Unleash the Power of LinkedIn Company Pages for B2B Growth in 2023. Guest Brenda Meller

Michelle J Raymond: Welcome everybody to the LinkedIn for B2B Growth show. I'm your host, Michelle J Raymond and I am joined by one of my LinkedIn best friends, mentors, teachers, and all round good person, Brenda Meller. Welcome to the show.

Brenda Meller: Hey, Michelle. I am delighted to be here chatting with you today. Thank you so much for inviting me on with you.

Michelle J Raymond: Look, when it comes to company pages, there is no one that I've spent more time discussing these on. So you and I first met around, I'm guessing it's coming up to probably two years ago now,

probably. Yeah.

 if I think about it, we were on Clubhouse. We hosted a weekly chat show, lots of q and as, super popular. We did that for around nine months. So I got to bounce so many ideas off you learn from you, and I wanted to share that with my audience. So I appreciate you coming on. But for those people who haven't met you before, who are you, what do you do and who do you help?

Brenda Meller: Well, awesome. So I help people get a bigger slice of the LinkedIn pie and specifically business professionals. And I work with executives, I work with job seekers, I work with teams. And I'm just having an absolute blast and I like to surround myself with awesome people, people like Michelle J. Raymond, and it's so nice to collaborate with you and talk about company pages, because so often the conversation around company pages is why they don't work and why you should spend more time on your personal profile and activities than on your company page.

And I think you and I share in common, Michelle, that there is just a, a lot of opportunities that exist within company pages. Um, My mentality as it, uh, my approach rather that, as it relates to company pages is more around your company page is highly concentrated. So you don't get as much reach, but the people that you do get there are very interested in you and your business.

So delighted to be here with you today.

Michelle J Raymond: Look, I call that The Greatest Hits Library. That's my term for the company page. So I don't know if you are like me around the same age, I'm 46, but back when I was younger, you used to have to save up all your money to buy a record or a cd, and you would buy that CD and there would only be like three songs on it that you wanted, but you had to pay for 20 and all those other ones you never played, but you had to buy them to get those three ones.

So I say on your company page, turn it into The Greatest Hits Library. No fillers, no fluff. Just give them the best of the best. I know that we're really aligned on that one.

Let's talk about something. So for people that are listening in today that may not have been paying attention to company pages, You know, they might have tried them a few years back, had no success. They were, you know, lacking features and functions. What would you say to them today about the changes that you've seen over the last two years to company pages and maybe why they should take a second look?

Brenda Meller: Well, there's so many things that come to mind when you say changes to company pages, and I almost like, I think because you and I spend so much time on the platform, it's almost like you have to, like how much has really changed in the past two years.

But I think like one of the features on company pages in the beginning, we could see who the followers were and then they took that ability away and then they gave it back to us, and then they added on the ability for us to invite people to follow company pages. And I think for me, that's one of the big major positive changes.

Uh, in the beginning they gave us a hundred page invitation credits, and then they extended it to 250 and a credit, what that means for your viewers and listeners, is if you invite a first level connection to follow your page, and they accept it, that credit comes back to you and you can invite more people out.

And LinkedIn in the beginning was giving us a hundred, and then they moved it up to 250 and they dabbled back and forth. And now I think we're all at 250 a month. As of last night, I only had one credit remaining and I didn't even think about the show. But remember Michelle, when we would do our Clubhouse, we would always not like compete, but we would kind of ante up, how many credits do you have remaining?

Because it would help both of us to keep on with inviting people, right?

Michelle J Raymond: Yeah and I dropped off. When they went to 250. I found it a little overwhelming in the beginning, and I've found, I've struggled a little bit because my growth recently, over the last two years since I've been talking about company pages, has been when I've had Creator Mode on.

So I've been collecting followers more than connections. And so what I've found is my new audience are mostly followers, so I've got a bit of work to do, to go back and create some connections with people so that I can invite them to come and follow my page more easily. Brenda, I've heard some of our colleagues out in the LinkedIn universe that would say that those invites to connect are a waste of time. Nobody accepts them. That's not my personal experience, but I always like to test the waters and see if I'm still kind of, you know, current. Do you still encourage your clients to use those? Because for me it's the fastest way to grow a company page, regardless of whether you can personalize that invite or not, no pages can.

Are you on board with the invite credits or a bit skeptical?

Brenda Meller: Yeah, I think it's really, it's up to you. You know, like you don't have to use your invitation credit. You don't have to be on LinkedIn at all. But I always tell my clients when they come to me, if you're looking to me for advice, I would definitely use your page invitation credits.

And the great thing is LinkedIn allows any admins to send out those invitations to follow your page. And in fact, I think on some of the larger pages, employees can invite, I haven't seen it on any of my pages, myself, Michelle. But more people have the ability to invite their connections to follow a page.

So the approach I like to recommend is think about like a dart board. In the middle of the dart board are the people who know you very well, who when they see you dialing on your cellphone, they're like, oh, it's Brenda. They'll answer it like those people. And then a level out from there is maybe people that you've met in person who who know you, but they're not super close.

And then a level out from there. They might like take a minute to figure out, do I know her? Oh yeah, I remember her from X, Y, Z event. So think about focusing on sending out invitations to the inner circle first and then going out a level from there, and then asking your admin and your team members to do the same.

I mean, of all the connections that we both have on LinkedIn, Michelle, there's many people who, if I pass them on the street, they wouldn't know me. You know, I wouldn't know them, I wouldn't recognize them. But there's a another portion who would. . Right. And that's who I'd like to focus on by sending out those invitations, either filtering and the great thing is LinkedIn will allow us to filter by geography, by industry category, sometimes by company or by university and some of the other filters that I put in place there.

So no, you don't have to do anything. But what I do like is that, you don't, the person doesn't have to accept the follow. And if they do, it's kind of like them raising their hand and saying, yes, I am interested in learning more about Meller Marketing or in supporting you and your business. And often what I find happens is when you send them that initial invitation, they may go, oh, I didn't know she had a page.

And then they pop on over to go to the page. and then they've got their blinders on, right? Because all they're seeing in the feed are posts that you're putting out onto there. And they might take a moment or two to read through some of your recent posts and learn a little bit more about your company and some of the value.

And you know, you never know where the future may lead is my philosophy there. And that's one of the reasons I like to use those credits.

Michelle J Raymond: . And using those filters to have a niche community is just so powerful. And if I think back over two years and there's so many new features that have come through, that's one of my favorites.

Even in that two years, we got LinkedIn articles, we've got LinkedIn newsletters, we had LinkedIn lives. we've now got LinkedIn audios for company pages coming through. Like there has just been so many little things. My most favorite one that I've seen recently is the company pages can now follow other company pages.

Brenda Meller: I don't have them yet.

Michelle J Raymond: Okay. So this is something that's really cool. So when you go into your company page, admin view, typically you can see all of your previous posts and then there's, you can see employee posts and hashtag posts, and there's now a feed where. Follow other company pages.

 Now, there's two strategies to this. You could monitor your competitors for market intelligence and stay up to date with what they're doing. I prefer to follow potential clients pages or customers that I've worked with so that I can support their content with my company page. What it's doing is getting companies more involved in conversations, and I think we're gonna see a lot more of that come through on LinkedIn.

So I won't dive too much into that. But all I can say is if you think about brands getting involved in B2B conversations, driving B2B thought leadership. I think that's where the future of pages is going. For people that might still be skeptical around," yeah, sure maybe there's new features and functions", but why should businesses actually pay attention to their company page?

Brenda Meller: Well, it's, it's interesting cause I, I probably have this conversation with people about once or, so a week when looking at their profile and I'll look at their experience section and there's a gray avatar next to their company name. When we see that gray avatar in your experience section, it either means you don't have a company page yet, or you haven't properly linked your company page back to your profile. But, more important is what happens on the, the viewer's perspective.

Will they kind of go, well, is Meller Marketing even a real business? There's no logo next to it. It looks like it's like not legitimate. Like maybe you're working out of your basement or you're dabbling in, this isn't a real venture yet. So we can create some, some skepticism. Like people visiting your profile and let's say you do have a company page and you haven't fully filled it out, it's not active, there's no posts on there, you, so you click to go onto the logo to go to the company page and there's nothing there.

It's almost like when you go to a new retail store that's been open and you walk inside and there's no one to greet you. And it's, there's nobody behind the, it's not really clear. There's a story even open and you kinda like look around. Like you, you almost like take a back step and look at the doors, have the hours, am I entering the story in off hours , right?

So I think having an active page and having it filled out, even if you're not getting as much traffic as you would on your personal profile, it still is, it's almost like a mini version of your website. And you don't wanna send people to a website and give them a 4 0 4 error, right? You wanna create trust from day one.

Michelle J Raymond: And people can find the company page, not just through searchers on LinkedIn. They can also find it through Google. So this is something that I think people underestimate the power or the importance of the company page because if I Google my business name, you look up Good Trading Co what's gonna happen is , you're gonna see my website first, and then you're going to see my company page second.

And sometimes my LinkedIn profile. So always first page results, right up there at the top. So if I'm doing my research on businesses, of course I'm gonna go to your website, but do I expect you to say anything other than great things about your company? Absolutely not. So I'm gonna go to that next level, and I think LinkedIn's a trusted platform.

So going across to the LinkedIn to see what's going on there. What happens? Is it a ghost town or is it something that really creates a great first impression, like you said? So I think these are the kinds of things that people need to understand that whilst you may not be seeing the pages in the feed as much, and that's a given, I have no argument for that. That is just how it's going at this point in time.

But just know that people find you in all kinds of different ways, and you may not be aware of it, but that doesn't mean they're not finding your page and going is this company, you know, they talk about marketing, but they don't even have an active company page like something,

Brenda Meller: or it's more they go to your company page and they can't find any mention of marketing. It's not in the description, it's not clear like, how do I get ahold of people. That the things that you're posting are recycled industry articles And it's, it's very incohesive. And what will happen is, we as profile visitors or page visitors will click off. We won't reach out and say, I'm not finding marketing.

We'll go on to the next person. We'll go on to the next company and you'll lose our business. You'll lose that opportunity to connect with us.

Michelle J Raymond: Absolutely. I could not agree more with that. So let's talk about what happens for businesses of different sizes. So we've got both ends of the spectrum and everywhere in between.

So we've got our solopreneurs, micro businesses, which may have one or two people. We've got mid-size through to the multinational corporates. Mm-hmm. . Do company pages work for everyone? Would you approach things differently based on sizes?

Brenda Meller: Well, I think first and foremost across the spectrum. I think everyone who has a business, who has a LinkedIn profile should have a company page.

And there's, there's almost like levels of how much information and how active do you need the page to be. And often I have people say, you know, I just don't have time. My most active audience is on Instagram or Pinterest or Facebook. I have a presence here on LinkedIn, but I, I know I should have something, but what's the bare minimum?

Like, what do I need to do? So I'll tell them like, here's the bare minimum that you should have. And the bare minimum is like, set up the page, fill out all the information so that you don't have any insert logo here, or blank banners in the background. You have an about description in there, and if you don't have a website yet, you can even use that website link to redirect it back to your profile and then put one post on the page. That just at bare minimum says, welcome to the official LinkedIn company page for Meller Marketing.

Visit Brenda Meller here on LinkedIn to learn more. So redirect them elsewhere. Now from there, if you are finding like your target audience is on LinkedIn, you definitely wanna spend some time posting and having activity on your company page. So bare minimum you should be posting once a month. I mean, that's like bare minimum, or I would say, I guess bare minimum was be one time only.

But if you wanna go the next level up, it would be one time a month. Ideally, I would say once a week as you are getting started. If you can maintain that cadence over time, then increase it to twice a week, and then if you're starting to see some engagement occurring, likes, comments, shares, those types of things, then increase it to three.

But I only tell people to increase their level of activity on the company page. If there is engagement to support it. You should not be posting five to 10 times a week if you're getting zero like, zero comments and all the way up to the end of the spectrum where maybe it's a very large organization.

Oftentimes they'll either have a social media manager or team who's dedicated in-house to manage the company page for them, or they may outsource it and sometimes I've done this for company pages in the past where the entire company page responsibility was outsourced to me and I was doing posting on their behalf, community engagement on their behalf, et cetera.

I really feel that works best, Michelle, with in-house teams as opposed to outsourcing it for a large organization. Because large organizations, they really wanna have all of their hands in on the language, the tonality, the photos, who's tagging, what products and features we're featuring, and how does that coordinate with all of our other digital activities as well.

So I don't think there's necessarily a one size fits all approach. I think it's based on your business needs, your availability, and even I think to some extent probably your digital acumen as well.

Michelle J Raymond: Yeah. Look, I get that the bigger the company, the stricter, the guidelines are around potentially putting content out there and the processes and approvals and yeah for me personally, I've probably had that similar experience. And if we go to the other end where it's a really small business mm-hmm. that's looking to outsource, to someone else because they don't have, you know, the resources for a full-time marketing person, that can be tricky as well, because often what I find comes at the very beginning of my conversation as I say, what are your business goals? Right? You know, if you don't have business goals, then we can't align a LinkedIn strategy that drives you towards those goals. You know? Otherwise you are posting for posting sake, which is not something that you or I would ever, ever encourage people to do right?

For me. I also find, I'm gonna ask you a question that's kind of an extension of that. Company pages are like the umbrella side of pages. And then underneath that we also have showcase pages, right? Product pages. Now, I think that lots of people get drawn to those, cause LinkedIn gives us those features and they look good, and it seems like it's a good idea to split everything up.

I would say that for most businesses, I don't think it's a good idea to actually have multiple showcase pages and product pages because of the resources required to manage those and create content. Do you have like a cutoff point for who you think those pages are good for or how they can be used by everyone in a different way?

Brenda Meller: So I'll give an example of a client I worked with recently as a major organization that was launching a new product targeted towards an entirely different audience. And their main page was more of a consumer page. And this new division was more focused on a B2B type of an audience. We knew that, and I kind of did a side-by-side comparison, pros and cons.

If we do it under the main business page, versus if we create a showcase page, what do we gain and what do we lose by doing so. And one of the. advantages of launching a showcase page is we could solely focus on this particular product category and speak to entirely different audiences than we were reaching on their main page.

 One of the downfalls, however, was that the showcase page can't be linked to employees on their profile and it can't be put in the experience section. So we had to rely a little bit more on employees actually going to the page and re-sharing the content and not just for traffic coming out of it.

Um, I do, I don't think it makes sense to launch a showcase page for every product and service that you're offering for your organization. And I think going back to exactly the point you said, Michelle's a resource requirement, and you don't wanna just launch it with the plans of closing it off in three to four months.

You wanna launch it with plans of maintaining the presence on that page. At minimum posting once a month, but really probably two to three times a week on the page to keep fresh content on there all the time as people are coming and visiting the page. And you certainly can use scheduling tools to schedule that content. But the scheduling tools do not allow for tagging of people and companies, so you have to go in and correct those. And the scheduling tools don't work as best for community engagement. I always prefer to come back onto the platform, to do it for them.

Michelle J Raymond: On that note, I actually, heard a rumor. I'll see whether my little birdies come true or not, but there is the scheduling function that we see on personal profiles post is coming to company pages allegedly. I'm just putting it out there. Let's see if it comes off, but mm-hmm. allegedly this quarter, so I've got my fingers crossed.

Cause I think it will help some people to be a bit more consistent. I'm with you. They have to come back and obviously engage with people. You can't just post and forget about it. It's not quite that simple. But it'll be interesting to see where the new features come and where the new functions come to help page admins really reach, like you said.

For me, Showcase pages there's another way that I use them and I, I dunno if you've got a company page or a Showcase Page, but for the books that I've got, sometimes I would have a Showcase Page just so we can tag them because I think it looks. Good. Um, in a comment or a post to tag to be able to draw people back to find out more info.

 But I have no intentions on those particular pages of ever creating more content or inviting people. But that's okay cause that's a strategy that I've thought about. What I find is people come to me, Brenda, and they've got all these pages, they have no idea what to do with them, and they're just so overwhelmed that they drop the ball on all of them and just go, right.

It's in the too hard basket. And I think you and I are all about simplifying and consistency is probably the key to success.

Brenda Meller: You know what though, on the book page, I wanna just tell you, like for my book, Social Media Pie, it's a LinkedIn strategy book. Yeah. Uh, I did create it as a Company Page intentionally because I wanted it to sit inside my experience section of my profile. And the great thing is I published my book in January of 2021. So when I added it to my profile every January, it'll send out a network notification. It hasn't happened yet for this month, but it'll send out a network notification and people will congratulate me for being two years author at Social Media Pie and that's an opportunity for you, me to message them back and say, thanks. Um, and talk a little bit about the book, or if you don't have a copy yet, here's where you can purchase a copy. So I use it as a marketer. I use it as a tool to promote the book itself, but I have seen other people put their books in on showcase pages.

Michelle J Raymond: I've got one of both. So Business Gold is a company page because Lynnaire and I need to both be the administrators. That's why we set it up originally, so we could have both have access, uh, and also show it on our work experience.

 The LinkedIn Branding Book, we actually set up a company page as a our community page, and this book is one sub-product out of that. We've got the podcast as well, so they're showcase pages. So again, it's never a one size fits all. We've gotta have a look at what resources, what are your goals, what are you trying to achieve?

 And this is the thing that I think people skip over. Another thing that I think people skip over when you set up a company page, Brenda, it takes, what, 15 minutes? If you tick all the boxes and follow the prompts, it's pretty quick to get these done. Mm-hmm. , and it's free. Mm-hmm. . But I also think that people do a poor job and they don't realize, I've read some stats that a completed page gets something like 11 times more clicks, 30% more impressions.

Do you have some tips that you can give people that, what makes a company page set up? What makes it good? Let's start with say the about section. Do you have some tips for in there?

Brenda Meller: Um, so it's interesting cause I feel like a lot of people just take, like LinkedIn literally on everything that goes in there and like the about, okay, well let's go to our company website and grab the about from there and just slap it in, you know, in this section.

And, for the most part LinkedIn doesn't allow us for HTML formatting, for bolding, for hyperlinking, for things like that. We are hearing that hope Hyperlinking will be coming to both about statements and hopefully descriptions on company pages. But what I like to do is, in my about statement, I always like to think about what's in the preview area at the top, knowing that most people will not click on see more.

So making sure that we're capturing the attention of our ideal target audience at the top of the about, and they give us, I believe it's 2000 characters in the company page description. So I'm a marketer and I'm an opportunistic marketer, and my advice for people is always like, if they give you 2000 characters, use as many of them as you can, but try to make it interesting.

Maximizing the first couple lines that are previewable. After that, then you do short, we like to call it snackable chunks of copies so they can skim through and read. Using all caps for section headings or for keywords. Now, if you want, you can use some of these other platforms where you can do bolding in different font and things like that.

Just keeping in mind if you use that, LinkedIn doesn't read it as a word, it reads it as like a, a picture, so you're losing the SEO value of it. But the trade off is you can bold things that are used in there. And the other thing I like to do is a work around is instead of doing a bulleted list, I will use colorful emojis to add a little pop of color. For you, and I'm just pulling, pushing right above me. I see that you've got this teal green and then you've also got the pink color. So using like those colored circles or if there are other icons in the emoji library to use for them, and then also in the about statement, putting a call to action for your ideal target audience.

If you want to learn more about booking me as a speaker, go here. If you wanna learn more about my book, come here. If you're looking to work for a Meller Marketing visit our careers page, here it is. So making it as useful as possible, but also giving people some type of a, a call to action on what to do next after reading that section.

Michelle J Raymond: And I think contact details are always handy because whilst they're a little bit easier to find now on a company page, one of the things I always found frustrating is that there were so many clicks for someone to try and look for. How do they contact you if they don't press the call to action button, which can often be learn more, not imply this is where you can come and, you know, find out how to reach people. My dream is that we have an inbox, a direct message inbox for company pages. Mm-hmm. , if I was to ask the LinkedIn fairies for one thing, that's probably at the top of my list. Do you have something that you would ask them for?

Brenda Meller: Oh, you know what? Notifications inside a company page. Can you like bring those to me. You know, like right now, notifications, the bell at the top of your page is for personal notifications or of your individual profile. Company page notifications, you have to go inside the page and even there's a newer feature that they launched within the past I think it's some of the past year , the lead gen forms and. I mean, you know, sounds great in theory and I've only gotten like five to seven in, and they have,

You got that many?

 The interesting thing is rather than driving them to book me for one-to-one coaching or for team training, I changed my lead gen form to download my free list of LinkedIn tips, and then they fill out the form and I also give them the webpage where they can go and do it themselves.

 With that lead gen form, you do get the opportunity to add them to your marketing email list for that. So I get it, a couple people, but the problem is they fill out the form and I don't get a notification. It's like three levels deep that you need to go and even then, it's not a notification.

It shows you the number of form completion. So you have to think, did I have five last time or did I have seven? And then I gotta open it up. And I didn't even notice when you download it. I don't even think they're in date or sequential. I don't know what the order is. So I have to look through my out email box and see, have I sent them a message?

Have I done a follow up with them yet? So I think there's a lot of opportunity for improvement, you know, unfortunately in that area.

Michelle J Raymond: One thing around notifications, which used to scare me was we got this ability to comment as company pages really easily in the feed and I loved it except when someone responded, we weren't notified.

 I was too scared to use it cause I was like, imagine if my company Good Trading Co goes and does a comment. Yeah, it's really thoughtful. I'd love to help and then someone says, that would be great. Can you contact me? And I ignore it because I'm not notified. I was like, that's worse for my brand than not commenting.

So the good news is that's been fixed, is my intel on that one. So you should get notified if someone responds.

Brenda Meller: Does that that notification sit inside the company page notifications now, then

Michelle J Raymond: It should do, it should do just normal ones. So that kind of little things I'm hoping will fix over time and evolve over time and make life a little bit easier. But this is where I think notifications, making things a little bit easier. That would be one thing that I wish the Page's team could make life easier for page admins to keep a track of all that. Because you are right, there are things that you go "have I seen that before?

Brenda Meller: I think that's a concern on the platform as a whole. When features roll out, we don't get notified of them. There's like usually a, a buzz that happens within the LinkedIn training and coaching community where we, we talk amongst each other and we share those.

But, I mean we have a network tapped in that does this, and then we'll post and talk about it, which is when the rest of the world will find out. I mean, they find out from us, they find out from people using the features going, Hey, did you see this?

Michelle J Raymond: And the thing is, once that buzz dies down from all of us and we all find, we post about it cause we wanna be first and make sure everyone knows we're across something, and then two weeks later we don't talk about it again because the next features and the people that miss those original posts, like even if 50 trainers and even if we cover a million, we're at 2 million, 5 million, there's 875 million people on LinkedIn. We can't cover all of that, no matter how much we wish we could. Right. Um, so this is the craziness of it.

But let's talk about content because I think content's the real opportunity.

So if we rewind back when I first started talking about company pages, maybe coming up to three years ago almost, if I start thinking about that they were broadcasts, they almost were like all about the company. Here's our facts and figures, we're so amazing, uh, and they read like ads. Fast forward to 2023, what type of content can businesses use that's really going to help them grow their business over time?

Brenda Meller: So I think it's always coming back to thinking about who is your ideal target audience, and what do they care about? What are the pain points that your products and services can address to help your ideal target audience? Or what are the resources that are gonna help your ideal target audience and help them to do better in their jobs with their organizations, with their roles, and then providing more of that content out there.

So whether it is providing, you know, checklists or resources or videos. What I do, Michelle, is when people will, either DM me, email me, or sometimes text me a question about LinkedIn. The most convenient place that I will put that is in a company page post, and I'll put it as a featured LinkedIn question from the page, and then I will do answer by @ Brenda Meller. So getting back to your point, what kind of content grows followers? Well, we know that there's not a lot of traffic coming to the company page. So when I tag myself, it actually pushes it into the homepage feed for Brenda Meller, where then some of my first level connections will see that and come back to the page and start following it.

 So that's just one technique. And then another one is humanizing your page by featuring real people. And you'll, you'll recall, I think right now as I'm talking about it. Employee of the month. Right.

That was me.

Right. And for me, the first time I did this, um, was, I think it was about two years ago. It was in between interns. I was the only person, but I did a picture, it was a fun like, you know, expressive photo of me and it was on the Meller Marketing page congratulating Brenda Miller for being named Employee of the month in October, 2020 or whatever year that was in month that was. And I tagged myself in the post. And then I commented as Brenda Meller saying, I'm so proud of the award and I said, I hope I get like the parking spot for the month and the coffee mug.

And everybody knew it was a little bit like, you know, tongue in cheek click. They knew that Brenda Meller is Meller Marketing. Meller Marketing is Brenda Meller. But it humanizes your business. And for larger organizations, if you have large teams, I think it's a great thing to do if you do have an employee of the month or maybe employees celebrating service anniversaries or employees that are joining your team.

And even sometimes just as a spotlight on, like pick somebody who is a very active person on LinkedIn who's engaging regularly with the page. Tap them on the whole shoulder and say, Hey Michelle, could we feature you on the LinkedIn page? And then give them a series of maybe three to five questions to answer.

And, and they're more personal, like, do you have any pets? If so, what are their names? What's your favorite place to vacation? What books are you reading right now? And then maybe the final question is something related to, but not directly a sales pitch for your business. So if it were me , what's the best LinkedIn feature you've noticed this year?

Or something like that. And that will, you know, when you tag them, it brings that into their homepage feed. It engages and other people want to acknowledge those individuals and they make, oh, this is kind of interesting. And then they click on follow. . So it's a little technique there.

Michelle J Raymond: I think anytime that we can see behind the Curtain Wizard of OZ style, like how do you make things happen?

Who makes things happen? How should I use your products or services? Mm-hmm. , what am I going to get in return for it? Any of that kind of stuff is the thing that the modern B2B buyer, they're doing their research, they want answers. Is your company trustworthy? Do I like them? Do you know what you're talking about?

You know, so that they can be well informed. And I think that's the thing that we need to keep in mind for companies these days on LinkedIn, is that you've ultimately got a modern buyer that has information at their fingertips, and we need to make sure that we've given them the best of the best information.

And a company page is often where they'll go to ,after they may have come across someone that might be building their personal brand. It might be one of your employees. But don't think that before they are gonna reach out and give you some money that they're gonna just make sure that the company aligns with what that individual's saying.

So I'm always a fan of bringing both of those two things together. I love the idea of tagging employees. I think company pages that highlight employees and other individuals might be key individuals in the industry, they're the ones that are starting to build communities instead of page followers. And that's my prediction for 2023, is that we're gonna start seeing pages and brands act more like communities as opposed to just collecting page followers.

And I would hope that people listening in have a process in place to go and connect with those page followers that you are collecting along the way. The second and third degree connections. Is the sales team involved? Are you passing that information on to somebody? Because nurturing those relationships I think is where the growth comes from.

Mm-hmm. , Brenda, I'm gonna wrap up today with what I do every single show is I want people to have one actionable tip that they can take away for their company page. Mm-hmm. What is an action that you think would be, the one that would have the most impact for people that you think they should go back and take a look at or create a particular type of content or try a new feature?

What is your tip for this week?

Brenda Meller: So my tip is to use your action button on your page to drive people, not just to a landing page or a contact us form or something like that, but driving them to a place where you collect their email address. For example, a lead magnet with a downloadable checklist, or you know, maybe it is to subscribe to your email list or some other place, but some place that you are giving them the opportunity to opt in and provide their email address hopefully in exchange for something of value for them.

Michelle J Raymond: The ultimate goal is to get more people off LinkedIn and into your other systems off LinkedIn, whether that's people, funnels, websites, you name it. But this is the opportunity that you have on your company pages, being able to direct that traffic. So Brenda, as always, I have loved this conversation.

I am excited that we've actually got to talk about company pages, first episode of the year because I think it's something that people can't ignore any longer. I appreciate you sharing all of your knowledge so generously, and I encourage anybody that's listening, please reach out and connect with Brenda or follow Brenda, on LinkedIn and I'll put her details in the show notes and let her know that you were listening into the LinkedIn for B2B Growth podcast so that she knows that that's where you came across her. So Brenda, I appreciate you and I look forward to, working with you more this year.

Brenda Meller: Thank you, Michelle. This is an awesome interview and I can't wait to hear it live and share it out with my network. I really appreciate the time with you today.

Thank you so much.

Michelle J Raymond: Have a good one. Cheers.