The benefits of employee advocacy are well known, but LinkedIn is making a change that will limit how this works on the platform. To make sure your business is prepared let's go through the changes and alternatives for your business.
Today's episode is sponsored by Metricool. Make sure to register for a FREE Metricool account today. Use Code MICHELLE30 to try any Premium Plan FREE for 30 days. https://i.mtr.cool/NEDXVZ
Key moments in this episode:
00:00 LinkedIn Announcement
03:20 The My Company and Employee Advocacy Tabs on LinkedIn
04:49 The Impact of Removing These Features
06:18 Exploring Alternatives for Employee Advocacy
08:27 Cost-Effective Solutions for Small Businesses
09:47 Planning for LinkedIn Success in 2025
For more details - https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a6836874?hcppcid=search
ABOUT MICHELLE J RAYMOND
Michelle J Raymond is an international LinkedIn™️ B2B Growth Coach. To continue the conversation, connect with Michelle on LinkedIn™️ and let her know you are part of the community of podcast listeners.
Connect with Michelle J Raymond on LinkedIn™️ - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellejraymond/
B2B Growth Co offers LinkedIn™️ Training for teams to build personal and business brands and a LinkedIn™️ Profile Recharge service for Founders/CEOs.
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#LinkedIn #EmployeeAdvocacy #LinkedInForBusiness
00:00:00
Michelle J Raymond: Oh, the irony listeners, every man and their dog is talking about the
00:00:04
benefits of employee advocacy, including me.
00:00:08
So what has LinkedIn done?
00:00:09
They've gone and made employee advocacy on LinkedIn harder for businesses.
00:00:14
What's the change and more importantly, how are you going to implement a workaround in 2025?
00:00:38
G'day listeners.
00:00:39
It is coach Michelle J Raymond and welcome back for another episode of the podcast
00:00:44
so glad that you can be here wherever you're joining from around the world.
00:00:47
There are some listeners that this recent change on LinkedIn, it's not going to impact you, but
00:00:54
it's handy to know because I think it's starting to show us the direction that LinkedIn are
00:00:59
heading in going into 2025, which as marketers trying to plan out things, I think it's really
00:01:05
important to be aware of what are the changes going on on the platform that are really impacting
00:01:11
how you leverage LinkedIn for business growth.
00:01:14
Now, what was this change that I'm talking about?
00:01:16
They are removing both the My Company tab and also the Employee Advocacy tab.
00:01:23
So after this quick word from our podcast sponsors, Metricool, I'm
00:01:27
going to go into that in more detail.
00:03:20
What is, or was the My Company tab and the employee advocacy tab?
00:03:24
They were two tools within LinkedIn that were incorporated for free.
00:03:29
And I think that's probably the main issue that LinkedIn has right now, where you could really
00:03:34
run your employee advocacy programs on LinkedIn.
00:03:37
Was it perfect?
00:03:38
No, but I think it was a pretty handy tool.
00:03:41
Now, if you've never seen it before, the requirements were that you had
00:03:44
to have a minimum of 10 employees.
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So if your business didn't have 10 employees registered to your company on
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LinkedIn, you would never have seen this.
00:03:53
The My Company tab was effectively a little mini intranet within LinkedIn.
00:03:57
So if you logged on, you could take a look around, see what all of your colleagues were up to.
00:04:02
And having this mini intranet on LinkedIn was great, especially for teams that were
00:04:06
spread in different parts of the world.
00:04:09
And I don't know how well it was used.
00:04:12
Maybe LinkedIn would say it's not.
00:04:14
I've got a feeling that this thing's going to come back in a different format where
00:04:17
they can actually charge businesses for this because I think they recognise the value of
00:04:23
getting employees active on the platform.
00:04:26
I think it's been around for such a long time and probably too soon.
00:04:31
That now what's happening is the world of B2B is only just waking up to the powers of
00:04:38
LinkedIn, the powers of getting your team active.
00:04:41
And that's what employee advocacy is.
00:04:49
What LinkedIn have done is sent out a notification to people with the My Company
00:04:53
tab to let them know that as of November this year, these features will be removed so that
00:04:59
they can put resources towards other parts of LinkedIn, which I totally understand.
00:05:04
And given that they want to be an AI focused company, then employee
00:05:08
advocacy doesn't really fit into that.
00:05:11
Although I would argue it's probably even more important.
00:05:14
And so these are going away and nothing's replacing it at this point in time.
00:05:20
On the notification if you go in and have a look at the LinkedIn help section, it gives you a
00:05:26
list of approved marketing partners that LinkedIn say, look, this is going away, but reach out
00:05:32
and connect with any of these other providers.
00:05:35
And I had a quick look at the list and ultimately they just looked more
00:05:39
like social media scheduling tools.
00:05:41
And, you know, I'm a big fan of Metricool but is that the same thing as an employee advocacy tool?
00:05:48
No, it's not.
00:05:48
It's great for getting content created, getting people to schedule it and managing that process.
00:05:55
But employee advocacy is so much bigger than that.
00:05:57
You know, it's that interaction between colleagues and supporting each other.
00:06:02
So I don't think that their list is going to be of much help.
00:06:05
There was very few that were actually dedicated to helping you create an employee advocacy programs.
00:06:12
Maybe a couple.
00:06:18
Now, If you're thinking about, well, what can I replace it with that
00:06:21
is a proper app or tool for this.
00:06:23
I did a bit of a quick Google around and yes, there are quite a few.
00:06:28
Some of these tools come at it from a slightly different perspective so it's the
00:06:31
gamification of getting your employees active.
00:06:34
And that's one piece to the puzzle, but I think within a business, there's
00:06:38
other pieces of, you know, how do you keep things within the brand guidelines?
00:06:42
How do you measure the impact?
00:06:44
How do you understand what the ROI is of your employee advocacy programs?
00:06:49
And so these things, are, question mark, question mark, question mark for me.
00:06:53
What do you do if you can't afford some of these programs?
00:06:56
Like I've looked into them before for some of my clients and they can be
00:07:00
quite expensive for a small business.
00:07:01
And maybe when you're just starting out with employee advocacy, you're not ready
00:07:06
to make such a significant investment.
00:07:09
And I totally understand you want to get the team up and running, and then
00:07:13
you can kind of graduate and evolve over time as you get more people involved.
00:07:17
As marketing teams that typically own these processes of getting your business active
00:07:22
on the platform, it's now going to make 2025 a little bit harder, especially if
00:07:27
you've been relying on the My Company tab.
00:07:29
And if you hadn't been used it and always wondered what it is, then it's
00:07:33
a missed opportunity for you as well.
00:07:41
There's no doubt that when you have a program set up where you support your employees
00:07:47
to be active on the platform, that there is a lot of benefit there to the business.
00:07:52
And there's so many quotes around, but one of the ones that sticks out for me is knowing
00:07:57
that employees are 14 times more likely to share content that basically has been provided
00:08:04
by the company to their own audiences.
00:08:07
And in my experience, that's probably a fair assessment of what happens because most
00:08:13
people don't want to write their own content.
00:08:16
Probably a bigger portion are happy to reshare it or, support company page posts.
00:08:21
But when it comes to putting things out under their own name, that's a much smaller percentage.
00:08:27
What can you do that can help support your team get active if you don't have the budget
00:08:32
to invest in these employee advocacy tools?
00:08:35
Well, I think we have to go back to old school and keep it simple.
00:08:38
And it could be your internal Slack channels.
00:08:41
It could be as easy as an email notification that goes out to people within specific
00:08:48
groups saying, Hey, this content's here.
00:08:50
Yeah.
00:08:50
You can then go and post it and it's going to be a lot more manual.
00:08:54
Good old Excel spreadsheets or Google sheets are going to come in where people self report.
00:08:59
And is it ideal?
00:09:01
No.
00:09:01
Is it going to be a lot of manual labour?
00:09:03
Probably.
00:09:04
Is it going to be worth it?
00:09:06
Well, I think so.
00:09:07
Because there's just so much benefit in the power of two, making sure that personal
00:09:13
brands and employer brands are working together to really bring the company brand
00:09:18
to life, to really bring those people and your employees into the spotlight.
00:09:47
It's going to be a short and sweet episode this week listeners, but a really important
00:09:53
message that I want you to have is regardless of whether you had access to the My Company
00:09:58
tab and employee advocacy tab, regardless of whether you had those, it's time to start
00:10:04
planning how are you going to best utilise your resources internally to achieve your
00:10:10
business goals by leveraging LinkedIn in 2025?
00:10:14
And if you're stuck and can't figure that out, that is exactly what I love doing.
00:10:18
So if you are a business that is ambitious, i.
00:10:22
e.
00:10:22
you want to be the best, you want to lead your industry.
00:10:25
You are innovative that means you're open to doing things different that other people won't do.
00:10:30
And you are purpose driven, you've got fire in your belly.
00:10:33
You're trying to achieve something that others are just plodding along and you want to leave
00:10:38
them behind and really have the industry see your business as a thought leader in that space.
00:10:44
Then I would love to work with you.
00:10:46
If we're not connected on LinkedIn already reach out, let me know that you
00:10:49
listened to this episode so that we can book a time to have that conversation.
00:10:54
Do not leave it to the last minute.
00:10:56
Do not let your competitors really get that jumpstart on you and take the lead.
00:11:01
Cause even with my help, it's super hard to catch up.
00:11:10
Listeners, I'm really focused on helping you through to the end of the year, have everything
00:11:15
that you need to be able to plan out a great marketing strategy for 2025 on LinkedIn.
00:11:21
And because of that, I've got some really amazing guests that are going to come and join
00:11:25
me and share their expertise on things that I know will make such a massive difference.
00:11:32
So between now and the end of the year, the episodes are just going to
00:11:35
be packed with everything you need to really set your business up for success.
00:11:40
So don't forget to follow the podcast and whichever player that you listen
00:11:44
in on, turn on those notifications so that you don't miss an episode.
00:11:50
So until next week, cheers.
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