Ultimate Guide to Improving Your LinkedIn Company Page Performace with Michelle J Raymond

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Michelle J Raymond: Welcome everybody to the LinkedIn for B2B Growth Show. I'm your host, Michelle J Raymond. This episode is going to be one of lots of different celebrations for me. So listeners, this is my episode 100. That's right. 100 episodes of the LinkedIn for B2B Growth podcast. I appreciate everybody that listens weekly. This is something that I've come to learn about podcast listeners. You guys just cannot get enough knowledge. And I really appreciate your support and reaching out to connect with me on LinkedIn. So as my way of saying thank you to everybody maybe you're a recent listener, maybe you've been doing it since the beginning, boy, have we come a long way since then. But ultimately this episode, I wanted to give back.

[00:00:45] Michelle J Raymond: It's my way of saying thank you. It is me answering all of those questions that people come to me and ask about LinkedIn Company Pages. Love them, hate them. Either way, if you have a business, you need one and why not have the best that you can have.

[00:01:02] Michelle J Raymond: This is what I say to everybody when I'm talking to them. You have two choices. You can roll out the red carpet when someone lands on your Company Page, or you can leave it as a ghost town and think about it, what kind of impression does that create? I'll give you the handy tip, it's not a great one. So today's episode is the ultimate guide to improving your LinkedIn Company Page.

[00:01:24] Michelle J Raymond: And I am going to go through at least. 10, maybe more, depending how quickly I talk and how much time things take. But I am going to share with you the answers to the top 10 questions that I always get asked by people wanting to work out the mysteries that are Company Pages.

[00:01:42] Michelle J Raymond: Now, first thing I want to do is just shout out a word of encouragement to anybody that is a Company Page admin. I know they're hard. It is getting more and more difficult to get results out of your Page. And I know that the pressure is on. I'm seeing lots and lots of marketing teams have their budgets slashed, and I can only imagine that's, you know, adding more and more pressure. Don't worry, I've got some solutions today that won't cost anything. And I think that you'll all enjoy.

[00:02:09] Michelle J Raymond: Now, the number one question, hands down people, how do you grow a Company Page followers fast? Everybody knows that if you're going to build a community, you need followers over on your Page as the starting point. Now, every month LinkedIn gives us 250 Page invite credits. They come out on the first of the month and then they expire at the end of the month if you haven't used them. The cool thing is if you send out the invite credits, which if you go into Page admin view in the top right hand corner, you'll see Grow Your Followers

[00:02:44] Michelle J Raymond: and by clicking on that, it opens up a bunch of filters, which I encourage you to use. Those filters, allow you to target your first degree connections, to invite them to follow the Page. Nowhere on LinkedIn and I'd say probably outside of LinkedIn as well. Nowhere does spray and pray work. This is why you have filters to use, when you use those invite credits up , it could be by location. It could be by the company that they work. It could be by industry or even university or schools that people have been to. Those filters are there for a reason. Take the time to go through and think, would this person that I'm connected to really be interested in what I'm offering in my Company Page content?

[00:03:33] Michelle J Raymond: The answer for me back in the beginning was I wasn't quite sure. So I invited a lot of people. It was a brand new business. Now that I have my target audience much clearer in my mind, I spend painstakingly. It's not an easy process. It's a time consuming process. Selecting who I think will help. Now I've collected over 16,000 connections and followers on LinkedIn.

[00:03:59] Michelle J Raymond: And a lot of them have come from when I started working on LinkedIn about 10 years ago in the beauty industry, selling raw materials and ingredients. That audience isn't particularly interested in what I do now. So it almost comes across as spam, if I send out invites to people who may or may not be interested. I'm going to say it's probably may not be most likely. And that's okay.

[00:04:24] Michelle J Raymond: We don't want everybody to be part of our community. We want to, show up and really add value. Now I have created a YouTube video, which dives really deep into this topic. And so I'm going to put the link for that into the show notes for people to, really dive deep into this section. But the other thing that most people don't realise, yes, you've got your 250 Page invite credits, use them or lose them, as I said.

[00:04:53] Michelle J Raymond: Did you know that employees, so anyone, even if they're not a Page admin can invite 30 of their first degree connections to come and follow the Company Page without being a Page admin. Your employees are going to have far more connections than the Page, especially when you're starting out.

[00:05:15] Michelle J Raymond: If you don't start approaching LinkedIn as a team sport and create your LinkedIn Dream Team, where everybody works together, not just the marketing team, not just the sales team, not just the business owner. If I had a dollar for every time I say, have you asked your customer service team What the frequently asked questions are?

[00:05:34] Michelle J Raymond: That makes amazing content. People go, Oh, it's not their job. Pretty sure it's everybody's job to make the company successful. So to bring that culture together, to include people, get people in the room, get them excited, show what's in it for them, and they will help you.

[00:05:53] Michelle J Raymond: So you've got 30 invite credits per employee that they can also use every month. Once they have used them, they reset the next month. And this is something I'm going to put money on that most businesses are not utilising this feature, which snuck in quite a while ago, but of course, LinkedIn doesn't tell you. It's up to me to share it with you guys.

[00:06:17] Michelle J Raymond: The other thing that I want to talk to people about is when you're growing these followers. Yes, the numbers are going up on the Company Page. Yep. That's great. But I want you to have a process that also goes in and looks at those new followers and have someone in the business reach out and say, thank you for following the Page and ask a question.

[00:06:39] Michelle J Raymond: What interested you? Why did you accept? What are you working on? Maybe it's somebody that you know, and you just want to thank them for the support. This isn't a place where we're just connecting followers, listeners. We're better than that. We have to do more than what our competition does, okay. So use the invite credits.

[00:06:59] Michelle J Raymond: If you want to grow your Page fast, give them a reason to follow the content. If you are just dumping stuff over on the Company Page or posting sporadically and you just kind of go, Oh yeah, I'll dump that over there. Or, Oh, that'll do. Or I'll repost the company blog. You know what? You have to be smarter and work harder, and I'm not going to accept that from Page admins anymore.

[00:07:25] Michelle J Raymond: Doesn't matter what size of business you have. Now, for those of you that have been listening to me for some time, you'll know, I talk about the Greatest Hits Library. If you can't keep up with the workload, I want you to just make sure that everything that you store on your Company Page is absolutely gold.

[00:07:44] Michelle J Raymond: Okay. Nothing more, nothing less. Just make it gold and give people a reason to come and follow the Page. You will find that people will follow quality content. And I know that there's a lot of noise on LinkedIn about people follow people trust people, but brands have access to so much information that individuals don't.

[00:08:07] Michelle J Raymond: So rather than coming at LinkedIn with a either or situation, I want you to look at it and say, how can we build a really strong Company Page that has a really strong brand attached to it, that then supports our employees or ourselves, depending if you're a solopreneur, but say you've got a team. Use your Page to support your team.

[00:08:30] Michelle J Raymond: What goes around comes around. I've said that about a thousand times in a hundred episodes of this podcast. My Nan taught me that lesson. And it is something that I think as a Page admin, you need to have a look at it and say, if I want my colleagues to come and support me. How about I go and support them. And I'm going to go into that a little bit more in the episode. So keep listening in.

[00:08:55] Michelle J Raymond: The next question. We've grown our Page followers and we move onto what is the best kind of content to put on the Company Page? That's the million dollar question. It's also the thing that I think people overthink. I think that's when Page admins come onto LinkedIn and they start to think. Oh, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to be corporate, box myself in, throw away creativity, throw away doing anything that might be a little bit out of the middle. Dare we stray off to the sides and everything just starts looking the same.

[00:09:33] Michelle J Raymond: With the amount of AI content that is now on LinkedIn. Don't even get me started on that. With the amount of AI content, what is going on is everything feels same, same. It is so hard to distinguish, especially with Company Pages, the difference between one company's content and the other. It is draining me. It is killing me some days that when I scroll, it is same, same, same, same.

[00:10:04] Michelle J Raymond: Now the smart listeners who are here listening to this podcast, you're going to dare to be different. In fact, I am going to give you absolute permission to try different things. And you'll actually find that it doesn't have to be, I'm not asking you to go to the extremes. I'm just asking you to try something different.

[00:10:24] Michelle J Raymond: Now, the types of content that works. Add some kind of insight and value. Maybe you have done a lot of research that you can share bite sized chunks, snackable content that people can consume in a fun way. Maybe it's time that your business tried LinkedIn live events or hosting a LinkedIn audio room. Now I'm a big fan of both of these.

[00:10:49] Michelle J Raymond: You won't get a better way to engage with your community than those two things. Now, having conversations with your community, having conversations with potential clients, people pay money to do that. And here we are, we've got these two amazing tools sitting on LinkedIn, that if you create a great event and use up invites that you can use to bring people to those events, then you have got a captive audience.

[00:11:20] Michelle J Raymond: Here's the thing. Did you know, across LinkedIn, you get 1000 invites to events per week as an individual person. Now that means if your company has an event on, once you accept that event invite. You can then invite up to a thousand people. That is nuts. That is free. And again, you've got filters so you can be targeted.

[00:11:46] Michelle J Raymond: Really think about it. Imagine we hear words like account based marketing. That's where you target a particular company that you want to do business with or nurture those relationships. And here I am saying you've got access to invite them. You can use those filters. And you have a higher chance of them turning up if you're putting on a quality event.

[00:12:07] Michelle J Raymond: Now, what I can tell you in my experience, the very first event is probably not going to be the best quality. If you need some help on how to do a LinkedIn live for your Company Page, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. Let me know I've got an article that I wrote a little while back, which will step you through some of the ways that you can set your event up successfully and manage the third party streaming apps and LinkedIn on your Company Page. It's a bit tricky the first time. I'm not going to lie. I actually forgot to press go live , which meant for the first 15 minutes we were talking to ourselves.

[00:12:42] Michelle J Raymond: So I share this because the first one can often be a little bit rough. But if you persist with that, you are just going to have winners. And so for me personally, I think that LinkedIn audios, especially are really an untapped resource. I think that they're getting quite high numbers show up to these. I wasn't expecting it. We had the big Clubhouse thing for a couple of years, and now it's Clubhouse who?

[00:13:08] Michelle J Raymond: But LinkedIn have silently and steadily, as they always do, late to come to the party. But when they put something out, I think because you've already got an existing community, then you can leverage that and it's quality over quantity in this case. Is there a few things on LinkedIn audio I wish would happen? Absolutely. You can't record them officially using LinkedIn. I know that there's lots of workarounds, but I don't wanna go into that today.

[00:13:35] Michelle J Raymond: Let's talk about should employees engage on the Page and does it look lame? I have to laugh when I get asked this question. I'm going to tell you a little story, so you think about it. I want you to picture in your mind the last time that you went to a wedding and it was probably a really great day. And you go to a wedding reception and there's some music playing and there's always a dance floor.

[00:14:00] Michelle J Raymond: And the music's pretty good and people are probably a little bit loose after a few drinks, but that dance floor stays empty and it stays empty until the first person gets up because nobody wants to be the first person on a dance floor. But once the first person gets up, then what happens? Everybody else starts to join them.

[00:14:22] Michelle J Raymond: The same thing happens on Company Page content. You will find it even harder to get people to engage. So be the first people, make it one of your employees, one of your team, be first so that it creates a space for everybody else to join you on the dance floor, so to speak. Now, once you've got a few people up, you'll start to get other people engaged.

[00:14:48] Michelle J Raymond: One of the things that's going to happen here is you're going to come up against, it's not my job. Totally get it. Everybody's probably more busy now in their roles, having to do more with less time, and I understand where they may be coming from. What's happening here is they don't see the value of what's in it for them.

[00:15:09] Michelle J Raymond: So it's your job to show how, what they're doing and what you're doing together helps all of you overall. It's this simple businesses that attract more opportunities, they have a higher chance of winning those opportunities because they're in it to win it. And the more you win, the more money comes back in the door. And it's just this vicious cycle. You've got more money to spend on things. You know me, I'm a B2B salesperson at heart. So for me, I don't see the point in doing things unless there's a dollar figure attached to it somewhere. You have to get your team involved. We know now more than ever that LinkedIn posts are not showing in the home page feed.

[00:15:50] Michelle J Raymond: It's tough, but what you can do is if your employees start to engage on your Company Page posts, here's the cool thing that's going to happen. Some of their connections will see that they've commented and maybe be drawn into that conversation. So don't underestimate. In fact, you must find a way to get the whole team engaged in your Company Page. Lead by example is my simple answer for this one.

[00:16:19] Michelle J Raymond: Now, before I go on to my next tips, I just want to tell you something else exciting that's happening. It's not just the 100th episode of the podcast. It is also nearly time for me and Lynnaire Johnston, who we co-wrote Business Gold: Build Awareness, Authority, and Advantage with LinkedIn Company Pages.

[00:16:38] Michelle J Raymond: The second edition is coming out on November 16. We have spent the last little while updating Business Gold, because there have been so many changes since we released that in 2021. If you are looking for an easy to read resource to get the most out of your Company Page, then stay tuned and make sure that you follow along on my content on LinkedIn, and you will see when it comes out and you can buy it off Amazon.

[00:17:07] Michelle J Raymond: And honestly, it was absolutely mind blowing to me just how much had changed in two years that we already had to go back and rewrite this book. So it's updated, new and improved and really brings you up to speed with what's happening now.

[00:17:24] Michelle J Raymond: Now, I spoke about LinkedIn events. Do I recommend them for Company Pages? Absolutely. Best form of content. Use your invites up. And for me, they are just brilliant. The other factor about why I encourage LinkedIn events is because you can repurpose the content that comes out of them, especially LinkedIn lives. They are a goldmine.

[00:17:47] Michelle J Raymond: Think about it. You capture people in the moment, speaking on video, no rehearsals. And I find when people are in their zone and they're just talking and things just come out. And you get such great clips that you can then make shorter clips, 60 seconds to 90 seconds, somewhere around there that you can then reuse as content. Not only that, you can turn these things into newsletters, the content that comes out of it. You can turn them into other short form posts. There's so many ways that you can repurpose events.

[00:18:22] Michelle J Raymond: If you are looking to build a mailing list, Hey, why not host a registered event on LinkedIn? The fastest way I reckon that people can grow an email list is invite them to a registered Company Page event. After they've given permission. That's the kicker. Wait for permission. After they've done that, you can then add them to your mailing list for followup afterwards. This is an advantage of the Company Page, that's not available over on your personal profile events.

[00:18:56] Michelle J Raymond: So imagine this, your strategy is create a registered event, invite a thousand members, you know your personal connections to these events. Get the team to do the same. Have a runway of a few weeks. Can you see where this is going? Are you with me? You can see how quickly you could build that mailing list. I don't think that very many people use this strategy on the platform. And this is one of those things when you are blinded by the fact that people keep saying to you, your posts aren't seen in the home feed, you don't get as much reach as a personal post, go and build on personal brands.

[00:19:36] Michelle J Raymond: Yeah, that's all well and good until what happens if those personal brands leave your company? Small problem. What happens if you need to replace that talent? You have an even bigger problem because you've now got a workplace that's the ghost town, like we spoke about before, because as a company, it's not just ideal clients that you can use your Company Page for.

[00:19:56] Michelle J Raymond: You can use it to attract top talent. You can also use it to make sure you can find other supply partners. Maybe it's logistics partners. Maybe it's legal support. In any industry, it's not just your company and your customers that make that industry up. Go bigger, go broader, become an industry hub, not just so narrow minded on using your Company Page as somewhere to try and get customers.

[00:20:25] Michelle J Raymond: That's one part of it, but stand out and be an industry hub. And of course the customers will follow where the people are.

[00:20:33] Michelle J Raymond: Let's move on to something else, which I love, and I know not everybody else does. So should you start a LinkedIn newsletter for your Company Page? My answer to this question is yes. But it depends. There's always a disclaimer in these things. If your Page is brand new and you have under a thousand followers, I want you to just hold back for a little bit.

[00:20:57] Michelle J Raymond: I want you to spend some time to create content, build up your numbers and get your systems and processes in place. IE responding to people that comment on your Company Page, religiously, never missing them. Good or bad comments. You're always in there and doing that. If you want a great example of a company that does this. Five star rating. Semrush and their team, it doesn't matter where they show up.

[00:21:23] Michelle J Raymond: They are responding to comments as that Company Page everywhere. And it's just a brilliant example. And one that we included in Business Gold to show people, it's important that Company Pages are responsive. No different to if someone comments on a personal post. Now the Company Page newsletter for me, why are these brilliant?

[00:21:44] Michelle J Raymond: If you've built up your Page following and you're over a thousand and been going for a little while, what can happen is you'll start to realise you need different ways that you can reach people. Now, one of the cool ways that you can do that is you can build up subscribers to your newsletter on LinkedIn.

[00:22:02] Michelle J Raymond: Now, depending whether someone's got their settings turned on, it might be delivered to them in the feed on LinkedIn. It could be sent to their inbox, or it could be sent to their inbox off LinkedIn. We've got all these ways that these newsletters are sent. Why do we care about subscribers? Every time your newsletter goes out, every subscriber gets notified. Think about that. We can't do that with our posts. When we post content, it goes to a small percentage at best of our followers. Imagine if you built up your newsletter subscribers and it goes to every single one of them, as long as their notifications are turned on, every single time you send out a newsletter.

[00:22:43] Michelle J Raymond: Now, as with everything, newsletters have to be valuable. If you are creating a newsletter, because Michelle on the podcast said that you need to go and build subscribers, and that's your whole motivation, I'll give you the handy tip, you are going to lose them just as quickly. But if you wholeheartedly go in with the motto and mindset of being of service to your community.

[00:23:07] Michelle J Raymond: Guess what's going to happen? They are going to be paying you back big time. And so you can create them on a particular topic. You can create newsletters and make them like a traditional newsletter with a around the grounds, what's going on, here's where we've been. Some photos of your employees is hands down, always going to be the best content to include in there.

[00:23:29] Michelle J Raymond: Show what you've been up to. Great way to give an inside view. Show us what's behind the curtain, Wizard of Oz style. And then also it can highlight some of those values that your business, maybe you're out supporting the community. Now don't do it because you want to look good. You have to live those values just as much. These are the kinds of things that are really cool.

[00:23:51] Michelle J Raymond: You're a solopreneur and you wanna know how much time you should spend on your Company Page. This would have to be right up there in the top five questions. My simple answer is this. On LinkedIn and if you have limited resources and a managing this all yourself, you are going to put most of your time and effort into your personal profile and content posted via your personal profile. You are going to set up your Company Page. You are going to pay attention to setting up that Company Page.

[00:24:21] Michelle J Raymond: And you're going to do a really great job because if someone goes from your profile, because they've enjoyed your content personally, and they thinking about working with you and they just want to know, are you a real business? Are you legit? People have all kinds of perceptions of solopreneurs.

[00:24:37] Michelle J Raymond: If you go to across to their Company Page and it's professional and you can't really tell the difference between much bigger companies, people then make a lot of good assumptions about your business. Now you are going to just keep it ticking over. I don't care. Maybe it's one post once every couple of weeks.

[00:24:57] Michelle J Raymond: Maybe it's one post a month. Here's a cool thing that you could do. You can also take your best performing personal posts. You're going to want to write this one down, take your best performing post personally. You're going to use the little identity switcher, which is in the corner of your post down the bottom, and you're going to switch it to say Company Page and you're going to hit repost and it is going to put a copy of that post over on your Company Page.

[00:25:26] Michelle J Raymond: Ta da, you have just got more bang for your buck out of your post. So now that piece of content is working together and you haven't had to do double the work. If you are not taking advantage of this strategy, you are missing out on opportunities. Now, I don't want people to go, Oh, but when you repost, it doesn't go that much further or the analytics don't show up on the Company Page.

[00:25:50] Michelle J Raymond: They'll show over on the personal side. Stop worrying about those kinds of things. Think about what is the impression that you create for people when they arrive on your Company Page. And if they see all of these great posts and it works for employees as well, this isn't just for solopreneurs take your best employee posts and bring them over onto the Page.

[00:26:13] Michelle J Raymond: And who doesn't want to see that the company is acknowledging the work that we've done. Think about it. You have to keep bringing the teams together, right? So use the Page to highlight the person, use the person to highlight the Page. And I'm going to keep going over and over and over this thing again and again.

[00:26:34] Michelle J Raymond: And, one of the cool things that I want to talk about as well is should you? Or should you not use the boost function for posts? Now the boost function is the fancy term for saying, would you like to pay for your post to be seen by more people? It is really easy. People tell me it's very similar to Facebook boost. I haven't used that before. But people tell me it's really simple.

[00:27:01] Michelle J Raymond: Now, here's, what's going to happen is you will use that and think if I pay a couple of hundred bucks, then I'm going to buy my way and I don't have to do all of the work. Um, unfortunately it doesn't work like that. If you don't have a target audience in mind, you don't know what kind of content resonates. You don't know what kind of language you should be using. You don't really have your products and offers and services all in line. That is just making a donation to LinkedIn.

[00:27:30] Michelle J Raymond: Now, if you want to donate to LinkedIn, how about you just send it to me instead? Because I will save you money by telling you boost is not probably the right option for 99.999 percent of businesses. That's not to say our friends at LinkedIn aren't going to be promoting that more and more. I've seen one LinkedIn Live that I'm registered to attend, so I can stay up to date on this whole feature and I'll come back and share with you guys. But ultimately what's happening is you've seen that posts are dropping out of the feed and now all of a sudden LinkedIn are promoting how to use Boost.

[00:28:07] Michelle J Raymond: No surprises. This is probably the first time in the last two years that I would actually say that LinkedIn for Company Pages has really moved onto that border. If not, they're there of pay to play, no longer organic reach, which I totally understand. They're not a charity. Like LinkedIn is here to make money.

[00:28:28] Michelle J Raymond: But if you are someone that doesn't have money to spend on ads, and that's pretty much most people that I come across these days, or their ad budgets have been pulled back significantly, go back to events and go back to newsletters, have a look at your strategies for those. And that is your work around.

[00:28:47] Michelle J Raymond: If I was to say, should you use boost black or white? I would say no. If I asked my friend, AJ Wilcox, who is a LinkedIn Ad specialist, he would also say the same thing. And I think there's better ways, if you have a small amount of budget that you want to use on LinkedIn ads, I would go and use the thought leader ads, which are a new format.

[00:29:09] Michelle J Raymond: And what they are is, the Company Page can pay to get an employee's post seen by more people. Now, if you have someone that has created a really great post and you want to make sure that it gets in front of your ideal audience, go and explore those things and reach out to AJ if you want more details because I think they're brilliant. And I think that we'll see more of that in the future as that becomes more and more popular is what I'm predicting.

[00:29:36] Michelle J Raymond: Now I'm covering a lot of stuff here on Company Pages. It is my topic of choice that I absolutely love. And one of the opportunities that's come to me because of Company Pages, I want to share with you because I am heading to Social Media Marketing World in San Diego, February 18 to 20 in 2024.

[00:29:59] Michelle J Raymond: And I can't wait. Cause I'm going to be sharing about strategies on how to use LinkedIn Company Pages to grow your business. Now, if you are in the U S and you are a podcast listener and you are going to be attending that, or maybe you're coming from overseas, shout out to Sarah Clay and Louise Brogan, who are coming all the way from the other side of the world, I can't wait to meet up with people.

[00:30:21] Michelle J Raymond: If you are going, I do have an affiliate link that I would love for you guys to use. Reach out and connect with me on LinkedIn and I will share that, but I really want to meet as many people as possible, especially podcast listeners. I don't know who you are. I don't know where you are and it would be so brilliant to get the opportunity to meet people.

[00:30:39] Michelle J Raymond: So if you're in the U S. And you are thinking about going, please let me know on LinkedIn, reach out and say, Hey, I'm going so that I can make some time to meet up with people. Safe to say, I'm a little bit excited about doing that, but let's get back to the questions that we have. So we're not going to use boost function.

[00:30:59] Michelle J Raymond: How can you stop people from showing up on your Company Page that don't actually work for the company? Oh, this is one of the biggest problems that we ever see on LinkedIn for Company Pages, and it's probably one of those things that's the bigger the Page, the bigger the brand, the more annoying this is because I say at some point it gets out of control.

[00:31:20] Michelle J Raymond: So for instance, let me explain how this works. Any person can create a LinkedIn profile. And they can go to update their work experience and they can say they work for any company in any role without any verification process. That's mind blowing, right? Think about it. I could go right now and add LinkedIn into my work experience section. So I could go there, add LinkedIn. I could give myself a title of CEO and they have no way of stopping me actually doing that. And this happens everywhere. The Microsoft Company Page, I think shows more employees than actually work at Microsoft. This is how big the problem is. And, it's not easy to fix. You can't just make them go away.

[00:32:04] Michelle J Raymond: You have to reach out to LinkedIn and you have to fill out a form and ask them to remove the offending people, share links to the profiles, et cetera, et cetera. Now this isn't easy. Anything with LinkedIn help right now at this point in time, while we're recording the podcast, it's probably a week to two weeks before you're hearing back from them at best.

[00:32:25] Michelle J Raymond: I don't know what's going on. Maybe it's because the platform has just rolled over to 1 billion members, which is, just again, mind blowing as far as that goes, but this is one of the problems that you have. So as a Page admin, I will put the link for the form that you need to send out and complete to get these people removed from your Company Page.

[00:32:45] Michelle J Raymond: We're starting to see some employee verification processes. On LinkedIn, if you have a company that has more than 10 employees, you can add your domain to the Company Page. And so that people don't have access to the, My Company Tab, which I'm going to talk about in a second. So there's lots of things going on there. I know it's frustrating for people. I know most people wish they could just fix it themselves. But it's really a challenge and not something that's easy.

[00:33:14] Michelle J Raymond: Showcase Pages, this is the next thing that comes up. Do you need one? Should you have one? What makes them different? So a showcase Page has been designed so that if you have a Company Page that acts as, let's call it the umbrella. So that's everything to do with your business.

[00:33:30] Michelle J Raymond: Underneath that you can have what's called showcase Pages, which highlight particular business units or brands within your business. So I use the example, I used to sell raw materials and ingredients in the chemical industry that would go into skincare and beauty products.

[00:33:46] Michelle J Raymond: Now I worked for a company, so we would have the Company Page up there and then I would sell beauty products, but my teammates would sell things that went into food, things that went into agriculture, things that went into health products. There was such a wide range. Now the audience that wanted to know about beauty products were not interested in any of those other areas and vice versa.

[00:34:09] Michelle J Raymond: If we ran all the content through the Company Page, it would mean if you had massive departments, then the beauty people would say, why do I keep seeing the industrial stuff? Why do I keep seeing food stuff? I'm not interested and they may unfollow the whole Page. So by having a Showcase Page, you can run them as mini Company Pages that are still affiliated back to the main Page, but this then creates more work.

[00:34:35] Michelle J Raymond: If you don't have resources, don't go and do it. This is the thing, do not create Showcase Pages if you do not have the resources to keep up with inviting people, creating content, et cetera. The main difference with the Showcase Page is you cannot have employees linked to a Showcase Page.

[00:34:53] Michelle J Raymond: Ie that means that they can't go and update their LinkedIn work experience section with a showcase Page. So brands don't show up that way. I don't know how I feel about that. Sometimes I wish they would change it, but ultimately that is the limitation of a Showcase Page. I use them differently. I use a Showcase Page for instance, for this podcast.

[00:35:16] Michelle J Raymond: So if you go onto LinkedIn for B2B Growth Podcast is a Showcase Page. I don't need to show employees for that. I just need to run separate content so that if I want to point someone in the direction of the podcast, everything's stored in one place. So Showcase Pages. For most people, you don't need them. Most people, it's going to be a bigger pain in the butt than is going to be useful. Unless you happen to be a big company, multinational, then Showcase Pages are definitely going to show up as valuable for you.

[00:35:46] Michelle J Raymond: My Company Tab. We're coming into the last question here. We have made it. The My Company Tab. Have you heard of it? Have you used it? You will only see it if you have over 10 employees. So it needs to be companies of a certain size. And if you're a small business, it doesn't apply to you. What is it? It's a space that is like your internal intranet. It's safe for only your employees on LinkedIn.

[00:36:11] Michelle J Raymond: And it's like an intranet where only your employees have a private space where you can recommend content that they could post. You can see what your colleagues are posting. You can see colleagues from, maybe they live on the other side of the country. You can get to know these other colleagues easily. The other ones that are on LinkedIn. You can collaborate, you can see milestones.

[00:36:34] Michelle J Raymond: But the main thing is that I don't think people in business use this very well or at all. But my favourite thing is if you've got a marketing team that can create some content, you can post it in there like a library and recommend that to your employees and when they hit the post button, it posts under their name, but it's not what we call a repost. It is literally comes across like it's just a personal post. So it's going to go further than if you hit the repost on LinkedIn. So it's a great place that everybody can come together.

[00:37:08] Michelle J Raymond: And again, creating LinkedIn Dream Teams is what I'm all about. You need to get everybody active and get the best out of them. So you'll find that you have people in your team that are happy to support other people that have no intentions ever of creating their own content. So why not? I encourage everybody to come in here to this, my company space.

[00:37:30] Michelle J Raymond: If you've turned on the domain protection that you can only come and join in there, if somebody's LinkedIn login details matches the domain, so the business domain and their login are exactly the same. Otherwise it blocks everyone out. So it's probably the only place that you've got some control over and stays private.

[00:37:47] Michelle J Raymond: Wow. We have just covered 10 questions of the most, I'm going to say they're frequently asked, but they're also what I would say, the ultimate guide to improving your LinkedIn Company Page. I would talk about this all day. I know that podcast listeners, you have other things to do, and I appreciate that.

[00:38:08] Michelle J Raymond: So if you get stuck and there's a question that you want an answer to, which I haven't answered in today's session, I want you to remember that I also have a YouTube channel called @LinkedInForB2BGrowth, which you can go across there and listen to lots of How To videos across LinkedIn and LinkedIn Company Pages.

[00:38:29] Michelle J Raymond: And I'm updating that more frequently. So if there's something I haven't covered here today, then please by all means go across to the YouTube channel and have a look there. Chances are it's sitting there. We've rounded out episode 100. I again just want to thank every listener that has supported me.

[00:38:48] Michelle J Raymond: Neal Veglio, I just want to say thank you to you for your podcast audits that helped me get better. I can't wait to keep doing this into 2024. It's not something that I ever thought I would enjoy as much as what I do, but I love helping other people grow their business and having amazing guests from around the world that give up their time. Experts that share on their particular topics, which will help you.

[00:39:12] Michelle J Raymond: So I have a favour to ask if you have enjoyed this podcast, if you're on Spotify, it doesn't take a lot to hit the rating of five stars. Or if you're on Apple, I know it's a bit complicated on how to write a recommendation and a review, but I would appreciate people that would take a moment to do that. And of course our Android listeners are on other platforms. I appreciate you just as much. So on that note, I'm going to wrap things up. They are my ultimate guides to getting the most out of your Company Page. Don't forget coming out we have the second edition of Business Gold, which is the updated new and improved version so that you're across everything.

[00:39:50] Michelle J Raymond: So it's been fabulous as always. And until next week.

[00:39:53] Michelle J Raymond: Cheers.