Unravelling LinkedIn Company Page Innovations with Lynnaire Johnston

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Lynnaire Johnston: Today we're gonna talk about new features to begin with, and I want to talk about a number of them. I've, there's about 10 or 12 since you and I last got together but I, we won't be able to cover all of those obviously. But I do want to talk about some of those and I'd like to have a chat about trends, what we've been seeing on LinkedIn Company pages in the last 12 months. And then any ideas or new tricks that you might have up your sleeve that you've been using that work really well and that you think people should be paying attention to first.

[00:00:29] Lynnaire Johnston: New features and the one that I'm most excited about is messaging, being able to get messages to company pages. If you could just give us a quick rundown on how that's going to work, because you are more likely to have a seen it and b tried it out. And so let's hear a little bit about messaging LinkedIn company pages.

[00:00:47] Michelle J Raymond: I'm gonna let you in on the secret that I haven't even tried it, and I'm gonna tell people why, because I'm in the same boat that the reason why you probably haven't tried it either. I've got a backup page admin. So before I dive into that, if you have more than one page admin, this feature is not gonna pop up for you immediately.

[00:01:05] Michelle J Raymond: It might come in the future, but it's not rolling out. So for me, when I was asked to be in the trial, I had a choice. Lynnaire, do I wanna test out the new feature messaging, which I was dying to do or do? Do I want to remove my second page admin who helps me set up advances and runs a whole bunch of stuff in the background.

[00:01:23] Michelle J Raymond: For me, I chose the page admin had to stay. So for those of you who have multiple page admins, you need to make that choice as well. But I have done my research so I can have this conversation, but excellent. Ultimately, If we come back to what we spoke about when we wrote Business Gold is LinkedIn's been driving brands to lead conversations to get involved in conversations.

[00:01:45] Michelle J Raymond: Now, it's always been crazy that to have a conversation with a company page, you have to have a conversation with an individual who you may or may not know is behind that. The bigger the brand, the less chance you've got of knowing. And what happens is, quite often company pages end up being like a faux customer service complaints line.

[00:02:04] Michelle J Raymond: So there are brands out there that if they, people don't get a response on, say, their customer service, they jump onto socials, whether it's Twitter, LinkedIn, and start diving and dropping everything. And really there's no way of managing that on the platform. So LinkedIn's now giving us ways. Now it's not all bad.

[00:02:22] Michelle J Raymond: I think there's some sales inquiries that we miss out on. You don't want to lose people, but if you're a super admin or a content admin, you'll have access to being able to manage the inbox. And essentially, as a user of LinkedIn, reaching out to message a company page it's as simple as pressing a message button.

[00:02:40] Michelle J Raymond: You've got a couple of options which you need to select from. I think there's four, which can't get customized at this point in time. But literally select, from the dropdowns. And then type your message and then theoretically someone on the other side is then gonna start responding to you.

[00:02:54] Michelle J Raymond: Now I think there'll be a few hiccups with this process, with the new box. I dunno about you Linaire, if you've heard anything different from the people who've been trialing it. But I think there'll be a bit of, oh, what's this inbox? Cuz I'm gonna guess LinkedIn's not really gonna do a great job of showing people how to use it.

[00:03:10] Lynnaire Johnston: I would agree with that. Absolutely. Which is a pity but that's the way LinkedIn rolls.

[00:03:15] Lynnaire Johnston: I see this as a great move forward. I can't imagine why it's not been done before. And I really think that once it starts to get rolled out, I've only seen it live on one person's page. So it's clearly going to be something that's going to take a while. Fantastic. Messaging, so big thumbs up to LinkedIn around all of that. So what's next on my list of things to ask you about today?

[00:03:36] Lynnaire Johnston: Commenting and reacting as a company page. Now I think that this has got legs as well in terms of being able to promote your brand by being engaging on people's posts or other company pages posts. So is that how you see this? Is being used, and is this a good idea to be commenting and reacting as a company?

[00:04:01] Michelle J Raymond: I think it absolutely is a great idea. Again, brands have so many more resources than individuals quite often, so the more that we can get involved in these conversations, the better. Now the problem is quite often, I dunno about your experience, but mostly what I receive is company pages commenting on my posts that are probably competitors or in some way, shape or form, not adding to the conversation.

[00:04:25] Michelle J Raymond: So I'm not anti-competitive, commenting on my page or anything like that or on my post, but it's tends to be those same kind of people that are using automation tools and sprouting lead gen and trying to direct traffic away. Now, that's not the intention that's behind this. It's about how do you add to the conversation so it's not even theoretically about.

[00:04:46] Michelle J Raymond: Competitor or not, it's like, are you bringing the conversation forward? I absolutely love it. The problem that we had early on when they launched it is that we didn't get a notification if somebody responded. So I was hesitant to use it because if I went out there commented as Good Trading Co, somebody responded, I don't get notified, I don't respond to them.

[00:05:06] Michelle J Raymond: Then they think what's the point? And it leaves a bad impression, which we don't want that for our brands. So for me, that's been fixed. So now we don't have that problem anymore. It's so easy to do. For those of you who haven't tried it, just go to any post on the home feed and there's a little photo of your, your own picture and there's a dropdown and it will bring up the company logo and just you can comment and you change that purpose.

[00:05:31] Michelle J Raymond: So you don't have to keep, worrying about who am I commenting as? But for me it's really easy. And again, something where I think you can now start to connect. Company brand and personal brand, which is, you know, all about what the LinkedIn branding book was about. How do you bring the two together rather than going, oh, I don't wanna deal with a logo.

[00:05:49] Michelle J Raymond: And all those are old school, kind of comments that we used to get a lot of notice. We don't get those anymore. Lynnaire I have to hear those. Goodness.

[00:05:57] Lynnaire Johnston: No. Thank goodness for that. One of the ways that we think that commenting can be really used well is when a company page is following another company page that might be, say like in a local community.

[00:06:08] Lynnaire Johnston: And then the company then that say yours and my client's company is then if we are commenting as them on this other page, it looks like then that we are part of the community. We're adding value, we're promoting the brand. By just by being there. But we're also then supporting what's going on in the local community.

[00:06:27] Lynnaire Johnston: And if it's a post about something that's some good that has been done in the community, I see some real value in that. I think that it can be you have to be a bit careful about what you choose to comment on the post that you choose to comment on because you are representing a company and so there are values that you have to adhere to obviously.

[00:06:46] Lynnaire Johnston: But I can see that building a community from a page is a really good way to do that by commenting on other posts and so that's something that we are going to be doing more of.

[00:06:58] Michelle J Raymond: Definitely. I think there's one other cool way that you and I both use it that other people might want to give it a go is that we created a company page for Business Gold.

[00:07:08] Michelle J Raymond: So when I'm scrolling through LinkedIn and someone's having questions about, company pages, then I can go in and tag the company page and then comment as the company as well. So what I do is I'll quite often come along and I'll see something and I think, oh, actually what would make a difference is.

[00:07:25] Michelle J Raymond: Business Gold. And I comment as Business Gold. Check out this book World's first book. And that's another way I do it with my podcasts. It's another cool way. They're company pages. Someone's looking for podcast recommendations, ta-da. Here it is. So there's some cool ways that you can use it, but always be mindful.

[00:07:40] Michelle J Raymond: Don't be like from the other side of LinkedIn. The ones that wreck it for all of us.

[00:07:45] Lynnaire Johnston: Yeah. No, I agree. And I like that idea and that's something I should be doing more of because then you are associating yourself with the brand as well. So I think that's excellent move.

[00:07:54] Lynnaire Johnston: Alright, now audio events for pages. We've really gone hard out on audio events and since they became available, we mainly do them from my personal profile because of course we get more people then to attend. But I think audio events for pages is a really good innovation except. There is no replay yet, and I tend to feel that once that becomes available then we may well see something more happening with that.

[00:08:26] Lynnaire Johnston: So tell me what experience you might have been seeing with audio events and whether any of your clients are interested in doing audio events. Are they seeing the value in these?

[00:08:38] Michelle J Raymond: I was just having a conversation about this with one of my clients yesterday. So the conversation went, okay, Michelle, we've been posting, regularly for the last six months, and they only pretty much focus on their company page, right?

[00:08:49] Michelle J Raymond: So we're evolving to the employees, but right now it's, Wholly and solely focused on the company page and they're having success with her. We were looking like everyone else can post, what can we do differently? And so LinkedIn audio is a great way to start getting a whole industry involved in conversations.

[00:09:07] Michelle J Raymond: Grab a topic. Maybe it's the topic, dejo, like what's the one that everybody's talking about? So if it was LinkedIn chat, g p t would be it, right? But industry has their equivalent. It doesn't matter which one you go to, there's the latest and greatest. Like I come from the beauty industry, it was all about clean beauty.

[00:09:23] Michelle J Raymond: That was the day. Now we're, going to the next levels of that. But I love the idea of being able to lead conversations. There's a theme that you're gonna see running through with the things and tools we've been given and what LinkedIn wants us to do. Brands should be thought leaders, not just individuals.

[00:09:40] Michelle J Raymond: And so I've seen the roadmap and there is recording audios on that roadmap. I don't know. When the timing is, I can't, share about anything along those lines. I don't know. But ultimately that will come for those of you who wanna work around, you can use auto AI and connect it up. I don't know whether it's within the rules or not, but it's possible.

[00:09:58] Michelle J Raymond: But essentially conversation builds community. I'm gonna say this about a thousand times in the next 45 minutes, maybe. Lucky it's not a drinking game where we take a shot of in every time I say conversations and community for company pages. But that's what we're headed towards. So think about how do I use these tools to build a community And having conversations is the best way and fastest way I've found, I dunno about your experience, Linaire, but it's something personal about having those conversations with people directly.

[00:10:30] Lynnaire Johnston: Absolutely agree. And I was interested when I was reading the latest HubSpot report about social media trends to see that there are a couple of things in there that really do relate to what we are talking about. And one of them is building community, just as you've been saying. And that brands do need to build community.

[00:10:48] Lynnaire Johnston: We are better to do that on LinkedIn. If you are a business, you want to be on a business social media platform, and LinkedIn is the only game in town of course. And so you do need to be here. And doing that, and also they mentioned talking about customer service coming to social media and you've already mentioned that.

[00:11:04] Lynnaire Johnston: And so I see that there. That's really probably where the messaging again, will come in. But it. I'm talking about customer service in a really positive way, I think, and being able to help people if they've got questions about a product or a service or how it's used or what they might be experiencing with it.

[00:11:21] Lynnaire Johnston: I think that kind of directness is really important, and that directness comes back to audio events where if you have a CEO or a leader of a company or people from the C-Suite fronting up to an audio event and taking questions from people, talking about products, showing people how they can be used and generally talking to people one-on-one, just like you were saying, I think that really is going to help do exactly that, build community in a way that simply hasn't been possible before because on lives like this, you and I can talk to each other, but we can't directly talk to anybody in the audience.

[00:11:58] Lynnaire Johnston: But with lies, you can do that because they can come up on stage, I'm sorry, with audios, they can come up on the stage and you can involve them. And I think that is an excellent way of being able to use them. But until the replays come along, I think their value is only, a per small percentage of where it's where it's going to go.

[00:12:16] Lynnaire Johnston: Audio events. What's next on my list? Alright. Post scheduling. Are you finding that really useful? For, for your clients. Plot spoiler we're very much, I have to say,

[00:12:29] Michelle J Raymond: I absolutely love post scheduling. Not for me, but for my clients, absolutely. Mine's a bit all over the shop, but that's a story for another day.

[00:12:38] Michelle J Raymond: But always with a disclaimer, I love post scheduling. So for those of you who haven't used it, basically you create post at the time that works for you and schedule it at a time that works for your audience. That's the simple answer. What I don't like is, and it's always the way you check your post a thousand times before you schedule it, and then there's a typo or there's a mistake and you wanna go back and edit and you can't.

[00:13:00] Michelle J Raymond: So I like to always just flag that is the one thing that I'm hoping they'll fix soon. But essentially being able to edit it after it's scheduled would be great because then you could work with your clients and say, look, we've posted it, scheduled it. Go in and check and just see if there's anything you wanna change.

[00:13:15] Michelle J Raymond: But that being said, I love the idea of being able to plan content in advance, not having the cost of third party tools, having the different formats that are now available. I think it's one of my favorite features that they've released in the, last six to 12 months because I think.

[00:13:32] Michelle J Raymond: If you sit down and batch create content. And what I mean by that is sit down at once and write three posts and cover the whole week. It's easier to do it all at once than wake up. And if you're running a business, what happens the day gets away from you. Shiny light. There's a customer service complaint there's all kinds of things that happen when you run a business.

[00:13:51] Michelle J Raymond: So being able to schedule things down in advance, one, I think it saves time. Two, make sure it gets done. But three, I think you can have a strategy around it rather than just what do I feel like creating today? And that's not a strategy. It's better than nothing, don't get me wrong. But I think when you plan things out, you can get rewards faster and returns on your time quicker.

[00:14:14] Lynnaire Johnston: And I agree that planning and it is really important because you can make sure you've got all the different formats covered. And if you have a business, it does different kinds of products and services, not just one thing, then you can make sure that over a period of time that you cover all of those in a controlled planned way.

[00:14:29] Lynnaire Johnston: And then also that you can add in extra things that might come up that do need to be covered because something has happened. There might be something in the news, for example, but then you've still got a little bit of leeway to be able to add extra things. If you want to do that, and I'm like you, they work really well for our clients, but we don't tend to use them on our own posts because I'm sure that you're like me, that when you put something up you wanna check back in a few minutes and see whether anybody's responded to it.

[00:14:56] Lynnaire Johnston: And then do that several times throughout the day just to make sure that you are right front and center and not being seen to be somebody who posts and ghosts. I think that important to be making sure that you do that. I think the company pages probably need to be a bit more aware of responding to comments, but because there aren't as many comments on a company page post, which is what we find, but I will just ask you to clarify, to make sure that's right.

[00:15:25] Lynnaire Johnston: Then we, but we get more on our own post personal posts that there's not that same kind of need really to be there in monitoring the post. Is that a fair comment or do you think that pages need to be there in monitoring the post all the time?

[00:15:38] Michelle J Raymond: Look, I don't think you have to be as. Babysitting the posts we would say, which means, hang around over that first kind of hour.

[00:15:45] Michelle J Raymond: Now I've moved away from that with my personal stuff as well because I found what I was doing is I was posting first thing in the morning, here's why. Posting first thing in the morning, which works for my audience cuz I shout out to all the US people, they're awake and it all works.

[00:15:58] Michelle J Raymond: But then what I would do is I would sit around and respond to all the comments cuz I, that helps, get my content seen by more people. But then I lost my most productive hours of the day. So then I never caught up for the rest of the day. So I've had to play around with things and that's what I always encourage.

[00:16:14] Michelle J Raymond: Experiment experiment to see what works. You're right. Comments don't come as much on company pages. And to be honest, with the reach on company pages as it is, we all know it's down the toilet. I'm not here to pretend that I've found the magical golden goose that can change that today besides paying for it.

[00:16:29] Michelle J Raymond: But the ultimate thing there is just make sure you do Like I, I made a whole YouTube video recently on one of my favorite products, which is the remarkable Now, I love it Lynnaire because I, oh I've got to buy it, right? Yes, that's right, you did. I love the remarkable, but every time I saw an ad for Remarkable, cuz they must have been retargeting me because I went to the website, these ads would show on my feet and they look like posts and there was all these comments and they were complaints.

[00:16:58] Michelle J Raymond: They were people that were loving the product. They were everything. And nobody had responded. Now I thought maybe once it was a bad, just a one-off bad time. But every time I see their ads, the same problem keeps popping up and it's a missed opportunity for those who love the product. They're your ambassadors, right?

[00:17:16] Michelle J Raymond: They're people like me telling the whole world that I love it. The other thing is, you've got unaddressed complaints, which then if I'm someone that's considering buying it, cuz you've shown me the ad and you're not addressing those complaints, that creates an impression of you don't care about customer service.

[00:17:32] Michelle J Raymond: So this is where I think commenting and responding to comments as company pages is really important and another opportunity to have those conversations. Now this is feedback that you're getting directly from your target audience and they're ignoring it. So yeah, I did a whole YouTube video on that one just to say, look, this is what I would do, this is how I would improve it.

[00:17:52] Michelle J Raymond: And whilst it's not, they're not alone. They're not Robinson Cruso in this whole problem. I'm sure you see it all the time, but being responsive sets a standard for how I think that the company would interact with me if I had an issue.

[00:18:05] Lynnaire Johnston: Yes, I agree with, and you, there are many instances of the very same sort of thing.

[00:18:10] Lynnaire Johnston: And I think that if you are as a company on LinkedIn, then you need to be aware that people can take that opportunity to say things, positive things and negative things and really make a make a response. I think that's a crucial communication, Michelle. Doesn't it always come back down to communicating?

[00:18:27] Lynnaire Johnston: People do business with people. And so just communicate with people and tell them what is going on. Because if you look at any PR disaster anywhere in the world, on any topic at any time, the main issue has. Was always, nobody has told us what is going on. And I think that is, can be the same in a situation like this.

[00:18:46] Lynnaire Johnston: Alright, let's move on to trends and the things that we are both seeing. And one of the things that you've mentioned already is the fact that organic reach not quite at the same level as we once saw to put it delicately. But I do think that there might be some ways around that.

[00:19:06] Lynnaire Johnston: And one of them that's had a bit of publicity in the last few months has been the idea of personal posts being boosted by companies. So if you could talk us through that. So it's the same, I think as if a company was boosting its own posts, but instead of doing that it's boosting posts otherwise, in other words, paying.

[00:19:28] Lynnaire Johnston: For them boosting posts of their top employees. Now, when I first heard about this, it was still in in beta testing and I don't know that it's been rolled out. I don't think I've seen an actual example except for the first one. So several questions there. Is this a good idea? Do you think this will help company pages and are we seeing it or can we expect to see it soon?

[00:19:53] Michelle J Raymond: I last time I checked with AJ Wilcox, who I know you had on your show recently. Last time I checked, it hadn't been rolled out further. I don't even think he had access to it it was a test. Yes, in theory, this whole pay to play, I can see where LinkedIn's going with it. Obviously, they wanna make money.

[00:20:09] Michelle J Raymond: That's why we get to enjoy this platform mostly free. So I get it from that perspective as a user or sorry, as a, LinkedIn for B2B growth kind of trainer. I look at it from a business perspective. Would I want that option as a business? Absolutely. Because what I read a really interesting post the other day from someone at LinkedIn, and it was essentially saying that when it comes to building brand awareness, organic is not the way to go because you're just showing content to people you're already connected to, right?

[00:20:39] Michelle J Raymond: So they already know your stuff. So the only way if you're looking to grow brand awareness is to show it to people who have never seen your content. And it made me take a step back because I was like, oh, I've never really thought about it like that. If a brand awareness play, you need to be in front of eyes that don't know you, and that's not our, initial things.

[00:20:58] Michelle J Raymond: Having content come from an employee and promoting that. I absolutely love that idea in general because I think. That whole thing of, not seeing who's behind the company is so important, who's behind the curtain. And so from that perspective, I really love that idea. But then it becomes who's got the most money pays for the post to be seen by the most people.

[00:21:20] Michelle J Raymond: That's where I'm I'm on the fence, I think, is what I'm gonna say on this one. I can see pros and cons. If I had to pick either way. I think I'd pick. I don't want it. I don't let us know in the comments, which way would you rather them have this ability or not have this ability?

[00:21:34] Michelle J Raymond: Because we've, we're trying to squish over what, 930 million people on this platform now that home feed's not getting any bigger. Do I want more pay to play? I don't think that's the solution, but if I'm LinkedIn, I can see why I want to offer it.

[00:21:49] Lynnaire Johnston: I guess it's too, it's gonna depend on whether they remove more organic posts from feeds and add an increasing numbers of sponsored posts, which I've seen some debate about recently about how prevalent that really is and how many posts that are paid for are actually showing up in our feed.

[00:22:06] Lynnaire Johnston: So it's gonna be interesting to see. I have to say though, that if it allows companies to promote Thought leadership amongst their teams, they're good team members, then I think that's a really positive thing because I really do believe that many companies are missing a great opportunity in having their thought leader team members out in front and promoting the brand, talking about their area of expertise.

[00:22:33] Lynnaire Johnston: Because if the person looks good, so does a company that's employing them and everybody wins. But I see far too often fear around that, oh, my team member's gonna be poached. Oh that's not gonna work for X, Y, or Z. We can't control what they say or whatever it else it is. And I just think that is, Such the wrong way to go about it and I would be really interested to hear whether you have a different view of that and how you feel that employee advocacy should be or could be better done here on LinkedIn.

[00:23:05] Michelle J Raymond: Yeah, that fear factor I don't think is going away. And what I find is if it happens to someone in the business once they leave, then they wipe LinkedIn all together and I think the cost versus benefit, you're gonna lose out more than by not taking the risk and putting yourself out there and really making it about your target audience and building up all that thought leadership.

[00:23:27] Michelle J Raymond: Like you said, there's more to lose by being invisible on the platform than what there is by potentially losing someone that's creating content. Now I know I was a prolific content writer when I was, first started on LinkedIn nine years ago, working for people. Did I get noticed because of my content?

[00:23:44] Michelle J Raymond: Absolutely. Did opportunities come my way because of that content? Absolutely. Did I leave and go to a competitor because of those opportunities? No, I left because I wasn't getting treated well in the business that I was at. Or there was another opportunity where I could advance or something was holding me back.

[00:23:59] Michelle J Raymond: That is not the reason I left. I got noticed and I probably got shown that opportunity, but I got shown opportunities every day of the week, so for me it's about look after the people. It's a culture thing. Bigger than that. And trust. Trust is such a big thing. Trust your employees, help build them.

[00:24:16] Michelle J Raymond: I've never found an employee wanna leave that's being nurtured internally and given opportunities and supported. And acknowledged. You do all of those things for people who are doing it. I don't see them leaving, but employee advocacy. So huge. I think, to your point before, I'd rather see promoted employee posts in my feed than normal ads.

[00:24:36] Michelle J Raymond: So I hope people use that instead of some of the other formats, like the lead gen forms, download our latest workbook or whatever. I'm not into those kind of ads, but yeah, posts I think I'd probably respond to better which is what I think marketers are looking for. And to go to your point line, you know about trends, I think the more content that comes from, the fancy ta fancy terms is like, user generated content or employee generated content.

[00:25:04] Michelle J Raymond: So names, faces, people, every day, not polished, not highly branded. Same message we've been sharing for what, nearly two, three years now. The more that you do that, the more that you can get your customers creating content for you. That's where LinkedIn trends are going. And it means sometimes marketers are gonna throw.

[00:25:23] Michelle J Raymond: Threw the branding guidelines out the window and I'm not sure they're ready for that. Sorry.

[00:25:28] Lynnaire Johnston: Marketers. No, that's probably true actually, I have to say cause it does take a bit of courage to do something like that. But you and I both mavericks in the sense that we'll use LinkedIn in different ways and perhaps at LinkedIn intended that we would use them, use it simply because we can see a better way of doing it.

[00:25:44] Lynnaire Johnston: Or we like the idea of experimenting and seeing how things work. Alright, so what other trends then are you noticing with your clients at the moment? Good trends, ones that aren't perhaps positive that then you're trying to find workarounds or solutions to what ex what's happening. Cause you've got quite a number of clients in the us am I right?

[00:26:02] Lynnaire Johnston: Yes, I've worked. So what's happening

[00:26:04] Michelle J Raymond: there? Yeah, so I work mostly with the US and it's a really interesting market. Funny enough, I don't work with very many clients in Australia. Dunno how that worked out, but this is how it is. What I'm finding is universally people are now acknowledging LinkedIn and building their company page and company brands.

[00:26:22] Michelle J Raymond: Is a must have. Now. When we wrote Business Gold a couple of years back, that was never a conversation that was going on. Like we were definitely in the Mavericks that went out, on a limb back then. Now it's like, how do we leverage this? How do we bring our whole team together so it's not just.

[00:26:38] Michelle J Raymond: Two people in the marketing department that now have this whole responsibility to take over the world on LinkedIn. It's a team sport. So definitely seeing it's not just one person that wants training, it's how do we get the team moving and starting to see how do you build a person on a business brand?

[00:26:55] Michelle J Raymond: They have to be used together. And so I'm starting to see that now for people that wanna build community,

[00:27:00] Michelle J Raymond: But if you wanna know what can you do on a company page? Okay, so your posts aren't showing in the feed, right? So here to say, absolutely, you got me not changing, getting worse as time goes on, not getting better. What do you do?

[00:27:12] Michelle J Raymond: Exactly what Lynnaire shared. You start having conversations. How do you do that? LinkedIn audio, LinkedIn Lives and LinkedIn Company page newsletters. If you do not have a strategy for one or two of those things you need to go back to the drawing board because you can use your invite credits, you can build up subscribers.

[00:27:33] Michelle J Raymond: That's how you're gonna get interaction not showing up in the home feed. So stop complaining that it's not in the home feed. It's done, it's dusted. There's nothing we can do, right? So stop trying to bang your head against that brick wall that it doesn't work. The same as your personal profile. And this is where people get so frustrated.

[00:27:51] Michelle J Raymond: They do what works on their personal profile, come over onto the company page, do the same thing, and then go, doesn't work. Company pages are broken. Ra, ra, ra, we hear it all the time. No, they're not broken. They just work different and you have to try different things. Those are the three things that I think you really need to have a look at.

[00:28:08] Lynnaire Johnston: I'm interested that things have diverged, if you like so much from profiles to pages, because originally of course, they were fairly similar. And I think that your right too in that the conversation has moved on. It's no longer does climate change exist. It's, oh God, it's on the doorstep and there's the way of rolling up the steps, and I think that LinkedIn is about the same too. The conversation has moved on, particularly because LinkedIn continues to roll out. So many new features that have so many different different values in terms of the different ways that they can use them, because the ones that I've already mentioned are specific to company pages, but there have been, there's nearly a hundred new features already so far this year, and we're not even at the end of May.

[00:28:54] Lynnaire Johnston: And a lot of those can be used on company pages are just not company page specific. And also there are a whole load of new features around recruitment and people on both sides of the recruitment fence, whether you're a job hunter or. Or you are someone who is looking to fill the roles. There are loads of new features around all of that as well.

[00:29:14] Lynnaire Johnston: So the fact that LinkedIn has by no means done its dash in terms of new features and what it's bringing in, and all those really positive things to me send a very clear message that it ca that it is still an in a major growth. Phase 930 million members now maybe a billion early next year.

[00:29:33] Lynnaire Johnston: Could be sooner than that, the way things are going. And so there is still a lot of room for LinkedIn to move a lot of ways that it can grow. And one of the things that you will have noticed, everybody who's not been living under a rock will have noticed, and that is something that you have already mentioned in passing and that is the use of ChatGPT and AI

[00:29:56] Lynnaire Johnston: now we've seen talk about it being beta tested for drafting posts. Not something that I am terribly happy about. But people will experiment with it because it's new, great new shiny object and all of that. So that's what you'd expect. But what I'd like to know is what you think might happen with AI generally when it comes to company pages, and this is white hat stuff, Michelle, not the black hat stuff that we don't wanna talk about or don't even wanna think about happening.

[00:30:25] Lynnaire Johnston: Do you think that there are ways that we will. See that LinkedIn will be making good use of ChatGPT and other AI tools and company pages in the next 12 to 18 months, potentially. Crystal ball gaze into your crystal

[00:30:38] Michelle J Raymond: ball. We got it pretty right in the book when we used our crystal ball. So here's what I would see.

[00:30:43] Michelle J Raymond: I think Microsoft, who has an investment in ChatGPT and LinkedIn has a vested interest in it. Working LinkedIn has a vested interest in us spending as much time as possible on the platform because they can show us more ads. That's how they make money, like a big chunk of their money. So if we think about it, they have to make this work on so many different levels.

[00:31:04] Michelle J Raymond: There's two things. ChatGPT is only as good as the prompt that you give it, and that is an art and a science to itself. And so even with myself playing around with it, how I use it in the beginning versus how I do now, I've come a long way. There's something that I'm gonna say we wrote about in the LinkedIn branding book, which I think is gonna outplay any of these ChatGPT features that come into LinkedIn and it's called Fear.

[00:31:30] Michelle J Raymond: And I think people's fear of putting content out there, regardless of the tools and how they can write it, I think that will stop more people from using it. And I don't think, I hope it encourages people and gives them confidence or ways to write, because not everyone's a writer. Not everyone has a background, or maybe English is a second language or you are really a subject matter expert, but maybe you don't know how to write on LinkedIn.

[00:31:55] Michelle J Raymond: I hope it brings more people out. That's what I'm, we get a bigger mix, not just those of us who enjoy creating content. I like the idea of it helping and prompting at the same time. It relies on the individual to. Analyze it, check it, it's gotta be fact checked, all these kind of things. And it has to have your own brand branding's. What makes you stand out? Brandings means that we don't all end up, as robot clones. So from that perspective, You have to do the work, this isn't going to take away the work. And branding's gonna become more important over time. So I'm excited by it.

[00:32:33] Michelle J Raymond: I'm hoping it will help, more people. And as I have said, in a recent LinkedIn live that it's AI is the dance partner, but you have to take the lead. So the more that you work together, the better it is.

[00:32:45] Michelle J Raymond: But yeah, don't switch off your brain is my advice.

[00:32:51] Lynnaire Johnston: That's a really good analogy. Actually, I'm using it as a dance dance partner because I think too often people tend just to go to use it at its face value. And I don't about you, but I you pretty much can tell when posts have been written by chat G p t they're just awful.

[00:33:07] Lynnaire Johnston: Now, you and I both are both writers. We are both published authors even. And so consequently we have a different view of writing than a lot of people. And I understand, as you said that writing is not something that is easy for everybody. And so the people who find that difficult may see this as a potential workaround, but as I think it's important that they make sure that their posts are accurate grammatically with.

[00:33:29] Lynnaire Johnston: Spelling, all of those kind of things, but really that they have a human element. Nobody I ChatGPT and AI cannot delve yet, cannot delve into your brain and dig out the knowledge that you know. So expecting it to be able to do a thought leadership piece on something that is your particular area of expertise, I think is just it is just simply not going to work.

[00:33:49] Lynnaire Johnston: Bearing in mind that there are these constraints I can see uses for it, but again, you are absolutely right. Don't turn off your brain. Use it advisedly and use it in a way that augments your own thoughts and your own work and potentially just puts it into a better order or makes it more under.

[00:34:09] Lynnaire Johnston: Standable because of potentially English being a second language. So it's gonna be very interesting. Michelle, and I think that the old Chinese adage we live in interesting times, or may you live in interesting times is meant for us because we certainly do. Three years ago, nobody would've known that how Zoom would've taken off.

[00:34:27] Lynnaire Johnston: Now look at us, ChatGPT and AI so it's gonna be fascinating to see where it goes. So now. Before we take questions and if you have questions, please do just pop them in the comments and I'm going to ask the fabulous share to put 'em up on the screen so that Michelle and I can have a chat about them.

[00:34:44] Lynnaire Johnston: But Michelle, is there anything that we've not covered today that you think that we really do need to mention while we are having the chat, given that it might be another year before we get in front of each other again, I sincerely hope not.

[00:34:55] Michelle J Raymond: Here's another thing that probably plays out on LinkedIn that people need to be aware of, that you may not think about the consequences of.

[00:35:01] Michelle J Raymond: And we've spoken about lots of features and new ways that we can use them, but. Think about the platform demographics right now we're at about, I don't know, I think the number's 65% of the platform's, 25 to 34 years old. What would you change knowing that with your content? What kind of formats, what kind of styles?

[00:35:21] Michelle J Raymond: Who is your audience? Now, they may not be your decision makers right now, but in five years time they might be. So are you planting seeds for that? And so we also know that these kind of people are purpose driven. So we're brands sharing them, work that they're doing as a brand to, drive particular, corporate social responsibility or ESG or all those kind of fancy acronyms.

[00:35:45] Michelle J Raymond: What are you doing to show that part of your business? And this is what ChatGPT can't do. This is where we start to show our uniqueness back to that branding word again. But ultimately it's about what makes you stand out as a business, and originality, creativity. What you stand for, what you're driven by, these are the things that you can't get out of that.

[00:36:06] Michelle J Raymond: So use ChatGPT to do the grunt work, give you some ideas, be a sounding board, refine things, but it's never gonna replace stories, experience and these kinds of things. I think when you understand age group, you can see what's going on the platform just as much as wow, why it's the shift in more personal content or what's allowed, what the rules are, what their etiquette is.

[00:36:26] Michelle J Raymond: Throw the rule book out the window is what I would say and have fun and experiment. That, that's my experience with company pages. There're a thankless task. Quite often you don't get those dopamine hits that we all love and adore, but what I've found is people are watching, and I don't get business from people that do lots of commenting on my post.

[00:36:47] Michelle J Raymond: I get more business from people that I don't even know are watching. And so if you adapt that mindset that your message lands where it's meant to be then and trust in the process. Put good quality content out there, be thoughtful, be creative, all these kinds of things, it will pay off, but it pays off altogether, and yeah, that's the, I guess that's the only other piece of advice that I would give to people is hang in, their persistence pays.

[00:37:12] Lynnaire Johnston: Oh yes. We both certainly know about that. That is for certain. Now let's move on to some questions.

[00:37:19] Lynnaire Johnston: Mick, asking about the biggest win for company page visibility or engagement. Michelle, what do you think would be the biggest win? It's a tricky one, isn't it?

[00:37:29] Michelle J Raymond: I'm gonna go with visibility. I think since we wrote business, God, if we look back, once upon a time we didn't have invite credits and we got a hundred, then we got 250 that employees can invite or other people can invite.

[00:37:42] Michelle J Raymond: I think what's happened is we've had a significant improvement in how fast we can grow page followers. We haven't had the equal improvement in how we can get. That content's seen by those same people and get that engagement. So I'm hoping we've got things, I spoke to the LinkedIn team, I've, this is a question I ask them all the time and they just laugh, nod their head and go, we haven't solved that one yet.

[00:38:05] Michelle J Raymond: Now, so they know that they haven't done a good job and they know that they need to, pages are mostly run by small businesses, not by large businesses, much to the, popular belief. So for me right now, visibility's first stage, if you're not visible, you can't get engagement.

[00:38:19] Michelle J Raymond: So I'll always go back to that, but for me, yeah, it's gonna be a trick. I don't see it going away. I was hoping the new LinkedIn discovery feed, which they spoke about, it's gotta be 12 months ago, would be up and running now and give us like that extra space. But I haven't seen anything since they mentioned it.

[00:38:35] Michelle J Raymond: And I don't know. Time will tell. Time will tell. What's your thoughts?

[00:38:40] Lynnaire Johnston: No I agree. With you if you can't, if you're not seen you can't expect any kind of engagement whatsoever. So your point earlier about the different ways that you can connect with people or get in front of audiences, really through your newsletter and both you and I have newsletters and subscribed.

[00:38:56] Lynnaire Johnston: I think it's a really good thing for people to be doing and for companies to be doing. And also events lives, particularly, I think that lives are particularly popular in an excellent way of getting in front of new audiences. And we've been building up quite a good audience with audio events.

[00:39:11] Lynnaire Johnston: People that we've never heard of are showing up and I have no idea how they find out about them because events aren't typically well promoted on LinkedIn. They don't typically show up in feeds. And neither do your posts about events do particularly well. So it's really interesting that people are showing up at these events.

[00:39:29] Lynnaire Johnston: That we don't know about. So I'm fascinated by that.

[00:39:32] Michelle J Raymond: Yeah, I've seen some audio. I think audio's really getting a bit of a push from LinkedIn. Like when I run LinkedIn lives, it has a panel on the right hand side, like if you go to somebody else's about other events that are on and yes. So there's different ways.

[00:39:46] Michelle J Raymond: And I always keep getting prompts, have you run our LinkedIn audio? So I think they have a vested interest because I can't imagine how much money that they put into this. Probably 18 months too late to when, the heyday of some of the other sites. But from that perspective, yeah, they're gonna keep pushing conversations and community especially for b2b.

[00:40:06] Michelle J Raymond: Oh, thank they're, that's

[00:40:07] Lynnaire Johnston: absolutely great. Exactly what we need is pushing conversations. So James has asked about scheduling and whether it reduces the effectiveness of the post. Now this is an excellent question. I can't say that I've noticed that. Michelle, what about you? Do you think that has any effect?

[00:40:25] Michelle J Raymond: No. So if we go back scheduling using third party tools, this was often a concern that people would have is that does it, drop reach Now, I never in my personal experience found anything like that happened. The only way that it impacted was we had different formats that weren't available to be used to schedule in third party tools.

[00:40:44] Michelle J Raymond: So you were limited. So say for instance when polls were going crazy, we couldn't schedule polls. So from, or we couldn't schedule documents and the carousel sliders. So from that perspective, you couldn't also tag individuals was another limitation. Now I think that holds back some of your reach now that it's done on LinkedIn, we don't have any of those problems in me personally.

[00:41:06] Michelle J Raymond: I think you posted the other day, Linaire, that now we get notified to say the scheduled post has gone live and, we get notified of that. I haven't seen that pop up yet. I can't wait to see that one. But ultimately, no I think you're gonna get more reach by doing it at a time that works for your audience.

[00:41:22] Michelle J Raymond: And if you can be around at that time to help support comments that are generated, that will help. But yeah not in my experience and not to any of the research that I've seen or, read from any of our colleagues.

[00:41:35] Lynnaire Johnston: Nope. Alright. And I, that's exactly how I'm seeing it as well. And now a question from Sandra.

[00:41:41] Lynnaire Johnston: So she's in the same part of the world as you from over the ditch as it were in Australia. Is it too much to have a company newsletter and also a personal newsletter on a different topic? Now that's an interesting one, and I'm not entirely certain. I really have an answer to that one.

[00:41:58] Lynnaire Johnston: Michelle, what's your thought on this?

[00:42:01] Michelle J Raymond: So I guess not knowing the business and not knowing why it's different topic. First to answer, should you have a company and a personal newsletter? I'm a big fan of having both. They're different audiences. For me. My company page is super niche. My personal one has got connections that I've gathered since 2009, so personal and company newsletters. I encourage people to have both if you've got the resources, if you've got a strategy and if you can do it consistently, that's the challenge. Depending on the size of your business would it be seen as a disconnect? I don't think so because you've got two different audiences for the most part.

[00:42:33] Michelle J Raymond: But I just question why so different? I have a personal and a company, page one, and there's. A lot of overlap, but they have their own individual kind of targets that I'm doing, and I've changed styles over time as well. So I tend to write them more on one subject, like an article that happens to have subscribers these days.

[00:42:55] Michelle J Raymond: But there's no right or wrong with anything on LinkedIn, so I would say try it if it works for your community. Keep doing it. Cuz ultimately you've gotta know what your business goals are and work your way backwards is, my recommendation.

[00:43:09] Lynnaire Johnston: Alright, excellent answer. Thank you.

[00:43:12] Lynnaire Johnston: Question any advice when you're setting up your newsletter. And I've got a piece of advice and that is, don't forget to add in this, SEO into the various fields on your newsletters and on your articles.

[00:43:25] Lynnaire Johnston: And I'm saying this out loud because I just remembered today that I forgot to do it on my

[00:43:29] Michelle J Raymond: own just this week. That's because it's not anywhere that makes logical sense. Tim, to answer your question, here's my advice and to anybody else's listening, congratulations on getting a company page newsletter out there.

[00:43:40] Michelle J Raymond: I'm excited for that. But here's what I want you to have a look at. The very first time you send your newsletter out, and this applies on your personal and your company page, but let's just stick to the company page for today. The very first time it goes out to every single page follower. It is your golden free kick.

[00:43:58] Michelle J Raymond: It's the only time on LinkedIn that something goes to everybody that follows the page. And the same applies over on your personal, it's all your connections and all your followers. It is the biggest free kick that you are ever going to get. And you get it once on LinkedIn. So if you only have a small amount of company page followers, say if you're only at 500, are you gonna use that kick straight up and only get a percentage of 500?

[00:44:24] Michelle J Raymond: Or do you wanna wait until you're at a thousand for instance? Now my advice is always just wait a couple of months. It shouldn't take you too long to get that bigger number. So from that perspective, make it a cracker. Make it one of your best. Jam it full of so much value for people. Always write it for the audience.

[00:44:41] Michelle J Raymond: You should get subscription. The numbers that I've seen, that email that goes out to notify everyone, roughly 30 to 30 percentish of your existing followers is what will end up subscribing to the newsletter. So if you want more, make it a cracker and just put some extra effort into that one so that you capture them cuz you got one chance my friend.

[00:45:04] Lynnaire Johnston: I'm finding that newsletters do particularly well as a format type. In other words, we seem to get very good reach with newsletters. Not least because of course if people have the button switched on it will show up as an email. And this is an aside. Recently I went to my settings and turned on newsletter email notifications, and Michelle, my inbox just got swamped.

[00:45:28] Lynnaire Johnston: It was absolutely deluge. Now, in the time that newsletters have been available, I have been very careful to only subscribe to newsletters that are about LinkedIn. I made that decision really early on that I, unless I knew a person particularly well and had a reason for subscribing, I would always turn down everything that wasn't LinkedIn related.

[00:45:49] Lynnaire Johnston: I can tell you that when I turned that particular feature on, it made absolutely no difference. To whether I had actually said yes or no to subscribing to a newsletter. They just showed up in my emails. I've lasted about two weeks and then I turned it off. It drove me absolutely mad.

[00:46:10] Michelle J Raymond: That's the problem.

[00:46:11] Michelle J Raymond: And I think some people, when we first got newsletters, when they switched creator mode on and we got that, like tsunami is the only word I can think of. When we got bombarded with notifications, it was just crazy and people switched it off. So if you are one of those people, I honestly believe the newsletters I'm subscribed to deliver.

[00:46:29] Michelle J Raymond: So much value because people expand their thoughts. You really get to see that they know their stuff and for me that they are just amazing. And so from that perspective, go back and check your settings, see if you're actually getting notified because I think that they're worth it. Cole, which ones you don't like?

[00:46:47] Michelle J Raymond: And I'm great to see that Tim's gonna hold off creating his company page newsletter for a little bit and put it over on his personal. I think that's probably a better idea and hopefully that's helped some other people that are listening in. That

[00:46:59] Lynnaire Johnston: makes a lot of sense. We're gonna fi finish off when one last question here, and it is another one from David and a brainstorming tool for CHATGPT is that the best way to use

[00:47:13] Michelle J Raymond: it? What do you say? Look, absolutely, and as I said, I did a LinkedIn live with is Isabella Bedoya, who if you're not following her, Go and follow her for all things.

[00:47:22] Lynnaire Johnston: That was great. She's, I'm really enjoyed that she had a lot of good things to say.

[00:47:26] Michelle J Raymond: Yeah, her content every day teaches me a new way to look at things. Absolutely. If you're staring at a blank page and go, I don't know what to write, then it's a great way to bounce ideas off. It's like having a colleague but not having one. You can just shut them up and when you don't want them. But ultimately for me it's only as good as what, the topic.

[00:47:45] Michelle J Raymond: Like I couldn't go and write on a subject, so I have zero clue on. Cause I wouldn't know what questions to ask. ChatGPT intelligently or I wouldn't know if it gave me good quality stuff. Go and have a play with it. This is what, have a swing, see what comes back, play around with it and just experiment because I don't think it's going away anytime soon.

[00:48:05] Michelle J Raymond: And whether it's that or any other version of ai, like these tools are there to take away the grunt work so we can focus on what matters. And that's building relationships with people. So I'm excited from that perspective.

[00:48:16] Lynnaire Johnston: And I think there are a lot of opportunities for it in other areas. I, I see a connection to mine called Dave Officer who writes funny posts to do with design and he's really super clever with them. And he's constantly experimenting with AI and turning it into a video and then sharing it in a really humorous. Way. And so I can see that there's some real possibilities around it and we just have to be open. I think that the difficulty is Michelle, a lot of people can be quite closed to new ideas.

[00:48:45] Lynnaire Johnston: You and I are not because we're, we, not only we mavericks on LinkedIn, but we do like to experiment, try things out and do things in different ways. And I think that if you ch treat chat g p t in a similar sort of fashion, it's something that to try out, to master, to get to grips with and to use it in a positive way.

[00:49:05] Lynnaire Johnston: I remember a lot of the things that have been introduced. And launched over my lifetime that the world was gonna end when they arrived. I remember that television, this is how old I am. Television was going to ruin radio. Look at us now. And it's funny, y2k,

[00:49:19] Michelle J Raymond: anyone who remembers y2k, I think the whole planet was meant to stop then.

[00:49:23] Michelle J Raymond: And yes, I'm that old as well.

[00:49:26] Lynnaire Johnston: So change is with us. It's getting faster and faster, and it's up to us not to get left behind. And whether that's using that for LinkedIn or in other areas of our lives, I think it's important to recognize that it is here to stay. It's a bit like mobile phones can't say now.

[00:49:41] Lynnaire Johnston: We don't want 'em anymore because they're a part of our lives, aren't they? And so I think that ChatGPT will become more and more involved in the things that we do. Anybody got a Siri? Or a Google? What's the other, those things or yeah, those things. They're with us for keeps.

[00:49:56] Lynnaire Johnston: Alright, so in wrapping up, lots of great new features for LinkedIn Company pages in the last year. Lots in other areas of our LinkedIn as well.

[00:50:05] Lynnaire Johnston: Michelle, thank you so much for being with us, but any final thoughts? Today.

[00:50:10] Michelle J Raymond: Look, if you haven't got, that's all about building community. Oh, if I haven't shared that, you've got the tools to build community.

[00:50:16] Michelle J Raymond: You've now got so many different ways that we can reach the audience. So use it wisely. Think bigger than just collecting page followers.