Episode 124: How to Grow a Following of Your LinkedIn (Company) Page

Bob Woods 0:00

Greetings, one and all and welcome to Making Sales Social Live. I’m Bob Woods, and I’m here with my co-host, the one and only LinkedIn whisperer, Brynne Tillman. How you doing, Brynne?

Brynne Tillman 0:11

I’m good, Bob, how are you?

Bob Woods 0:14

I am doing great. Fantastic. So today, let’s talk a little bit about LinkedIn pages, which used to be known as Company pages, now they’re just Pages. And let’s just say enough about that. 

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 Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, every week. Making Sales Social Live.

We get asked a lot about LinkedIn pages, though. And since it’s been, it’s been actually quite a while, longer than I thought, since we talked about them in our podcast. Guess what we’re going to do, we’re going to talk about them right now. So what doesn’t get talked about much with LinkedIn pages, though, is the different ways that they can be used for any size company, and I’m talking literally any size company, even the smallest size, and that is solopreneurs, or single person company, they’re actually important for that, too. So let’s get right into it. Brynne, before we get to actually building the page, I think I’d like to talk just really quick about why it’s important for those solopreneurs, single-person companies, too.

Brynne Tillman 1:30

Yeah, I think that’s a great, great way to get started. You know, company pages are very different than your personal profile page, and it’s used differently. So, for example, we often talk about your profile page is you personally walking into a conference or a trade show, shaking hands and kissing babies, right? Like meeting people, starting conversations, you as the person. And then when someone says, “Hey, tell me a little bit more about what you do.” You bring them over to your booth. And you, that’s your company page or your LinkedIn page. I continue to say “company page”, it’s no longer company page, it’s just Pages. But it makes, you know, there’s lots of ways to use Pages, but your company page, your page that represents your company, can brag a little more, can talk a little bit more about your solutions, can sell just a slight bit more. And we’re going to talk about how to use that company page in conjunction with your personal page to be able to show off a little, to be able to talk about awards and new product launches without it sounding like you personally are too salesy.

Bob Woods 2:47

Yep. And then let’s just say, for example, if you are that solopreneur or single person company, and by the time you get done listening to all this, you’re like, “Yeah, I still don’t think that this is worth it for me.” It is worth at least, just setting up a page with your logo on it. Because in your Experience section, you really, really should link to a company because otherwise at the very top of the profile, in what we call the top of the fold section, if you have a company listed there, and then there’s just that big gray, ugly blob up there next to it rather than a company logo. Assuming that you have a company logo, you really lose credibility, because it doesn’t look like that you work for anyone or any company or whatever. So just from, like, the looks, aesthetics and credibility building standpoint, even for that one-person company, it’s important to at least set up a LinkedIn page with your logo attached to it. (Brynne: Perfect. I love that.) So, from there, let’s build the rest of the company page. 

Brynne Tillman 3:55

All right. So there are a couple of elements that are really important. And we’re not going to talk about like, details on building a page. I just want to talk about some things that are really important. Number one, your logo that you upload should be a really good quality logo, a high resolution logo. It can get grainy at times if you’re using a lower resolution logo and it’s just not as appropriate. The other thing is, try to make your logo to fit nicely inside of the box. Even if you have a narrow logo or put it maybe even with a white background behind it so it fits nicely inside that box and your logo is very clear.

 Bob Woods 4:38

If you’re the type of company, like actually, we are here at Social Sales Link and you’ve got like an icon, as well as your name as part of the logo, just use the icon there because everywhere you see it, it’s going to say your company name right next to it. So don’t be afraid to just use your icon in there, too. Because if you scrunch like, like if we scrunch all of that down into that little space, no one would be able to tell what it is at all. And if you want to know what I’m talking about, just look at (crosstalk) or just Social Sales Link in our company page and you’ll see what I’m talking about right there.

Brynne Tillman 5:17

Yeah, right. So it’s literally the logo, not the logo and the name because it shrinks (crosstalk) (Bob: Right) at times. So that’s a very good point. The next thing is using your background banner, like a billboard, change it out, use it if you have an event coming up, if you’re going to an event, if we have a podcast that we want to promote. So, that will be there. Use it wisely. Use it like your company billboard. If there was a billboard outside of your building, what would it say? What would it do for you? And you know, this is dynamic. It’s not once and done, right? That’s a really good opportunity.

Bob Woods 5:57

Definitely does not have to be one and done. A lot of companies still, unfortunately, treat it like that but you know, for upcoming events, or you know, anything like that at all, switch that stuff in and out. It’s like those electronic billboards that are up now. (crosstalk) (Brynne: Digital billboard. Yeah.) Yeah. Digital billboard, yeah. They’re all electronic. Digital billboards, yeah, exactly.

Brynne Tillman 6:15

Yeah, exactly. The next thing is your tagline, right. And so this is different than your personal headline. This is the tagline of your company. So if you have a website and a tagline, that should match here, right. But the goal of that tagline is to resonate with your buyers and get them interested to find out a little bit more about what you do and what you sell as a company.

The next thing I want to talk about is the “call to action” button. You have an opportunity to drive traffic from your company page out to somewhere. So, are you driving it to your website? Are you driving it — you don’t have a website, are you driving it to your personal LinkedIn page? Do you have a landing page with a download? Do you have a free giveaway kind of thing? Right? Like there are a lot of ways to use that page and I highly recommend that you take advantage of that real estate.

Bob Woods 7:10

And that’s and that’s also new too, so if you had a company page, you haven’t touched it in a long time, definitely update that.

Brynne Tillman 7:16

How new is that, I think it’s years now. No?

Bob Woods 7:19

Oh, I, the actual CTA. I don’t think, well, check it no matter what. How does that sound?

Brynne Tillman 7:24

Either way, but that’s interesting. Yeah, yeah. I think it’s been around a while, I think it’s pre-COVID. So, but it’s, but even that whole time it’s not, so, who knows, right? So there are lots of other things to do. You want to make sure you’ve got your description there, you want to make sure if there are more than one employee that they are all connected here. And you want to post frequently. Now, normally, we talk a lot about curating content. On your company page, you don’t need to curate content, this could be original content, but it, also you can do events through your company page and polls through your company page and sharing content. Here’s what I love is you can brag. If we won an award, and I went out and said, “Hey, I’m so excited, I won an award.” right? It’s braggadocious. But if we put that on our LinkedIn profile, or we have a new product launch, then as I personally, I can go engage, right, so I can go as Social Sales Link, I can post “Congratulations, Brynne and Bob for X, Y, and Z.” and then Brynne and Bob will go engage and say “Thank you so much for the kind words,” right?

Bob Woods 8:34

And then we can also share that on our, we can share that company post on our own timelines as well. So I call that a humble brag. So it’s, you know, because it’s starting from somewhere else, and you’re going “Oh, thank you, you like me, you really like me” and all that type of stuff, basically. You know, it’s not really bragging if someone else recognizes you first and then you just acknowledge by thank you, or whatever, and that’s where the humble part comes in because obviously, people who are following you and who are connected to you should see this at some point and in their timelines as well. 

Brynne Tillman 9:10

Okay, so now, I mean, there’s so much more in setting up your page. But, you know, I just really kind of wanted to cover a little bit of that. So the next thing is, how do we grow followers? So here’s one of the most wonderful things — and LinkedIn has improved this over time — is if you are an admin of the company page, and by the way, you can make many people admins even you know, it breaks LinkedIn’s agreement to have someone post on your behalf on LinkedIn, to log into your account and post. You can actually use like Hootsuite to schedule posts, but to organically log in, it just breaks LinkedIn agreement. So on a company page, you can assign as many admins as you want that can post absolutely authentically. We’re not fooling anyone because it’s a representative of the company. So yes, they can post but they can now go in as a company page and engage on people’s posts. It used to be, you had to have a shared hashtag and that’s gone away.

Right now, when you are on LinkedIn, and then you’re an admin of a company page of the page, a LinkedIn page, there’s a little drop-down at your face where you have, you’re sharing as Brynne Tillman or you’re sharing as Social Sales Link and engaging. So you can go into a post, like, react to it, and comment. So I could go in and choose Social Sales Link and I’ll say, “@BobWoods and @BrynneTillman, check out the valuable tips in this post by @GunnarHood,” right? And so now, Gunnar who we’re making pretend it’s his, you know, so he gets notified, Bob gets notified, and I get notified and then we go in and engage personally. Now Gunnar would say, “Oh, now I’m gonna go follow Social Sales Link, because they engaged on my post.” You can also, all the people that are engaging on his post, you can like and comment as the company page and as you, personally.

Bob Woods 11:18

Just for the security-conscious people out there who are like, “Oh, I don’t know, if I want to have all these people being admins of the page.” There are a couple of different roles that you could assign as well. So “Super Admin”, you would obviously want to keep that locked down tight. But “Content Admin” is probably where you’re going to want to put those people there because they could post and manage content and comments and things like that, but they can’t like, delete the page or anything like that. So that can be done.

Brynne Tillman 11:46

Awesome. There are lots of different things that you can do from a posting perspective. And you can mention people. So go ahead, I saw you had an “Aha!” moment.

Bob Woods 11:56

Aha, analytics.

Brynne Tillman 11:58

Ah, yes, go ahead. Talk a little about that.

Bob Woods 12:01

You get a lot more analytics with a company page than you do with a personal profile. Now, at this point, I’m not saying don’t do a personal profile, and only do company pages because of analytics, but you can see who is visiting, who is following the page and that alone can be used in a wide variety of ways because somebody may be following a page who’s not in contact with, you know, let’s say you have several salespeople, they’re not following or connected to salespeople, you can potentially have them reach out and say, “Hey, I noticed that you’re following our page…” and then do what we normally talk about in terms of, you know, following and then maybe liking a post or two of theirs.

And then at that point, reaching out to actually connect with them too. So you can use all of those analytics to actually not only see where people are coming from and what they’re engaging with, but you could potentially even have your own salespeople slash employees, or however you work it, actually utilize that as well to reach out and get new connections and, you know, possibly start new sales conversations.

Brynne Tillman 13:15

Yeah, that’s awesome. And the last thing I will share is that you can go in as an admin, and literally see the people that are following your page. You can see if they’re first-degree or second-degree, and so, you can go in, if there is someone that’s following your page that you want to engage with, you can reach out and say, “Hey, Tony, thanks so much for following our company page, I had a chance to look at your profile. And I’d love to invite you to connect. May ask how you found Social Sales Link?” right? Start a conversation with these folks. Now, not with everyone, but there’s an opportunity in here for sure. These are people that are already engaging with your brand. So connecting with them, it’d be a really big deal.

Bob Woods 14:05

Yeah! So, before we wrap things up, we do have a couple of comments that I want to talk about and share about really quick. Steven, our good friend, wonders if someone from his company page likes or shares my content, how does that affect my posts, good or bad?

Brynne Tillman 14:21

It’s all good. There’s no negative, (Bob: It’s all good.) Yeah, there’s no negative. I mean, we are always engaging with each other’s content.

Bob Woods 14:29

The next one is, is from Joe, “We have LinkedIn company pages, important to put viable information that helps people keep it fresh, maybe going to a trade show and offer to meet up and compare notes to help each other. Make it a relationship builder page.” Could not agree more with that, excellent. And then Neil, Neil has an interesting one because we’re kind of in the same situation. “I’ve posted my podcast episodes on my company page. I used to post them in my personal feed, not sure if there’s much of a difference?”

Brynne Tillman

Big difference.

Bob Woods

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s a big difference there.

Brynne Tillman 15:03

So I will share, you should do both. So you can post it first on your company page and then as Bob mentioned, repost that on your personal page. But there’s very different algorithms and there are very different people that are following your company and who you’re connected to. And my guess is, at least it is for us, we have significantly more connections and followers of our personal than we do have our company page. So, we want to make sure that all audiences are seeing that. So, start on your company page and then reshare that on your page, so that you’re getting both audiences.

Bob Woods 15:44

And then something else that I would suggest, and this is something that we just started doing, I’m not sure if we’re seeing a lot out of it, though, is that LinkedIn still has showcase pages that are attached to the company page. So, we actually have the Making Sales Social podcast, which incorporates both versions of what we do, going into that actual showcase page. So kind of tucks underneath the main page, but it’s its own separate kind of entity, I guess, for lack of a better phrase (crosstalk)

Brynne Tillman 16:14

Yeah, I would say it’s much better for bigger companies like, if you have, (Bob: It’s better for bigger companies, yes.) Right, like if you have the Comcast page and then you have XFINITY under it and Comcast business under it, that might make sense. But we’re not, we’re actually seeing less engagement when we’re posting on the page that has less followers, right? So, and then your, you’ve got to focus on building two pages. So unless you’re a big brand, Bob, in my experience now, is just don’t bother with the showcase pages right now.

Bob Woods 16:50

Yeah, we just try to just, quite frankly, see what happens. (Brynne: We have to.) And, you know, try it if you want to, it is more work. And, you know, your mileage may vary, as they say.

Brynne Tillman 17:04

So Meredith, “Events, should they go on the company page or the personal page?” Okay, big difference between personal events and company events. The biggest difference is that company events, you can actually check a little box that says it’s a form, a signup form, which you can export into an Excel spreadsheet. So it’s a lead collection form that is available on the company page that’s not available on the personal page.

However, your personal page typically will get a bigger reach. So again, like we said, with Neil, if you want to use that form, to collect the leads that are signing up, I would recommend creating it on the company page, and then sharing it on your personal page. When we do LinkedIn Live, we get a much bigger audience from my personal page than the company page. So in that particular case, we’re not collecting leads, necessarily, we’re just putting out an event. And so we’re doing it on the personal page. But that one feature is killer for a lot of people. And that’s only available on the company page.

Bob Woods 18:17

Yeah. And then the next one, which I’m actually looking at an analytics page here, so I can talk about that a little bit. So, Joe asks, “When with LinkedIn, does it keep track of the analytics of how many people, how many times people comment on a web page?” I’m assuming a post at this point, or notice, so I’m looking at one right now. It keeps track of impressions, views, clicks, CTRs, reactions, comments, shares, and, and it even provides an engagement rate as well. So, it gets, like I said, it gets, it doesn’t reach the levels of granularity that you know, people like Brynne and I want to see, but it’s definitely much more than when you do analytics from personal posts. 

Brynne Tillman 19:03

Yes. And it’ll share the name of the post, the post type. Did you reshare it, was it uploaded article? Was it an image? It will tell you who, what audience had the opportunity to see it, which in our case, is always, we put it out for all followers, how many impressions it got, how many clicks it got, how many reactions that’s the like, or the love or the curious, right? So, I think it’s really nice and because you can really understand the reach of your posts.

My one recommendation is to try to compare that to the best analytics you can have your personal posts, A/B test it, because I have just found generally my personal posts do significantly better. (Bob: Yeah, same here.) And you can also do it in timeframes too. And you can export your analytics, which is great. (crosstalk)

Bob Woods 20:00

Yeah, that’s nice about that.

Brynne Tillman 20:03

So to company page or not company page, I think to company page.

Bob Woods 20:08

Yeah, yeah, I definitely think we’ve asked, we’ve answered that question. Like I said, it just, you know, depends on your time and how much effort you want to put into it. But every company no matter what, if you’re Fortune 500 or if you’re a solopreneur, every company should at least have a company page that is branded with a logo and like that type of thing.

Brynne Tillman 20:34

Awesome. So let’s bring this in for landing, my friend.

Bob Woods 20:37 

We are taking home, bringing it in for a landing, coming into the train station, all that stuff. Thanks again for joining us on Making Sales Social Live. If you’re with us live on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter right now, we do this sucker every week. So keep an eye out for our live sessions. If you’re listening to us on our podcast and if you haven’t subscribed already, go ahead and hit that Subscribe or Follow button to access all of our previous shows and be alerted when new ones drop, as the kids say.

If you like more information on our podcast, go to socialsaleslink.com/podcasts. As I said before, we actually do two shows weekly, we do the live show and then we also have a Making Sales Social interview series where we talk with leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business, and many more areas. So when you’re out and about, be sure to make your sales… (Brynne: Social.)

Thanks, everybody and you’re welcome to everybody who’s typing in “Thank you” in the comments, too. We appreciate it. Bye-bye, everybody. 

Hit Subscribe now and click the notification bell to get the latest videos from Social Sales Link. Give this video a like and comment down below. Register for free resources at LinkedInlibrary.com.