Top 5 LinkedIn Company Page Mistakes and Solutions with Michelle J Raymond

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Michelle J Raymond: Welcome everybody to the Social Media for B2B Growth Show. I'm your host, Michelle J Raymond, and I'm so excited this week that we are going to be talking about LinkedIn company pages, which is my favorite topic, and maybe you're a social media manager or a page admin that's out there that is pulling your hair out because let's be clear, organic reach on company pages is down the toilet. I'm just putting that out there. One scroll of your home feed and you are going to see that there are not very many organic company page posts that are showing up. In fact, my friend Richard van der Blom has done some research and I think the numbers are down to around 2%.

[00:00:39] Michelle J Raymond: So what does that mean for company page admins who have KPIs of increasing followers, increasing engagement and building communities? It means that 2024 is not going to be easy, but all is not lost. I am gonna be talking today about the top five mistakes that I see with company pages and how more importantly you can fix them.

[00:01:03] Michelle J Raymond: This sounds like something that you're interested in. Stick around to the end. 'cause number five is the one that I think you're gonna need to pay attention to the most. Now, let's start with number one. Let's go straight to the top. I am just going to crack into this because it is so important. Let's talk about the first thing, overly branded content.

[00:01:27] Michelle J Raymond: Now, what do I mean by this? I appreciate that in corporate land, most people have brand guidelines. You've done a lot of investment into building brands, so that means colors, logos, language, all your assets, and I understand that this is really important to the business, and I understand the power of branding, like I co-wrote The LinkedIn Branding Book, but ultimately, here's what's happening on the platform. The more that you overly brand your LinkedIn posts, the more as users when we are scrolling, we start to see those posts, they look like an ad, they smell like an ad, they read like an ad and what do we do with ads on LinkedIn for the most part?

[00:02:15] Michelle J Raymond: I don't know about you, but I keep on scrolling. I go past them as fast as possible so I can get to the good stuff. What does this mean? How do you find the balance between following your company guidelines and staying on brand and making content that actually resonates with people on LinkedIn? I think the first thing that we need to be mindful of is that LinkedIn is a social media platform.

[00:02:43] Michelle J Raymond: The type of content that you create needs to come from a social perspective. Now, what do I mean by that? Effectively, it's from people to people. People are throwing around the terms like human to human, and I totally agree with this. So it doesn't mean you have to throw your branding completely out the window, but what it does mean is we need to pair it back, tone it right down and look for other ways that we can make our content distinctive for our brand. And if you wanna know more about distinctive brand assets, then please go and listen to one of the previous podcast episodes I did just in December with Professor Jenni Romaniuk from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute. And we talked about the power of distinctive brand assets to protect your brand long term. It's a really amazing conversation she's got an awesome book as well as a resource that you can refer back to. But it's time to start making your posts on the company page almost look like they were coming from a person. And we are seeing a lot of talk about how Gen Z are creating content that's really resonating. So Duolingo is right up there. The team at Hootsuite, they're doing a great job. And of course we see it play out probably more on Twitter. It's a little bit behind over on LinkedIn, but ultimately what I want people to be mindful of is that you are creating content that humans want to read. I wanna see more faces and that means throwing out the stock images. Can we just make a pact here on the podcast listeners that you are the kind of people that won't be using stock images going forward. And I think this also applies to a lot of the AI generated images. I'm not sure that they resonate. I'm still testing them out. I think there might be a style that you can find that are really successful is that they've created a character and that character stands out, and that's what people look for. That's what people get affinity for. And when you're scrolling the feed, that will stop you in your tracks. And so think about how can you do this? And for some listeners you might be thinking great for those guys. They've got huge teams, big budgets I don't. The good news is it doesn't need to cost you a lot. I'm doing it with one of my clients right now. We are doing it with, having a emoji that represents the character that we are talking about. We are doing it with just like a little element on each of the images where that character shows up and it was just something we grabbed outta Canva.

[00:05:24] Michelle J Raymond: Now, is it what we would do if there was an unlimited budget and a big team? No, of course not. But is it something we're trying? So what I'm challenging the listeners today is, as you're hearing this, think about what can you do to make your content stand out without making it read like an ad. Challenging I know, but it's time to get creative. You marketers out there are creative people by nature, and if you are a business owner listening to this and you've got a creative team that reports into you, this is my plea to you, to make sure that you are supporting these teams. When they come to you with ideas, it's okay to go a little crazy sometimes get out of that box, try something different. I'm seeing too many examples where one company page blends into the next company page within industries, it's almost like somebody did the brand research and now they all look pretty much the same. Anyone else relate to that? So be the one if they zig you zag, and so this is why I want people strip back a lot of those branding elements on your posts. That's mistake number one that I see. Overly branded corporate content is number one. What is number two, mistake number two that I think I see would have to be that people are neglecting the basics. I am seeing all too often when people call me in for some of my paid services, like a company page audit and strategy, or a company page setup. When I'm called in for these kinds of projects, the first thing I do is I take a look at how everything's set up, I take a look at the fundamentals, the building blocks of having a great company page. What things can you be looking for? 'cause I wanna share actionable tips as always. First of all, I want you to go into page admin view. So we're going behind the scenes on the company page, and I want you to go into edit page, which is in the left-hand menu and do a quick audit. Just click on the menu one by one and go through and have a look. Now is that company page set up correctly? 100% complete. A true reflection of what your business is today, not what it is when somebody else set the page up many moons ago, it's probably changed hands a number of times if you're in a reasonable size business. With staff turn over, often what happens is we don't think about the importance of page set up. Now, why do I want you to pay attention to this? It's this simple. When somebody lands on your company page, and we like to think of it as our greatest hits library, like it's more than just a page. It's more than just something that creates and gathers dust. But what we want you to do is come across and find the best version of that page, up-to-date information. What do you do? Who do you help? What's the transformation I get when I work with you, and most importantly, what makes your business different?

[00:08:42] Michelle J Raymond: What kinds of things make your business different? Could include things like your values, and this is where tabs like the workplace commitments, on the company page setup are a really great way to show what does your business stand for? We know Gen Z are attracted to working with people that share common values.

[00:09:03] Michelle J Raymond: Now, you might be thinking, they're not my decision makers. I'm not so sure about that. And we know for sure that they are working their way up very quickly and building a brand doesn't happen overnight. Some of these things are gonna take time. So I want you to make sure that you are building now for how your brand's gonna show up over the years.

[00:09:24] Michelle J Raymond: So that I think is something that's really important. The about section, just a quick tip, go and have a look. You've got 2000 characters that you can fill in that space. How many does your company page use up? If the answer is a small fraction of that. You've got some homework to do. You knew that was coming, right?

[00:09:45] Michelle J Raymond: So page setup is something that I absolutely recommend that you invest some time in. The reward for that is LinkedIn have told us that pages that are 100% complete get up to 30% more weekly impressions. And as company page admins, we've gotta fight for every single impression that we get. They're not coming to us for free anymore. On LinkedIn, the days of a hundred percent organic are becoming a more and more a distant memory. You'll see LinkedIn are, really pushing forward the boost feature. They want us to pay to play, and I totally get that. If I'm them, I wanna monetize my platform as much as I can.

[00:10:32] Michelle J Raymond: With company pages right now, they've got two choices. LinkedIn ads campaigns or the boost feature and both are how do you pay to get your posts seen by many, many more eyes. And the thing that I would say is, you have a choice. You can pay to do that or start building employee advocacy. And I'm gonna talk about that in a little bit.

[00:10:53] Michelle J Raymond: Other areas that I think people could do better. And they're neglecting the basics is the consistency and frequency of your content. How often are you putting content out there? Is it you go hard, then you get distracted 'cause you're busy in other areas, the company page is frustrating you, so you disappear for a little bit.

[00:11:14] Michelle J Raymond: Or do you have a constant flow of good content coming through? If the answer is you go hard and disappear and it's all over the place, then I want you to think about what is the minimum number of posts that you can create that you can then start to schedule in advance. Now, I'm totally okay. The smaller the business, the smaller the number, and now could be one post every couple of weeks, and that includes you, solopreneurs. You don't get a pass to not have to do this homework either. It may not be where you focus most of your attention, but it is the place that you need to keep it ticking over . Your company page legitimizes what you're up to and what you are doing.

[00:12:00] Michelle J Raymond: The next thing that I would say is once you've got that frequency sorted about what you can commit to week in, week out, one of the best ways that you can do it, if your company doesn't have a social media scheduling tool, then don't forget you have a native one within LinkedIn now where you can schedule company page posts.

[00:12:21] Michelle J Raymond: Are you using that? Have you tried it? Because it's a cool way to save time when you're creating content because you can sit down when you're in the zone, and for me, I'm not exactly sure when that zone is ever gonna hit, but when it does, it's typically not at the time when my audience is around. So the cool part is I can sit down, write when works for me, post it when works best for my company page followers, and it's a win-win. It saves me so much time. So you've gotta think about this. As social media managers or page admins, I'm pretty sure you're not the kind of people that are sitting around with so much time every day that you can twiddle your thumbs.

[00:13:01] Michelle J Raymond: Is that fair to say? Yeah. Thought so. Now let's have a look at mistake number three. . And mistake number three is all about dumping the company page success on one person or one team. Is your business guilty of that? Is it just the page admin's job? Is it just the marketing team's job or whoever owns the page?

[00:13:28] Michelle J Raymond: Quite often I find that the company page has been dumped with almost the newest person that comes in. They get no support, they get no training, and it's just you know how to create a post. There is so much more to doing a great company page than just being able to put a bit of text together and throwing an image with that.

[00:13:52] Michelle J Raymond: I said in the last one that it's getting harder and harder to get your organic posts seen by many more people, and this is where employee advocacy comes into it. The more that you create your LinkedIn Dream team, what do I mean? The more people that are supporting your company page on LinkedIn, including your employees, the more likely it is to be seen by their networks and so on and so forth.

[00:14:21] Michelle J Raymond: Now, bringing everyone together means that you've got buy-in. It also means that the person running it can start to use the page more strategically and help you achieve your business goals. Think about that. You have to get everyone in a room and work out what's the business goal that you're trying to achieve. How is this LinkedIn strategy? Company page specifically going to help support those business goals. Now, of course, building personal brands, I'm not anti that. In fact, I am, shouting that from the rooftops just as much for employees. But today's episode, when we are looking at mistakes, the mistake is to just dump the company page. Set some time aside for people to get in a room once a month or once every couple of months to plan out the strategy for the LinkedIn Company page. It's really cool to have sales and marketing in the same room. Now, I can say that now because having spent 20 years in B2B sales and then having my own business and seeing the power of branding and marketing and how important it is that I know the power that comes from having these two working together.

[00:15:33] Michelle J Raymond: Now, I know it sounds captain obvious, I understand that, but it's surprising how much I see the marketing team running away doing their own thing. The sales team is doing their own and never the two shall meet in the middle. So it's as simple as get people in a room. Now, if your company page admin has had no experience on LinkedIn before, invest in training. Someone like myself can train your page admin in the current best practices, which are not what worked in 2023, 2022, or previous to that. Set them up for success. It is not fair to let someone come in the door and say, off you go. When I've just told you that, company pages are probably when we're talking about non paid, content and growing a page is probably one of the hardest things to do on LinkedIn, and you are giving this person zero chance of success. Come on, we can do better than that. Invest in training. Reach out to me. Ask me how I can help. That's what I'm here for. That's why my business exists. So no more dumping it on one person or one team. LinkedIn's a team sport. It's getting everyone involved. And if you don't wanna have to pay for ads or if you want highly effective paid strategies, then combine that with employee advocacy and work out how can we get the best out of everyone.

[00:17:05] Michelle J Raymond: It's not about ignoring the company page and just building personal brands. 'cause what happens then when your team turnover? What happens if they leave? What happens if someone changes jobs? What happens if someone's personal circumstances change and they don't want to create content anymore? So many things can happen on individuals side. So as a business, have a look at the whole thing and work out how this can work. That's one of my favorite things that I love to do with businesses, is take a holistic view and then have a look and say, where should we start? Where would we aim to get to, and what are the small actionable steps that we can take in between?

[00:17:44] Michelle J Raymond: Let's go to number four, and this one's been around for a while, and I'm gonna say it's almost borderline, one of the biggest mistakes that I think you can make, but the next one is company page content that is all about me.

[00:18:01] Michelle J Raymond: And in this case, the me is your business. I was helping a company with an audit recently, and I was almost smacked in the face very quickly at how much the content was promotional, how much the content was all about the business, and what the business did, what they business wanted, their results. And it was a little old school, I'm gonna say.

[00:18:27] Michelle J Raymond: The old school company pages would almost treat the page like a broadcast tool, hi, here's our company results. Maybe they got a new employee, maybe someone got promoted, and it was just, here's my product and services, here's what we do, and it's pushing content at people and not inviting the reader into a conversation.

[00:18:51] Michelle J Raymond: It's not centered on what is the problem that you solve for your ideal audience out there, and if you are using LinkedIn to leverage and grow your business and this applies on any social media platform, right? I talk about LinkedIn more specifically, but this is something that you need to take everywhere.

[00:19:11] Michelle J Raymond: We are on social platforms where people are looking to be educated, entertained, or inspired. Now, if they're coming to be educated, they're looking to brands who theoretically have more resources than most individuals. And if they're doing that, then we wanna make sure that we share that knowledge with our audience.

[00:19:33] Michelle J Raymond: What is the problem you solve? How do you do it? And what makes your business different? There's very few real monopolies out there in the world. There's very few unique businesses, but what is unique is how your business goes around solving that problem. A lot of this could be to do with your values.

[00:19:53] Michelle J Raymond: What do you stand for? How do you treat your employees? And this is part as well of building up your employer brand. So you attract the best of the best to come and work for you. And this is great in times when maybe there's a lot of turnover when the job market's hot and people have got lots of choices, you wanna make sure you've got the best of the best.

[00:20:14] Michelle J Raymond: When you've got the best of the best working for you, what do you know? You end up winning more opportunities and it just becomes this flywheel of best people work, win more opportunities. You've got more resources, and you just invest that back in the people and around we go.

[00:20:30] Michelle J Raymond: So company pages how can you change this really quickly? It's as simple as often asking a question. When you ask a question in a post, and this applies on personal posts as well. So if you don't have a company page and you want a secret tip, if you want to keep the LinkedIn algorithm happy, you have to generate conversations which happen in the comments. Easiest way is ask a question. Now, if you think about that, again, I'm being captain obvious this morning. But how many company page posts do you see that end with a full stop or period? I'm gonna say far too many. And this is a huge mistake that is so easily fixed. When you end it with a full stop it's like I read it, I consume it, and I go, thanks for that, and I move on to the next post. But if you ask me what my thoughts are on this. Or ask me, have I seen other examples? Have you tried a product like this? What's the problem that you face most in your day? When you start to get interested in your audience and helping them, what do you know? They get interested in you. This is called community building. There's nothing fancy about it. It's actually just getting interested in your audience. I know. Mind blowing. And I know that people are sitting there going, seems a little bit too simple, Michelle. I tell you what, do me a favor. Next time you're scrolling on LinkedIn and company page posts, or you can do it on your own company page, then take a look and let me know the percentage that don't ask questions. The percentage that seem to be talking about themselves. It is so high, your eyes will water. It makes me cry and pages can do better.

[00:22:22] Michelle J Raymond: And again, we are moving out of old school company page practices and moving into the new ones. And that leads me into mistake number five. Mistake number five is probably the biggest mistake that you can make as a page admin, as a brand, as a business owner, is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.

[00:22:49] Michelle J Raymond: If you think that posting three times a week with an image, maybe it's a stock image and some text in the same format, in the same ways day after day and you're wondering why things aren't working. It's not all something that we can blame on the LinkedIn algorithm, right? You don't get that get outta jail free card.

[00:23:11] Michelle J Raymond: What happens is we have to mix things up. 2024 I want to be the year of mixing things up, getting creative, and really marketers there was a time when you had dreams, maybe you were a young marketer and you got corporatized, you got boxed into the brand. This is your year to start to expand, break out of that box.

[00:23:35] Michelle J Raymond: And again, you can see it lots of stories on the internet right now about how Gen Z are breaking the mold. I've had a look at some of this content, and maybe it's my age, I'm a GenXer. If we get any other listeners that are out there that might be able to relate, but ultimately, you have a look at the HubSpot company page, for instance, on LinkedIn or other places, and you'll see the change in their content.

[00:23:59] Michelle J Raymond: You can see the power just recently when Elmo did a post and just asked how people were, and it goes viral. And these posts are actually quite often, not that many words. They're quite short and they're quite personal. And sometimes I even wonder if they're work related. Now I struggle with this, my personal view on some of this content that's going out there. For instance, if I use the HubSpot example, then I look at it and go, I don't get it. I don't see the point, but there are so many people engaging with it. They are getting the attention, and I think that's really important. We have to do things right now to get attention and get people involved.

[00:24:41] Michelle J Raymond: Now, where that line falls for your brand and your business, it's gonna be different for everybody. But take a look at it and think, what is it that they're doing? That I can assure you these posts do not cost money. So it's not a budget constraint. There's nothing that stops you from trying it for a little while, and if it doesn't work, throw it away and try something else.

[00:25:02] Michelle J Raymond: But get into that mode of experimentation. Have a look at high-performing pages, and if you wanna list, please reach out to me on LinkedIn, Michelle J Raymond is where you'll find me. Make sure that we're connected. Let me know that you listened to this particular episode, and then I can come back with some examples of pages to show you what's working.

[00:25:24] Michelle J Raymond: I think there's a huge shift that's gonna happen on company pages, and I've been talking about them for around four years and it may not feel like much has changed, but so much has changed in even just the last two years that we had to rewrite Business Gold, which if you haven't heard of that, it's the book that I co-wrote with Lynairre Johnston, it's the world's first and only book that's dedicated to LinkedIn company pages. How do you build awareness, authority, and advantage using them? We had to update that and do the second edition just within two years. LinkedIn's Page's team are doing a cracking job at trying to give us new improvements. Now, we may not always agree, and yes, the organic part is a struggle, but ultimately, I think right now we have a great opportunity to build page followers reasonably quickly, and we have to try different things with our content.

[00:26:19] Michelle J Raymond: So get creative. Have a go and see what you can come up with.

[00:26:24] Michelle J Raymond: If you try something and it works, I would love to hear from you. Are you a page admin that tried something pretty cool? I would love to talk about it. I'll give you full credit in the show of course. If you someone that wants to come on the show and talk about it, I'm always open to those kind of things, especially page admins that have a company page that's really successful.

[00:26:44] Michelle J Raymond: This is a request. You have an open invitation to come and talk to me on the show. So I would love to do more of that. So these are my top five mistakes that I see on company pages. These are my top five ways that I can help you resolve those. If you're kind of having a think of this and you're still stuck and you've got a company page that's flatlined and you're looking for some external help, then reach out to me.

[00:27:09] Michelle J Raymond: I'd love to be that fresh set of eyes. With my expertise, that can come in and really help you kickstart that. So my actionable tip, which I would leave people every single show because I want you to take action. I want people to listen to this show and then go away and think, I've gotta do this, and this.

[00:27:28] Michelle J Raymond: First point I would start with is do a quick audit of your company page. Take a quick look and just ask yourself. Is this content that if I was on the other side of the fence and I was the consumer of the content, would I wanna read it? If the answer is not really, or probably not, that's your sign that it's time to switch things up.

[00:27:53] Michelle J Raymond: It doesn't mean that I don't acknowledge that changing things in corporate land is hard, sometimes slow and other people won't understand you. You're gonna have to bite these things off in small bite-sized pieces and know that small changes over time still add up. You may not change things overnight. Your brand might not be comfortable with that. Your managers, your CEOs, your business owners. But that doesn't mean we can't make small changes. So I hope you've enjoyed today's Top Five Biggest LinkedIn Company Page Mistakes and How to Avoid Them. If you have this is my request, come across to LinkedIn, connect it with me if we aren't, and please let me know that you listen to the episode.

[00:28:38] Michelle J Raymond: I love connecting with people that are podcast listeners. It's one of the funniest things that I find about podcasting is that I don't know where this podcast lands. So if you are thinking, does she really mean me? Yes, you, everybody that's listening, I would love to hear from you. So I hope you've enjoyed this episode.

[00:28:56] Michelle J Raymond: Until next week, cheers.