Episode 156: Leveraging LinkedIn Company Pages to Grow Your Brand

Bob Woods  00:00

Welcome, everyone to Making Sales Social Live! Brought to you by Social Sales Link. I’m Bob Woods, the LinkedIn Sherpa and I’m joined by the LinkedIn whisperer and fellow LinkedIn and social selling professional, Brynne Tillman. What’s up Brynne?

Brynne Tillman  00:16

Hello, my friend. It’s a great Monday morning, is what’s up.

Bob Woods  00:21

Yes, it is. Yes, it is. And we are here to talk about LinkedIn company pages. 

Intro: 00:29

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!

Bob Woods  00:46

Now LinkedIn itself wants us to call them just LinkedIn pages but I think we all know that we’re going to continue to call them LinkedIn company pages. So that’s what we’re gonna do here. Anywho, LinkedIn Company Pages really get short shrift when it comes to not just social selling, but with marketing in general. That’s a shame because they can be used effectively by any company to successfully engage with prospects, no matter what if you work for a huge company, medium or small-sized business, or you’re even an entrepreneur working by yourself or with a very small staff. So with that, let’s talk about just LinkedIn company pages overall, Brynne, I know why I like them. Why do you like them?

Brynne Tillman  01:29

Well, so first of all, company pages are a great way to brand the business. Even if you’re an entrepreneur, solopreneur, coach, I think having a brand alongside your personal profile is a big deal. If nothing else, to put the logo on your personal profile. So that’s the first thing. (Bob: and that’s big) It is big, right? (Bob: Coz it doesn’t look real if it’s not there) It looks less impressive, for sure and I do agree. Like that’s the beginning of the branding. 

Now, there are a lot of people that will come to us and say, “You know I’m a coach, I don’t necessarily have a brand.” Your brand could be your name “coaching.” It’s okay, like you can do that but having that company page, will do a lot and we’re gonna go through all of those things but at the highest level, if you are a business, you should have a LinkedIn page.

Bob Woods  02:28

Yep. Even if it’s just you. So, that’s just, I just wanted to pause there just let that sink in for a second. Because I mean, there are a lot of solopreneurs out there who, you know, and hopefully, gray box, yes, gray box. And it’s just, you know, people look at that and it’s just I mean, it’s not like a total turnoff, but you know, people kind of wonder who is this? You know, is it real? Yeah, yeah, yeah, are they real? And having that company page, even if you don’t fill it up with stuff, I mean, just having it is better than not having one at all. 

So let’s talk about actually having them and using them effectively. So I got several items here. The very first thing is when you are an entrepreneur or solopreneur, you can create your own page. You would go ahead and do that and no matter what size company you have, someone within the company is always going to have administrative or admin privileges over it. Now if you’re in a slightly larger company, and you actually have a social media manager, even internal or external, you need to give them admin privileges, so that when they post it’s showing up as the company rather than them individually, 

Brynne Tillman  03:45

Yeah, now, when I had started this before, Bob joined bajillion years ago, and I was the only solopreneur for a very short period of time. I actually made my husband an admin, he does not ever log in but I always like having a backup if something should happen, right. So always have at least two admins, even if one is inactive, just so that if something should happen, let’s say there’s something happens to your profile, we want to make sure that we can still go into the company page and it’s not a nightmare to do.

Bob Woods  04:21

That is a very excellent and very important point. So now that we’ve got the two admins there and you’ve got some of the things filled in because there are certain things that you need to fill in ahead of time if you do absolutely nothing else, put in your logo in there where it’s supposed to be. So again, that will appear at the top of your profile when you link your profile to your company page. Let’s talk about growing this sucker.

Brynne Tillman  04:48

Ohh wait, I want to add a couple more things. So banner, create a banner for the visual, the call to action button that can lead to your personal profile if you want to, lead to your website if you wanted to, it could lead to a funnel or an opt in if you wanted to. Use that call to action, complete the about section, even if you literally take the about section from your website, copy it and paste it, put it there. Okay, and make sure you’ve got the link to your website, fill it out, complete. 

Bob Woods  05:25

Yeah! So, you know, just fill out as much as you can but definitely concentrate on those couple of areas. If you do nothing else, concentrate on those couple areas that Brynne had. 

So now let’s talk about growing this sucker. So inviting followers monthly. You can actually do this from the company page and that’s probably the easiest way to start growing the number of followers that you have in your profile, I’m sorry, for your company page. 

Brynne Tillman  05:57

I know, right? Here’s the thing, which is interesting. Most people now have 250 invites per month. If someone accepts that invite, you actually get the credit back. So it could be more than 250. So we want you to start inviting people that would actually know who you are, and would be willing to follow me and even your clients or your networking partners. So personally export your connections, search through them, and make a list of people that you are already connected to because you do have to be first degree connected to invite them to follow that you are already connected to that, you know, and you can invite up to 250 a month. 

Now if you have a bigger company. So you know, in our case, Bob and I are the primary people out there. So we could split it into 125 each, meaning he could go in, because he’s also admin, he could go in and invite 125, I can invite 125. Now let’s say you have a bigger company, you can make your employees temporarily an admin to invite their clients to invite their connections, even if you make them admin for a couple of hours, and then pull it back and then you can broaden your followers through your team members.

Bob Woods  07:18

Exactly, exactly. So let’s talk about posting content. And we’re specifically going to talk about some of the thought processes and things like that about posting to a company page versus or sometimes in addition to posting to someone’s specific profile.

Brynne Tillman  07:39

Oh, yeah, that’s a great, great topic. So a lot of people will ask us, “Well, should I post it to the company page? Or should I post it to my personal profile?” And let’s break this down a little bit. You know, one thing that we talk about a lot is your personal profile is like you’re going to a conference, and you’re walking around and shaking hands and introducing yourself and having conversations with people And then they say, “Hey, tell me a little bit about what you do.” And you grab their hand and you walk them over to the booth. The booth is your LinkedIn page, the company page. So this is your opportunity to be able to brag. What do you call it?

Bob Woods  08:20

Yeah, so I call it “A Humble Brag” So I call it the humble brag. It’s not like #humblebrag. No, it’s not the specific definition for that but you know, it’s my definition. And this especially works if you’re a solopreneur, or an entrepreneur with a very small staff, and something good happens with your company and you’re like, “Yeah, but I really don’t want to post it to my personal profile” like an award or something like that, because it seems a little too braggy. What you can do is posted to your company page, and then you can repost to your profile from the company page. And then you can say, “So happy to have accepted this award from blah, blah, blah…” chamber or wherever you got it from, and go from there. So you’re bragging, but because it’s coming from the company page, it’s much more humble. Plus, you’re getting two separate hits within LinkedIn about that announcement as well.

Brynne Tillman  09:24

Yeah, I love that and you know, sometimes I used to do this now we actually have a team that does this. But back in the day, I remember specifically one incident where I won the ambassador of the year for the local Chamber of Commerce and that was exactly where I’m like, How do I say this without so… @Social Sales Link I went in, I was able to say “Congratulations to @Brynne Tillman, our CEO for this great award.” Mentioned the people in the chamber and then I simply just to Bob’s point, I went in, I commented, I liked, I shared it back to my posts, and it felt much more comfortable than me just saying, “Hey, I’m awesome.”

Bob Woods  10:13

Exactly, exactly. And that’s why it’s a humble brag. I mean, because you do want to get stuff like that out there. There’s no doubt about that. But a lot of people do feel conscientious about it. Heck, I would feel conscientious about it, too. But so that’s why LinkedIn has this really good, good way of I mean, you know we’re definitely using the LinkedIn tools to achieve this but you know, thank goodness, LinkedIn actually, lets us do all of this.

Brynne Tillman  10:37

Awesome. What’s next?

Bob Woods  10:40

Yeah, so now we’re talking about liking and commenting as the company as well as yourself. So you can like and comment on other people’s posts as the company as well and most companies do not do nearly enough of this, I think.

Brynne Tillman  11:01

This is so good, like so good. So it breaks LinkedIn’s agreement to have someone log into your personal profile, and a lot of people are like, “Well, you know, I really want someone to help me with content.” Well, this is a perfect solution, you can have as many admins on your company page as you’d like. So our admin Reggie, hi, Reggie, it goes in, he’s not our admin, he’s our social media manager, I shouldn’t, but he’s an admin of the company page. And he goes in and he can engage as Social Sales Link and if there’s something that’s talking about a topic that Bob is really smart at, he can @mentioned Bob Woods, and then that’ll get on Bob’s profile. So then Bob can go in and engage.

There are times where I actually go in and I engage versus social sales, like and mention my name, and then come back, and I engage, so you’re hitting them two times with your logo and your personal profile, right, so they’re seeing that you’re gonna grow followers that way, as well. And when you are on your newsfeed, and you’re gonna go like and share, if you are an admin of your page or other pages, there’s a little arrow that you click on, and there are little dots buttons, to engage either as yourself or as the company page and then as soon as you click that button, anything you do on that post, you comment, like, share will all be as the brand. 

So then, so you do that, I’ll go into the Social Sales Link icon, I’ll mention me “@Brynne Tillman, what are your thoughts?” Then I’ll go back in as Brynne Tillman and then I’ll respond on my thoughts. But what’s great about that, if you have a social media manager, they can go that content, you can say, “hey, if content comes out from these 20 companies” or and they can actually have people so if you give them a list, and they ring the bell of the people, when those people share content, it will come into their personal profile, but they can click through change to the brand, engage and mention you and so it’s a great way to have support in curating the content to engage on.

Bob Woods  13:21

Absolutely so while we’re talking about content and things like that, LinkedIn has been like about a year now, when it comes to newsletters, a company can actually now do a newsletter directly from the company page and this is something that we’re familiar with, because we just put out our second one, I think today, so we’re still learning more and more about how to do this, just know that you can put out a newsletter from LinkedIn that goes out to all of the followers of the page, essentially.

Brynne Tillman  13:59

Yeah, and our first ones, we have a little over 4000 followers on our page and we got over 600 subscribers with the launch.

Bob Woods  14:12

That’s like 15%

Brynne Tillman  14:15

it’s a high percentage. And the reason is, because LinkedIn loves these newsletters so much, it literally will get into the my Network tab of all of those followers with a request to follow. So that’s pretty powerful.

Bob Woods  14:34

So next, let’s talk a little bit about the relationship between the company and employees when it comes to content and this is going to be primarily for like small companies that you know, maybe like 50 plus employees or something like that all the way up to the largest companies that are out there. You can use the page as a way and just your presence in general. As a way to, you know, look at what your employees are sharing and if they share something that’s really good, go ahead and reshare it on the company page.

Brynne Tillman  15:10

Yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s amazing. And, the company page actually gives you the tool that if the employees connected to the company page, it’s alerted, you can also teach your team to mention the company, like at mentioned the company, and then that is going to come into activity into the company page. So, but, so is the company page, you can absolutely engage on that reshare it. And if it’s a great piece, once a day, as an admin can send notification to every employee, about one post a day, every 24 hours, you get to do it. So if you really want to get that word out about that post that an employee did, or even an internal post or an event or whatever that might be, take advantage of that announcement.

Bob Woods  16:09

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So then, obviously, any company that has any employees, or even if you’re a solopreneur, you’re, you know, posting is important, and then you can make sure that you’re recommending content to your employees, as well. And LinkedIn even makes that easier, in terms of suggesting things to post directly from, you know, to like reshare content from the company page, because company pages should have feeds going just like any other type of social media type of feed in general, you really should think of the LinkedIn company page along those lines as well. So if there’s like an NC you know, if a company has an Instagram or Facebook or blah, blah, blah Twitter or whatever, if they have all that and they don’t have LinkedIn in there, you definitely need to put LinkedIn in the mix.

Brynne Tillman  17:03

Awesome. I love that. I forgot, can I rewind for a second? One of the greatest things about newsletters, if I go back to that, I mean, really amazing, is you can look at all your subscribers, if their first degrees, you can send messages if their second degrees, or third, you can connect. And I’m actually live looking at these folks and there are so many second degrees that have actually subscribed and I didn’t realize how many followers we have of our page that we haven’t connected with. So you can do that as well. You can click through your followers, and you should have folks on your team. They may be your first Bob. So you should have your team engaging with the right people. You don’t have to connect with all of them but make sure you’re looking through and connecting with the people that you would want to have a conversation with. 

Bob Woods  18:03

Exactly because that’s what social selling is all about. Always keep that in mind, if nothing else. Okay, so socialsaleslink.com/newsletter. That is how you can subscribe to our newsletter. It’s pretty, it’s pretty cool how that works. So thanks again for joining us on Making Sales Social Live! If you’re with us live on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter right now, we do this every week, so keep an eye out for our sessions. 

As I mentioned before, if you’re listening to us on our podcast, which is recorded and 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. If you want more info about our podcast in general, it’s socialsaleslink.com/podcast. We do two shows weekly, we do this one and we also have the Making Sales Social interview series, where we talk with leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business and many more areas that can help you with your sales and social selling. 

So when you’re out and about be sure to make your sales social. Thanks, everybody. Have a great week. Bye bye. 

Outro: 19:12

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