIn created about HP’s followers — in the lower right, it shares internal data that HP’s followers are 2.5 times more likely to recommend HP and 1.5 times more likely to consider HP products.

Here’s that infographic.

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | LinkedIn | Social Media Marketing | Top News

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