G'day everyone.
Speaker:It's Coach Michelle J Raymond, your trusted guide for building your
Speaker:business and your brand on LinkedIn.
Speaker:And we are continuing on our series of friends that I wanna talk to and
Speaker:I'm gonna let you listen because this is going to be a fabulous
Speaker:conversation about Company Pages.
Speaker:Zoe Bermant, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker:Thank you for having me.
Speaker:This is your second time on the show, so I appreciate you coming back because when
Speaker:it comes to Company Pages and specifically everyone, we're gonna be talking about
Speaker:Company Pages premium, it's probably the most often question I get asked.
Speaker:And just so you know, I got Zoe on the podcast because people
Speaker:are even asking Zoe right now
Speaker:are you getting paid by LinkedIn to promote Company
Speaker:Pages premium to other people?
Speaker:We're gonna get into this right after a quick word about our
Speaker:podcast sponsors Metricool.
Speaker:Alright Zoe, I know people want to talk about all things LinkedIn Premium, but
Speaker:we're not gonna go straight into that.
Speaker:I'm gonna make them wait.
Speaker:Classic podcast host manoeuvre.
Speaker:But I wanna talk about something that's probably more important right
Speaker:now and that is Company Page reach.
Speaker:It's pretty much declined over the last five years.
Speaker:Many people would say to almost non-existent in the home feed.
Speaker:And you've probably seen this firsthand across the board with your clients.
Speaker:How are you navigating this shift with them?
Speaker:Because I think your experience working with so many different Company Pages is
Speaker:definitely going to help some people out there that might be struggling with this.
Speaker:You know, it's not new to this year.
Speaker:In 2023, we launched with an event that we hosted at Google called,
Speaker:it's not about the post because we were opening up our feed.
Speaker:You know, you go into LinkedIn, you're scrolling through your feed,
Speaker:and I was saying to people, how many Company Page posts seeing in your feed?
Speaker:You follow how many brands?
Speaker:Are you seeing those brands?
Speaker:You follow them?
Speaker:Are you seeing it in your feed?
Speaker:And even back then, 2023 and, and since then, the reach just keeps getting worse.
Speaker:I think in those days it was about 11 posts in a hundred in your feed.
Speaker:Now you're lucky if it's one or two, and even if you go to the Company Page and
Speaker:you ring the bell and you engage with the page and you follow the people and you
Speaker:doing all the right things on LinkedIn, go to your feed, scroll through, the
Speaker:only content from brands that you're seeing is stuff that's being promoted to
Speaker:you, they're paying for you to see it.
Speaker:So that is it.
Speaker:Begs the question, who's viewing Company Pages?
Speaker:Where are these likes and impressions and engagements coming from?
Speaker:And it's a really big challenge.
Speaker:So we face it with three main strategies.
Speaker:Number one is to invest in people.
Speaker:You know, if you are going to an event, great.
Speaker:Put the event post on your Company Page.
Speaker:Your Company Page is a bulletin for what is happening at your company and
Speaker:it supports all the other activity.
Speaker:We invest in layers of advocacy, thought leadership, ambassadors,
Speaker:and then everybody else, and we get everybody else to like and
Speaker:repost the Company Page profile.
Speaker:Um, content.
Speaker:We get the ambassadors to create their own original content.
Speaker:We get thought leaders to create thought leadership, and if you invest
Speaker:in people, we see that that's how you're reaching your audiences.
Speaker:Then you're getting page views, you're getting likes, you're getting
Speaker:engagement on your company profile.
Speaker:It's not coming organically through people's feeds.
Speaker:The second thing that we invest in is.
Speaker:Premium.
Speaker:We're slowly bringing our clients to a place where they're understanding LinkedIn
Speaker:want you to pay to play, and it's so bad that, and we'll come back to this when we
Speaker:talk specific about premium, but if you switch it on and then switch it off again,
Speaker:like you do their one month free trial.
Speaker:Everything will tank completely.
Speaker:By the way, you'll see this on your personal profile as well if
Speaker:you boost your posts and then stop boosting your posts, all your posts
Speaker:don't go anywhere organically.
Speaker:But that's social media.
Speaker:LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok are pay to play platforms.
Speaker:The people who agree to pay see bigger returns than the
Speaker:people that don't agree to pay.
Speaker:And then the third thing is and I hate to say this 'cause we're very much an
Speaker:organic, led agency, but we do encourage boosting for reaching audiences.
Speaker:But we do it as a, an add-on.
Speaker:You know, you've gotta get organic, right?
Speaker:You can't just do paid media and paid boosting and expect
Speaker:that you're gonna have results.
Speaker:You have to have social first good content with good advocacy in place and then you
Speaker:can say, okay, now how do we level up?
Speaker:How do we 10 x?
Speaker:And then you go and boost everything.
Speaker:So those are our three wins to get social media working.
Speaker:And I'm so glad that you came at it from all those different angles because
Speaker:you know me, we've been friends on the platform for the last five years talking
Speaker:all things Company Pages and from that perspective, I always get dragged into
Speaker:every post that's out there that tells me Company Pages are a waste of time.
Speaker:To your point, yes, they don't show up in the home feed anymore.
Speaker:I can't get on this podcast and lie to you or anyone out there and say, oh
Speaker:no, everything's sunshine and fairies.
Speaker:Because if you log on yourself, you very quickly and easily see as Zoe shared, that
Speaker:your organic posts are not in that feed.
Speaker:And then the argument comes, well, why bother?
Speaker:But there's more to Company Pages.
Speaker:There's more to building a brand, there's more to social selling or whatever
Speaker:way you wanna look at it, linkedIn marketing than just post impressions.
Speaker:And I love, using the term, the Power of Two.
Speaker:Bring the employees together, bring the brand together, and we've all
Speaker:got to focus on the same goal.
Speaker:So yeah, I was nodding.
Speaker:For those of you who are listening to this on the audio podcast, I have been just
Speaker:nodding the whole time Zoe's been talking.
Speaker:I absolutely agree with that.
Speaker:Boosting, interesting.
Speaker:It's not something that I particularly use that often for myself or clients.
Speaker:But you are right.
Speaker:You can't just pay money on LinkedIn to make bad content work.
Speaker:You know, if you haven't done the work, the foundations like positioning and
Speaker:messaging and what kinds of, graphics work or land with your audience or
Speaker:the copywriting, then you are just literally making a donation to LinkedIn.
Speaker:So if you are doing that.
Speaker:And using that Boost button and just making that donation.
Speaker:I'm gonna put my bank account details in the show notes, and you could
Speaker:just send your money straight to me.
Speaker:I promise I'll do more with it.
Speaker:I'll share it 50% with Zoe, because we can save you.
Speaker:Like it's just, it kind of gets a little crazy.
Speaker:But let's talk about LinkedIn Company Pages premium.
Speaker:So it's been around for what the best part of a year or so now, and
Speaker:it was the sign of things to come.
Speaker:I think 2025 is definitely the year of pay to play on LinkedIn, and it's
Speaker:been a bit of a shock to the system, but when you are working with your
Speaker:clients, do you recommend to them to invest in Company Page premium?
Speaker:And what kind of businesses does this actually make sense for?
Speaker:So we're talking budget wise, what I, in Aussie dollars, we're sitting
Speaker:around a hundred to 130 Aussie dollars, depending if you pay annual.
Speaker:Around the world, like how do you decide who it's good for
Speaker:and who should save their money?
Speaker:That's a great question and I, I'll start first by saying, when LinkedIn
Speaker:Premium first came out it, like any LinkedIn new feature, it was half baked.
Speaker:It wasn't available to everyone and even now there are different prices for
Speaker:different companies like you go to sign up on one company and it's like you said,
Speaker:about $90 and another company, it's $130.
Speaker:And there's also different features available to different companies,
Speaker:which I discovered just by accident.
Speaker:So it's still in its processes of becoming a real valuable tool.
Speaker:But there's no doubt that LinkedIn have gone all in on this, because
Speaker:they've tanked to reach for everybody.
Speaker:And it's becoming clearer that if you're willing to pay for the premium, you're
Speaker:going to see bigger and higher reach.
Speaker:And people are still questioning it.
Speaker:You know, with us it was a decision of, we really just needed one feature on for one
Speaker:of our clients, which is the Auto Invite.
Speaker:And the way the auto invite works is anyone who engages with your
Speaker:content on your page is automatically invited to follow the brand.
Speaker:And this was for a VC, a venture capital firm where they have a lot
Speaker:of engagement 'cause there's a lot of founders and startups in their ecosystem.
Speaker:Their posts get amazing organic engagement, but their page was
Speaker:growing really, really, really slowly.
Speaker:What we found when we switched it on and what happened , and I get accused
Speaker:of being , a LinkedIn lackey and, and promoting this, were having this.
Speaker:They didn't have the option to switch it on.
Speaker:And I had it on for a different client and I was like, it'd be
Speaker:so cool if I could have this.
Speaker:So I wrote a post and I tagged LinkedIn and I'm like, why is this
Speaker:not available to other people?
Speaker:And someone from LinkedIn reached out to me and said, I can switch it on for you.
Speaker:And I said, well, here are all the pages we wanna switch it on for.
Speaker:So I then had someone at LinkedIn I could talk to and it became a
Speaker:whole matter of switch it on, why is this page different from that page?
Speaker:Why is the cost different?
Speaker:But what we did see is, apart from that one feature the pages that switch it
Speaker:on their reach grows, their visibility grows, their credibility grows.
Speaker:And there are some kind of cool features that are optimized
Speaker:now for your landing page.
Speaker:So when people do come to your company profile, you've got a carousel
Speaker:that you can have like a slide of think five banners at the top.
Speaker:You can have featured, uh, awards.
Speaker:You can have a customer testimonial.
Speaker:So it's giving you things that are kind of leveling up the landing
Speaker:page that people come to when they come to your company profile.
Speaker:As well as all the benefits of the added reach and the added engagement.
Speaker:And it's a sad story to tell, but we're in the process of starting year end
Speaker:reports and Q4 reports, and for most of our clients, like just yesterday, we had a
Speaker:client say to us, what are the highlights from this year that I can tell my C-suite?
Speaker:I'm going into a meeting and we just couldn't.
Speaker:It didn't matter how we manipulated the data.
Speaker:I said, let's take the top 20 posts from this year, put them next to
Speaker:the top 20 posts from last year, and maybe that will give us something.
Speaker:And even there both reach, engagements and clickthroughs.
Speaker:There was nothing good about this year, and this is one of the brands
Speaker:that didn't switch on premium.
Speaker:It's really interesting because you know, when people come to me and you
Speaker:know that everybody knows me for Company Pages and I'm out there speaking,
Speaker:I've written a book on it and people will put me up on this pedestal.
Speaker:And when I start working with clients and we're doing all the cool stuff,
Speaker:but the numbers are still sliding down and they're looking at me going,
Speaker:Michelle, like, what's going on?
Speaker:And I'm like, no, no, no.
Speaker:Like, you know, just trust me.
Speaker:We'll work our way back up.
Speaker:But there is that period of time where I know that there's a lot of
Speaker:people out there listening, social media managers, marketing managers
Speaker:that are running these Company Pages and thinking, what the heck do I do?
Speaker:Because nothing that they've tried, and it can work on all kinds of other
Speaker:platforms, but when they come to LinkedIn, things just aren't growing.
Speaker:And I used to say to people, number of followers, it's not that big
Speaker:a deal, until I had a bit of a change of heart and an epiphany.
Speaker:We look to that as social proof, and the bigger the number of followers, the more
Speaker:the page is held in that higher esteem and I think that then attracts more people.
Speaker:It's like the, you know, nightclub that's got the lineup
Speaker:out the door, around the block.
Speaker:Of course we wanna see what's going on in there, so we line up as well.
Speaker:And so that follower growth and helping people grow that quicker.
Speaker:I now see is much more valuable than potentially.
Speaker:When I recorded a podcast episode on that feature about a year ago, I was
Speaker:like, yeah, does it make a difference?
Speaker:Actually, I think it does now.
Speaker:But for the people who are thinking, okay, we can afford, you know, whatever
Speaker:the budget is for Company Page Premium, what feature do you think has had
Speaker:the biggest impact for your clients?
Speaker:Is it the follower growth that you see is the biggest one, or is there
Speaker:something else that you really love?
Speaker:I think it's the craziest one when you go into invite people to follow your page.
Speaker:You can actually now look at your competitor and see their
Speaker:followers, invite them, which is insane if you think about it.
Speaker:The only thing to remember is that the person doing the inviting is like,
Speaker:you know, all those notifications you get in LinkedIn saying, so and so has
Speaker:invited you to follow this page or follow this newsletter or follow this brand.
Speaker:You are the person sending out the invite.
Speaker:And I think Company Pages get 250 invites a month.
Speaker:But you can be really strategic and targeted with it.
Speaker:And it also gives you the option to choose, by job title or role or whatever,
Speaker:so you can actually geo target it.
Speaker:So I can go in and I can say for a brand that we're representing in treasury
Speaker:banking, which is like, it's so niche, I can go and say, I wanna find people
Speaker:in the US with this job title, whatever, and then invite them to like the page.
Speaker:And that is a game changer because they tend to.
Speaker:We used to see about a 5% accept rate, I think, which is really low.
Speaker:I mean, it's nothing.
Speaker:If you are inviting a hundred people and you've got a 5%, that means
Speaker:you're inviting five successful people to follow your brand a month.
Speaker:It's not gonna bring you hundreds of followers.
Speaker:But now we see about 20, 30% success rate because you're much more targeted
Speaker:in the people that you're inviting to follow your brand, and they're more
Speaker:likely to follow because this is of interest to them than because you just
Speaker:randomly knew them because you worked with them 5, 10, 15 years ago and
Speaker:you're connected to them on LinkedIn.
Speaker:Look, and this is the reminder to everybody that's listening.
Speaker:If you aren't taking advantage of those 250 page invite credits each month.
Speaker:I think that that's a missed opportunity.
Speaker:I know that there are people out there that used to say to me, Michelle,
Speaker:like, you can't send a connection message with them so they're bad
Speaker:and evil and we shouldn't do it.
Speaker:And now those same people, because there's been such a shift over on
Speaker:personal profiles, if you don't pay, you can't send connection messages.
Speaker:So now I think connection messages are out the window and from that perspective, now
Speaker:we're all like going, who even wants one?
Speaker:I don't wanna get one.
Speaker:And I've actually found when we're doing it for our clients, if we're
Speaker:out there connecting personally.
Speaker:No message performs hands down a thousand percent better than anything else.
Speaker:You know, if we put a message on there on that first one, they're like,
Speaker:you are trying to sell me something.
Speaker:I'm, you know, you are out.
Speaker:So it's, I think that's gonna work well for Company Pages.
Speaker:Now no one's gonna be sending messages.
Speaker:To add to that, your employees have 30 people a month they can invite as well.
Speaker:The only thing I'll say is, and I see it myself in my own notifications every
Speaker:day, is it's getting really crowded and noisy, and after a while, all
Speaker:these invitations become meaningless.
Speaker:And if every company's relying on that to grow their company brand.
Speaker:It's a problem.
Speaker:To go back to your point about follower growth in our reporting
Speaker:this year, we made a big change.
Speaker:We started showing everything by visibility, resonance,
Speaker:credibility, and opportunity.
Speaker:And credibility.
Speaker:Is that what you were talking about?
Speaker:It's those page followers and mentions and tags and things like that.
Speaker:That's credibility.
Speaker:Like that.
Speaker:Seeing the res like.
Speaker:How well your company is perceived.
Speaker:And so follower growth becomes important.
Speaker:But one of the things we keep reminding our clients when they're
Speaker:looking at competitors, they're like, why is this competitor
Speaker:growing like 30% faster than we are?
Speaker:Because their competitor is using job ads with the auto apply on LinkedIn,
Speaker:and every time someone clicks to apply for a job, so they put up one
Speaker:job, it gets a thousand applicants.
Speaker:They get a thousand new followers.
Speaker:Or 800 and something.
Speaker:Some people turn it off, but it's an auto thing to follow the
Speaker:brand when you apply for the job.
Speaker:And only if you choose to turn it off, then it doesn't follow the brand.
Speaker:So, you know, we've even got clients who are saying to us, okay, we wanna
Speaker:start using job ads that don't exist.
Speaker:Jobs that don't exist just to grow their page.
Speaker:Following.
Speaker:Then this gaming of the system and also the auto invites and the inviting and the
Speaker:inviting, and the inviting and inviting.
Speaker:After a while, it all becomes meaningless and it's a problem like genuine
Speaker:authentic growth and authentic voice and authentic social first content is
Speaker:the way to win and advocacy and thought leadership and all of that stuff.
Speaker:If you're just there to game the system so that you can say, I've got a thousand
Speaker:new followers, or I've got slightly more followers than my competitor, are you
Speaker:really getting value and ROI out of that?
Speaker:No.
Speaker:Oh, I, I've got my eyes rolling and my teeth gritted as I listen to
Speaker:that because you are right, like all those stupid automation tools and
Speaker:things that promise to get around LinkedIn's limits and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker:I've been on a mission.
Speaker:I now actually have an email address to report automation tools, so just
Speaker:shout out to all of the listeners.
Speaker:If I come across a tool that breaks the LinkedIn rules,
Speaker:I'm dobbing on them, right?
Speaker:Because, yeah.
Speaker:It ruins it for the rest of us and I've just had enough.
Speaker:You are not being clever, you're not being smart.
Speaker:You're just ruining it for all of us.
Speaker:And from that perspective.
Speaker:I love LinkedIn, but I have definitely struggled this year where there have been
Speaker:times when I've fallen out of love with it, with the combination of lots of things
Speaker:that all happened throughout the year.
Speaker:Lots of bumps, lots of lumps, lots of gut punches, it felt like, but
Speaker:I got to the point where I was like, no, I love this platform
Speaker:and what it can do for businesses.
Speaker:I've gotta get my head back in the game.
Speaker:And I actually have come to the realization it, all of these
Speaker:things have just flushed out, who are the great marketers that can
Speaker:adapt and get this stuff sorted?
Speaker:And who are the ones that are gonna try and cheat the system because
Speaker:they've skipped over all of the basics and the foundations and the strategy.
Speaker:You know, you don't need to do that kind of stuff if you go back
Speaker:and get your foundations right.
Speaker:And I'll get back off my soapbox right now and, uh, take a chill pill because I want
Speaker:to ask you a question because it's not very often Zoe that I can go and hang out
Speaker:with someone and talk all things Company Pages and them be excited like you are.
Speaker:So this is like my Christmas coming today where I get to talk all things Company
Speaker:Pages with someone else that loves them, but I have to ask for everything that's
Speaker:been going on right now, you, your team, I would love to know what kinds of things
Speaker:you've been testing and what types of content are you finding that consistently
Speaker:perform best on Company Pages.
Speaker:Can you share some of your secrets with our listeners?
Speaker:Yeah, so it's great.
Speaker:I love this question because I get these brands that come along and they're
Speaker:like, we are in computational computing and our audience is really technical
Speaker:and like they think that the co the content has to be completely different.
Speaker:And I'm like, what works on LinkedIn for the algorithm and what we see works?
Speaker:Carousels and galleries, right?
Speaker:And we start from there and then we go to, you know, single images and video.
Speaker:Although everyone says video is the content platform, it's a huge
Speaker:investment, and the ROI is not there.
Speaker:And we just don't see the value in the video that we thought would be there
Speaker:this year or that we used to see.
Speaker:So our order of preference is a gallery.
Speaker:Which is the easiest.
Speaker:It's just loads of images.
Speaker:Then a carousel, which takes a lot more work and it's more designed,
Speaker:and then a static image, and then a video, and then a plain text,
Speaker:and it's just as simple as that.
Speaker:Now, within the galleries, what we are discovering is you can
Speaker:get super duper, duper creative.
Speaker:And we've got one big enterprise brand that everybody knows.
Speaker:And I would love to be able to just like throw it out there, but I can't.
Speaker:But what we did was we've developed a way to animate using gifs so
Speaker:that when it displays the four images, they move across all four.
Speaker:In a coordinated way.
Speaker:Each one is actually just a standalone gif.
Speaker:Um, and then you've got your plus symbol with all your extra images after that.
Speaker:So it visually is wow, you see it.
Speaker:And then the other one to that, the add-on to that is to sometimes
Speaker:have statics, sometimes moving.
Speaker:So because you can add multiple images to a gallery, and some of them can be
Speaker:gifts and some of them can be static.
Speaker:Again, if your first main image moves and then everything else is static, or
Speaker:this one moves and this one's static, but something jumps from here down to
Speaker:the bottom image because you've timed it and you've planned it that way.
Speaker:It is wild.
Speaker:Like we've had something blow up in the bottom image and then all of a sudden
Speaker:fireworks come out in the top image.
Speaker:So listen, this is an investment in stop, think, plan, test.
Speaker:We have a testing group on LinkedIn where we can upload content, see that it
Speaker:works, see that everything coordinates properly, and we are doing much, much
Speaker:more of these kinds of formats because we know that they work really well.
Speaker:I love that.
Speaker:I haven't seen any of those.
Speaker:After the podcast, if I can have some secret squirrel top secret
Speaker:clearance to come and check these out.
Speaker:'cause that sounds super cool.
Speaker:For me i'm gonna ask you one more question about the types of content.
Speaker:So there's probably two that I love that you didn't mention, and
Speaker:they are polls and newsletters.
Speaker:I still think polls, despite what everybody else is saying right now,
Speaker:for me and my clients, they work a treat again, method to the madness.
Speaker:Two choices.
Speaker:Make someone choose really easily and pick a hot topic in the industry.
Speaker:That's my disclaimer.
Speaker:If you give them four options and they're all blah, blah, you
Speaker:already knew the answers anyway.
Speaker:They don't work, so can we just like put those ones aside, press the buttons
Speaker:on a hot topic and get people into it.
Speaker:But newsletters I still love.
Speaker:I I've been a fan of them since day one.
Speaker:How do you find them for your clients?
Speaker:Are they part of what you are promoting?
Speaker:Or is it?
Speaker:No, no deal.
Speaker:We are doing that, elsewhere.
Speaker:Yeah, so I'll start with polls.
Speaker:When you put them side by side with the metrics of all your other content,
Speaker:they sit in like third or fourth place, so we don't often do them, but
Speaker:it is a fun way to break up content.
Speaker:We find, and I used to say, listen, there's not a lot of value in them
Speaker:because if you're expecting hundreds of thousands of people to answer.
Speaker:Having said that, we'd had some standout examples.
Speaker:Like we had a cyber client where the CEO and again, it was from a personal
Speaker:profile, not from a company profile, but he asked, should companies pay ransomware?
Speaker:I have my opinion, but I'm curious about yours.
Speaker:Controversial topic, and everybody had an opinion on it.
Speaker:So 500,000 votes later, and he was like thrilled.
Speaker:Then the Company Page did the exact same poll and, like 300 replies later.
Speaker:It just didn't have that.
Speaker:And it's same topic, same controversy, same people with opinions, but less people
Speaker:see it because it's on a company profile.
Speaker:So that was number one.
Speaker:Number two I got taught a lesson because I, you know, say to my clients,
Speaker:there's no point doing a poll unless you really creative with it and whatever.
Speaker:But we had a client that wanted a series of polls leading up to a
Speaker:survey results that were coming out.
Speaker:So they would take some of the questions from the survey, put it into a poll.
Speaker:And the guy came back to me on our weekly meeting and he said to me,
Speaker:you wouldn't believe it, but I picked up two new clients this week based
Speaker:on that poll because it was so niche and the questions were related to a
Speaker:pain that one of their customers had.
Speaker:And even though that actual poll had only had something like 15, 20
Speaker:answers on it, the two within the 15 20 we're potential new clients.
Speaker:So value isn't always measured in hundreds of views, thousands of likes
Speaker:and and millions of impressions.
Speaker:It's measured in, you've got the right audience with the right message at the
Speaker:right time, and you've ticked three boxes, and then magic happens on social media.
Speaker:As we've been talking, I was wondering, and I haven't looked at this or done
Speaker:any analytics and you are like my go-to when it comes to analytics.
Speaker:Like you know that that's not my strong point.
Speaker:Never has been, never will be.
Speaker:But I'm wondering with Company Pages premium, if you have 300 engagements
Speaker:on your poll, I wonder if they get invited to follow the page if they're
Speaker:not already, because that could be fun.
Speaker:That could be a fun way to, yeah.
Speaker:Blow the right audience up.
Speaker:Not just trying to get an audience for the sake of it, but getting
Speaker:people that are interested in that.
Speaker:And I think it's probably easier to get them to engage in a poll than what it
Speaker:is sometimes with Company Page posts.
Speaker:And I don't know if you have any insights in that, but it was just an idea that was
Speaker:popping into my brain as you said that.
Speaker:'cause polls could be an easy way that people could say, vote either way.
Speaker:And then, they get auto invited.
Speaker:That would be cool if that worked.
Speaker:If you go back to that VC example that I gave they do do polls because
Speaker:they're polling their startup founders about the biggest pains that they
Speaker:have and raising funds and whatever.
Speaker:They switched on their premium because they had one KPI.
Speaker:You ready for it?
Speaker:Grow our
Speaker:page followers, and all I wanted to do was switch on the auto invite.
Speaker:And we see they have about 17,000 followers, if I'm not mistaken,
Speaker:and we see around 90 to 150 followers a month on auto invite.
Speaker:Wow that's pretty high because I would say historically, if even if you look
Speaker:at just the Company Page invites, like if you're sending out 250, you probably
Speaker:get 60 to 80 if you're coming from the right person and super targeted
Speaker:and using all of those filters.
Speaker:So that's interesting.
Speaker:I'm gonna watch this space and do some testing of my own.
Speaker:To all of our listeners that are out there, I think there's one more
Speaker:important thing that you and I can discuss that I think has probably
Speaker:impacted a lot of people out there.
Speaker:Either those that are starting out in their career as social media
Speaker:managers who often get handed the Company Page, last person in most
Speaker:junior gets handed the Company Page.
Speaker:Or we're at the other end where you're a one person marketing team
Speaker:and you are responsible for the Company Page and everything else.
Speaker:Or we've got agencies that might be listening to us as well,
Speaker:similar to what you and I run.
Speaker:But from that side of things, I wanna talk about the feeling of, I don't know,
Speaker:I guess being worn down by everything that's been going on with Company Pages.
Speaker:On one hand, if you listen to everyone on the feed, they
Speaker:say they're a waste of time.
Speaker:Don't bother.
Speaker:Just promote your employees.
Speaker:Get employee advocacy going, ignore your page.
Speaker:And you know, people are getting paid to do these jobs and doing
Speaker:their best, and then logging onto LinkedIn and getting just slammed.
Speaker:And then the numbers are sliding down out of control despite your best intentions.
Speaker:So if someone out there is listening and feels like they've
Speaker:been doing all the right things.
Speaker:But not seeing results.
Speaker:What advice would you give them?
Speaker:The wisdom of your experience for the new year.
Speaker:First of all, sympathy.
Speaker:Let's just take a deep breath because it is hard and painful.
Speaker:Um, and you know, I as you rightly said, I have an agency, so it's like times this
Speaker:by 50 clients and the pain is very real.
Speaker:So I really feel the pain for every single person out there.
Speaker:Take a deep breath and, if you are struggling to convince your company
Speaker:that advocacy is worth it, and if you're struggling to get people
Speaker:to buy into advocacy, start slow.
Speaker:Pick one person.
Speaker:Let's say if you set a goal of one person, or if you've got three product
Speaker:lines, maybe pick three people, one in each, pick an ambassador, one person
Speaker:that you mentor, that you make it easy that you create content for, right?
Speaker:And you just keep feeding them and making it easy for them.
Speaker:And even though that's not in your job title and it's not in the scope of work,
Speaker:and we do it as an agency, I like said to one of my clients last year for free,
Speaker:I wanna start mentoring ambassadors.
Speaker:Bring me three people a quarter and let me take them through a process.
Speaker:And within a quarter some of them fall and fail.
Speaker:And they were never meant to be ambassadors in the first place, and
Speaker:other people fly and so on before you know what, they don't want my help.
Speaker:They're creating their own content.
Speaker:Because they're seeing the value.
Speaker:They're going to exhibitions and shows, and people know who they are.
Speaker:They're getting invited to more, uh, speaking opportunities.
Speaker:They're being quoted in the press.
Speaker:And it ties into the whole marketing stack, pr and it's gonna start tying
Speaker:into GEO, which is, you know, the Agentic Engine optimization so that
Speaker:you can show up in ChatGPT and LLMs, everybody's talking about that and
Speaker:everyone's saying PR isn't dead.
Speaker:You need PR to get the mentions in agentic tools.
Speaker:Well, guess what?
Speaker:How do you get more PR?
Speaker:You big up your people and make them voices in the industry and that
Speaker:comes through their social media.
Speaker:So everything ties in and you can suddenly start to build this amazing visibility.
Speaker:And there's this thing called ego.
Speaker:So you take one person, you big them up, then suddenly hold on.
Speaker:That's not the right person to be bigged up.
Speaker:I'm bigger than that person.
Speaker:You should be doing my profile.
Speaker:And then you start to get all these other people.
Speaker:You know, investing and interested and, and the interest grows.
Speaker:And if you start high in the C level, you know, and you get them engaging
Speaker:with other people's posts within, you can change an entire culture in
Speaker:a company to where a social culture, we're interested, we're engaged.
Speaker:The CEOs liking posts and engaging with his employees and what is the
Speaker:knock on effect of that success and that success is translatable to
Speaker:the social media account managers.
Speaker:Now what I will say is you've gotta measure that, and that is
Speaker:the hardest thing on this earth.
Speaker:So when you're mentoring people.
Speaker:Come up with a system of how they report back to you, their success, so
Speaker:that you add that into your results.
Speaker:Yeah, here's how the Company Page is doing.
Speaker:But when you add this, which has 400 or 800 times the success that the
Speaker:Company Page has, that's your success.
Speaker:Make it your success.
Speaker:And then you have all of that under your belt, and you're not
Speaker:just saying, well, the LinkedIn algorithm's really bad at the moment,
Speaker:so everything's down and it's tanked.
Speaker:Or last year we had one really standout post and everything else
Speaker:went like belly up this year.
Speaker:You can actually turn that narrative around, but you have to
Speaker:take charge and don't use their excuses as your excuses because
Speaker:they don't understand social media.
Speaker:If they understood social media, and I said this to Michelle earlier, if
Speaker:they understand social media, they're not asking you to put up a post today
Speaker:about a webinar that's starting in two hours time thinking they're gonna get
Speaker:hundreds more registrants to it, because that's not the way social media works.
Speaker:We know that, but we end up doing it because it ticks a box.
Speaker:Somebody had told us to do it, they think it's gonna bring them more registrants.
Speaker:So we do it, but we know we're not dumb.
Speaker:We also know that if a blog went out today.
Speaker:The post doesn't have to go up today.
Speaker:You can actually think and be creative and do a really fun post
Speaker:with it or break it up into 10 posts if you have time to think.
Speaker:But if everything on social media is the blog went up today, the post has to
Speaker:go up today, then what you end up with is really bad social media and then
Speaker:the results are also not that great.
Speaker:Look, you have the wisdom of your experience.
Speaker:I appreciate you sharing that.
Speaker:I think the main message that I wanna echo is it's gonna take teamwork.
Speaker:2026 is gonna be when page admins, whether you're part of the marketing team
Speaker:or the social team, need to have more conversations with their colleagues and
Speaker:ask for help and work out how can you use the page, I call it Page advocacy.
Speaker:To help promote those individuals in the business.
Speaker:How do you shine a light on those employees so they do feel 10 foot
Speaker:tall, bulletproof, and that you are there to support them, not just someone
Speaker:that's saying, Hey, I need your help.
Speaker:You need to help me get my KPIs.
Speaker:Because if you work out how to work together quickly as a team,
Speaker:that's where the real magic comes.
Speaker:And I say that like it's just easy and you can click your
Speaker:fingers and it will all happen.
Speaker:It doesn't.
Speaker:It takes time and commitment and the right culture behind it.
Speaker:So Zoe, thank you for everything that you have shared today.
Speaker:I know that there are people out there that are gonna be listening
Speaker:to this and have really enjoyed it.
Speaker:So I'm gonna put all of your details and how they can find you in the
Speaker:show notes so that they can connect with you and follow you on LinkedIn.
Speaker:But from my side of things, I wish you all the best for 2026.
Speaker:Thank you for coming back on the podcast and until next time, cheers.