Episode 47: Leveraging LinkedIn Company Pages

Bill McCormick 0:00

Hello, everyone, welcome to Making Sales Social Live! Where today we’re going to talk about: “Leveraging LinkedIn Company Page for Brand Awareness”.

Intro (Bob Woods) 0:11

Welcome to Making Sales Social Live! As we share LinkedIn and social selling training, strategies, and tips that will have an immediate impact on your business. Join Bill McCormick, Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, every week. Making Sales Social Live!

Bill McCormick 0:29

Now listen, we know that they’re not called Company Pages anymore, but that’s what everybody calls them. So we’re gonna call that, so no hate now that, hey, you guys don’t know what you’re talking about. They changed the name, we know they changed the name. I don’t think they should change the name but that’s a whole nother episode. So Brynne, let’s talk a little bit about leveraging LinkedIn Company Pages.

Brynne Tillman 0:51

Yeah, that’s great. Let’s actually start with what’s the difference between a personal page and a company page, right? So we look at the personal page, like you’re a human being walking into a networking meeting, and you’re having conversations with people, and you know, so you would not go into a networking meeting, and start pitching your products and services, you wouldn’t talk about your clients success stories right away, right? Like, it’s really about, kind of networking, providing value building rapport, building trust, but then they say, “Hey, tell me a little bit about what you do”, and you take them over to your company booth,(Bob) trade booth, (Brynne) trade booth! *cheering* Good thing you’re here, Bob, so your company page’s like your booth, right? And at that point, share a little bit more about what you do as a company, who you help. You can even brag on your employees, share awards, right? There’s lots of things that you can do as a company brand, that you can’t do as a person. Now the difference is, as a person, you can have connections and followers. As a company, you can only have followers, and there’s a big difference in engagement, when you have connections versus followers. So there’s definitely some really good ways to use LinkedIn, and we’re excited to share two uses of LinkedIn company pages that we’re excited to share with you. Let’s talk about the first one, setting up the page, what are some of the things, when you initially set up your LinkedIn page that you think is important.

Bob Woods 2:30

So just a couple more functional things is number one, having a banner that really represents the company and keeping in mind that the banner size, and I forget what the size is, but it’s a little longer and it’s skinnier than the typical, or than the one that is on a personal profile, which you know, we start thinking about between company pages and personal profiles, probably the best way to segment those out in your mind, and then the second one is, rather than having a profile photo up there, that should ideally be your company logo. Now, where some companies get into a little bit of trouble, in my opinion, if they have a horizontal logo, they try to cram it all into that little square. So if your company has an icon, kind of like Social Sales Link does, just use the icon because that appears on LinkedIn, the company name is going to be right next to it, and it may not be the same font or whatever but people will definitely get the idea, because you use the icon,(Brynne) that’s a great idea.

Bill McCormick 3:37

So the cover image sizes 1128×191, that’s the pixel size. If you just Google it, it’ll bring you right to LinkedIn help, and they have, actually, image specifications for LinkedIn pages, and so right there, you’ll see all of that information for you. So you can look at that, I think it’s also important to point out, like how to go about setting that page up, you know, where do you go, and what do you do, and we’ll talk about the reasons why, but if you go to what we call the Work Waffle, which is right up next to your name, the Me Section with your little picture in the top, and you click on that drop down, the very last thing is create a company page, and LinkedIn does a really good job of walking you through that, you click on it, and it’s just here’s what you do, and so you know, one of the things you’re going to want to do is put information in there from your website, you know, your About section. That’s really, really simple, and to Bob’s point, you really want to make sure you have a logo in there, because that’s what’s going to show up  in what we call the Above the Fold Section, which incorporates all of your imagery, and also your headline, and over to the right will be your company name, and if you don’t have a logo loaded or you don’t have a company page, there’s just gonna be this pixelated image that just doesn’t look very good. So you want to make sure that you have that setup.

Brynne Tillman 5:01

And I just want to clarify, what you’re talking about is when you connect the Company Page to your Personal Experience in the Experience section that goes, what’s coming up. Okay, I just want to clarify that, awesome.

Bob Woods 5:15

It just looks legitimate, not only for you, but if there are other people working in your organization as well, they obviously can use it too, and it just looks better, it looks more professional and doesn’t look sketchy.

Brynne Tillman 5:25

So I’m going to just share a couple more things, you actually have a Call to Action button, you can there are things like sign up or register, and so you can use that call to action button if you’ve got events that are coming up, and you can link, any link to any one of those call to action buttons, so I think that that’s pretty important. There are other things to do as you set up your company, one of them is a tagline, and I think that’s like, it’s like a mini headline where your profile would have a headline, you get the chance to have that tagline. It definitely should, as Bill was talking about, align with your website, you’ll also be able to choose headquarter locations, and if you have other locations, you can add them as well, and you know, you’ll tell them how many employees you have, and what industry you’re in, and when you started, and if you’re a corporation, so you’ll fill all that out, and as Bill said, it walks you through that, and now you have your beautiful company page, and the first thing they’ll say is: Do you want to share to the world that you have a new company page? You certainly can. But there are a few other things that we want to do. Let’s talk about choosing hashtags and why. So this is actually sort of, part of setting up choosing your community hashtags. So we’ll talk a little bit about why this is important on your company page.

Bill McCormick 6:46

Yeah, so you’re allowed to have three community hashtags, and the reason that’s important, is because LinkedIn is actually going to send you notifications to your company page to say: “Hey, you know, here’s a post on”, you know, so for us, one is hashtag sales, I believe, and then, with that notification, it will take me to a post, and I can engage as the company, as our company page, not as Bill McCormick, but I Social Sales Link, and what this will help you to do is, establish credibility for your brand, for your company brand on LinkedIn, because you’re sharing thought that–well, hold on, let’s say, because what you should be sharing is thought leadership, and you should be responding, answering questions, you know, what you don’t want to do is go out there and pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch pitch, because that’s not going to work. That’s one of the things that’s broken on LinkedIn, even as a company, you don’t want to pitch. So what you want to do is provide value and establish credibility, establish thought leadership, and by having these three community hashtags, you’ll be able to then comment on posts that are generated using that hashtag, how’d I do?

Brynne Tillman 8:01

That’s great, and so I’m just gonna add a couple things to that, and I’m gonna throw a question to Bob. But the first thing I’m gonna say is you can change out those hashtags as often as you’d like. So we have sales, and you don’t even have to wait for those notifications. If you just click on hashtag sales, you will get a newsfeed of everything that’s used hashtag sales, and you can organize it by Most Recent or Most Popular. I can’t remember the other one is,(Bob) I think it’s Recent and Relevant.(Brynne) Yeah, so the most recent and most relevant, I don’t exactly know what relevant means, but it is what it is. But now as a company, you’ll look, you know, when you react, or you comment, instead of your face, it’s the company logo, again, that logo is showing up, but you can change them out. So there are times where I will find an article as Brynne Tillman, I will see this article and go: “Well, I want to engage as the company”. So I take one of the hashtags from that article, I switch out sales with the new hashtag, I click through, and I can engage. So keep in mind that it’s dynamic. I want to ask you Bob, you know, we have our own hashtag, talk about the importance of having your own hashtag, and why you want that on your company page.

Bob Woods 9:19

So we have our own hashtag, it’s basically a part of branding. So think of it as another way to brand your company. So when it comes to your company, it could be all kinds of different things. Sometimes people have their own personal hashtags, companies can have their own hashtags as well. So we use hashtag S-S-L insights, that’s plural with an S, and it’s SSL for Social Sales Link, we put, to kind of crib popular commercial that’s out there, we put that stuff on everything. Every single post that we have has that hashtag, what happens is, just like Brynne described before, when you Click on that hashtag, you’ll be taken to a page that lists all of the content that has all of the shares that have that hashtag in it. The other thing that you can do from that page is to click on Follow. So people are following the hashtag at that point, and that’s good, because then it starts appearing in their feed more and more, and it’s just good because it increases your branding across the platform.

Brynne Tillman 10:26

So my takeaway is, hashtag SSL Insights is a condiment. So engaging as a LinkedIn page, we already talked about that through hashtags, but let’s talk a little bit more about, kind of the strategy behind it. So for me, I want to find influencers, sometimes we call them Magnets, people that are attracting our ideal prospects, and look at the hashtags that they’re using, and then engage on their post. We want to, you know, so the author will absolutely be curious if you’ve got–if you’re engaging as a brand, but you can engage not just with the author, but with all the commenters, and what that will do is get people to click through and say, Who is this who’s doing this, so be thoughtful in your engagement. There are lots of ways to do that, don’t just say great posts, like really talk about it. Also, mention your employees and mention other people on your team, including yourself. So I might engage in Social Sales Link, and then let’s say: “@BrynneTillman, you’re going to love this”, and then I go back as Brynne Tillman, having been mentioned, and it comes into my notifications, and I engage, right, and so that’s really important. Then LinkedIn will provide sub-pages within company pages for specific products. Yes, the Showcase Page is what they’re showing now. Here’s my challenge, I think big brands showcase pages work well, my thought around this, so we have one for our podcast, making cell social. But here’s the challenge. If someone follows the showcase page, they’re not automatically following your main page, right? I believe they would work much better if they followed the showcase page, if they automatically followed the main page as well, because so much more content is going to come from the main page. So I feel like you’re splitting up your followers, right, and you’re siloing them, which makes it a little bit more difficult to manage. So that’s just my–

Bob Woods 12:42

Someone like a Procter and Gamble, no one’s gonna follow the Procter and Gamble.(Brynne and Bob) You can follow Colgate, you can follow all of those, but with smaller companies, where the showcase pages are probably tied much more directly with the company. I think that’s where Brynne’s thing, for anything brings things.(Bill) Yeah,(Brynne) he wanted to bring things, Brynne’s things,(Bob) Yeah.

Bill McCormick 13:06

You end up diluting the effectiveness of both pages, and I think you also create yourself more work, because now you have places where you need to post, and you need to post multiple in multiple places. So I think that’s one of the issues with that, that I see.

Brynne Tillman 13:23

I love that! How do you build followers? Let’s go, let’s go, Bob first, what are you doing to build followers on LinkedIn?

Bob Woods 13:31

The easiest thing to do, is to, when you’re in the admin part, assuming you’re an admin, there is a column on the right hand side, to where you can invite people who are in your first degrees directly to the page. So what’s nice about that is while you only have 100, if let’s say you send out 10, and so you’re down to 90, and five accepts, you get bumped back up to 95, so it’s like a constant 100.(Brynne) So invite the right people.(Bob) Invite–Yeah, yeah, yeah, just don’t invite everyone, invite the right people without a doubt.

Brynne Tillman 14:11

Yeah, awesome! Bill, what do you think?

Bill McCormick 14:12

I think to go to your point earlier, when you’re engaging as your company page, on magnets content, and not just with the magnet, but also other people who are engaging, that’s really an organic way to gain followers, because then those people are going to look at your page. Here’s where we come back to making sure your page is optimized the right way, that it’s set up the right way, so that when people come back, they see imagery, they see a link to your website, they see the tagline, so that they want to follow the page. So you know, that’s a really huge way to gain followers, so what about Ubering?

Brynne Tillman 14:47

So the one thing I would say is to Bob’s point, when you have up to 100, there’s gonna come a point where you max out the primary people in your network that you want to follow. However, what you can do is rotate admins every month. So this month Bill goes in, and he doesn’t, you know, he invites 100. Next month, Bob does the next month, I do right now, if you have a larger group, we happen to all be admins of our page, right. But in a larger company, if you have client facing sales people, if client facing customer service people, you can actually temporarily make them an admin, and you can even do it through Zoom, have them invite 100 people, and then unadmin them, right, and so you’ll start to really get the followers that are incredibly targeted the prospects that, you know, that you’re going after, and then they’ll start to see the content, or you get most of your clients following, that becomes pretty powerful. The last one that we’re talking about is: “Engage with your followers”, which is something relatively new in the last six months or so. Maybe it’s a year, you can actually see who’s following you, and you can see if their first degree or second degree connection. So what would you do with that knowledge?

Bill McCormick 16:09

Well one of the newest things they’ve just had, it used to be, you could just see the followers, that was it, and it was not in any type of order, even of your most recent followers or your oldest, it was just a randomly generated list of here’s all the people that follow you and you have to scroll through. Now they give us at least the ability to filter, so you can filter by location, you can filter by title, and I believe by industry, maybe school also is the fourth, there’s four, there’s one that’s not as important. I’d certainly like to see the full range of search filters there, but at least there, if you wanted to target and say, you know, today I’m going to invite people just from the Philly area, or I’m in upstate New York, just the Albany area, you could do that. I think that’s one of the real benefits there. But then also, you can see, okay, who’s following my page that I can now, that fits my ideal client profile, and now I can start to, maybe share some content from the company page that’s educational, and resourceful that I know would help them. Because now you’re coming, because not only you look like the thought leader, but they also see your company as a thought leader too. So it kind of creates a super power effect of not just you, but also your company behind you. Because most people don’t understand the power of a company, I think that is a great way to engage with.

Brynne Tillman 17:38

I love it, and its Location Job functions in your industry and company size. Unfortunately, you can’t, at this point, combine the searches. But eventually, hopefully, they will, I will say company pages have been improving over time significantly, I will throw out a couple more things. You can stream live from a company page, so we used to stream from the company page. But because we have way more connections than followers, we decided to stream and LinkedIn alone only allows you to pick one profile at a time. The second thing is you can blog, you can have content from a company, a lot of people don’t realize that you can do that. The other thing that you can do from a company page, wait. So events, you can create an event page and the poll. So here’s the interesting thing, if you run the web, the company pa–LinkedIn page, if you run it and you create a poll, you can share that link with all of your sales reps, who can actually go out and get asked people to vote they’d be you know, interested in your one click vote, and you can aggregate all of those votes as the admin of the page and it really becomes pretty powerful, and as the admin of the page you see all the people that have registered for the event and so forth. So there’s so much you can do with that page, how do you deal with negative–but let’s talk about this, because this is you know, I think that’s a really great deal, I have ideas, but do either of you want to shoot?

Bill McCormick 19:21

I’ll just say, so I ‘admin’ on some other pages, there are some negative comments, so first of all, if the negative comment is about superfluous stuff, not stuff directly relating, directly to a post or relating that directly to content that you’ve created? I ignore it, you know, some people on the internet. This might be hard to believe, they’re just looking for a fight. They’re just looking to be able to share their opinion like that, and they don’t believe that everyone else is right, as Stephen Covey said, you know, we judge ourselves by our intentions, everyone else by their actions, and so it’s, that’s a really powerful quote. But if it’s something around, something you’ve done, that you create a piece of content and someone disagrees with you, you know, I think you can say: “Hey, I appreciate your point of view on that, and I don’t agree”, well, I wouldn’t do is get into a comment for comment, tit for tat argument with that, I will look to take it offline, and get it away from the message thread. Because listen, communication via text, and that’s what this is, is very two dimensional. People can’t hear your heart, they can’t hear your voice, they can’t hear, you know, so we tend to read more into things than what’s really said, so there’s a lot of room for misunderstanding, and the more you go back and forth, the greater that gap gets, and the more misunderstanding, I think it happens. So you know, and you can also delete comments, the other person won’t know you deleted the comment, they’ll still see it there, but no one else will see it.

Brynne Tillman 20:59

So I will delete a comment if it’s offensive, and sometimes they are. But generally, just like I think it helps your reputation, when people see that you can handle it professionally. So my reaction as long as it’s not offensive, my reaction is, you know, I appreciate everyone’s thoughts and opinions. I think it’s really important that we respect each other in having different opinions. I typically do not agree with your perspective, and it’s okay that you don’t agree with mine. But let’s be kind about it.(Bill: Yeah),and so and that’s exactly like I. I’ll say it, because now what are they going to say?

Bill McCormick 21:45

And yeah, so does it make sense? But is it okay? Actually, I think to Brynne’s point, you don’t want to delete every negative comment or every comment of a person who disagrees with you, because then that’s not genuine and authentic. I think it’s okay to let some people disagree with you. I would delete comments that are really overly negative, like Brynne says, offensive, like, if somebody is calling someone names, and making it really personal, and we’re getting away from–

Brynne Tillman 22:10

Or even like, I had one word, someone was not at me, but was cursing at someone else, and I’m like, you’re done.(Bill: Yeah), that’s not appropriate.

Bill McCormick 22:19

And I think I would look to try to: “Hey, you know, messaging them, and saying, you know, let’s get on a Zoom call, let’s get on the phone and talk about this.” Because people are really brave behind the keyboard, right. But if they have to look you in the eye, then things calmed down a little bit, and I think then you have a chance to say, but listen, at the end of the day, if you’re the admin of the page, you’re in charge, and you get to decide what’s right and what’s wrong.

Brynne Tillman 22:45

And you know, it’s different too, when it’s a company page versus a human being like you, you don’t know who to really get, they don’t know who to really get mad at, right? It’s mad at a brand. I can get really mad at a brand. But it’s not no one is personally taking that attack. So as a brand, we’re talking about company pages in this particular case, you know, there are times as a company page, I’ll tag me and say at Brynne, please take this.(Bill) Yeah,(Brynne) and then I’ll come in as a human being and have the conversation, and my only rule is that we need to be kind. If we’re not, if you’re not kind, you don’t get to hang out here, you get your opinion, you can definitely share your perspective. I mean, we’re unfortunately a very polarized world right now. Very strong opinions, but it’s important to be able to share them, as long as we’re kind and that’s a big word. If you’re not kind, you get to go away. You can’t be on my page, if you’re going to be mean, you can’t be in my life, if you’re going to be mean. Like you know, it’s boundaries, and we are, we can definitely have them without stifling freedom of speech. Well, man, this was a fun topic, and we really just touched the surface of Company–at LinkedIn pages. See, I’m still saying LinkedIn company pages, but it’s LinkedIn pages, and you know, we hope that you guys really, if you don’t have a company page and you’re an individual sole proprietor or very small company, consider it making sure that everyone is connected, they’re branded well, and so as we wrap up this week’s Making Sales Social Live, really consider company pages and taking as much time and attention to build them out, as you might even your own profile. So take us out, Bill.

Bill McCormick 24:28

Alright, so hey, thanks so much for watching us. We’re here once a week, so we are live and then it’s recorded and replayed on our podcast. You can find out more information on our podcast if you go to socialsaleslink.com/podcasts, and we’ll see you next time everyone, bye-bye.