G'day everyone, it's Michelle J Raymond, and I am joined this week,
listeners, by the one and only content anarchist, Ashley Sava.
Welcome to the show.
I am very happy to be here today.
Now, I'm not sure where this conversation's gonna go, and I'm a
little bit nervous, not gonna lie.
But I think we have to do some things that make us nervous when it comes to creating
content, because otherwise we're gonna be putting people to sleep, and I know that
that is something that you are very anti.
Oh, definitely.
All I wanna do is not put people to sleep, or I don't wanna be there at all.
Yeah, exactly.
It's a waste of time.
Now, I am excited to have this, because you are behind the Manychat Company Page
on LinkedIn, which I am a super fan of.
I've even dedicated an episode to it before, but I thought it'd be even
better to get the person behind it.
For those people who may not have come across Manychat before, can
you just tell us about you guys and your team that's doing the work?
Yeah, definitely.
The way that we like to, um, identify Manychat for people who don't think that
they've come across it is if you go on Instagram and there's a little comment
the word XYZ and we'll send you a link, we are usually the proprietory between that.
So we are the ones that are powering the automation, um,
behind those type of things.
But Manychat on a wide scale helps creators and brands and businesses
turn comments and DMs and messages into automated conversations that can help you
generate leads and sales and bookings.
Um, in short, it can help brands have millions of one-to-one
conversations without needing millions of people behind the keyboard.
That'd be pretty helpful.
Now, as far as your team that's taking care of the LinkedIn portion of what
I'm seeing, tell me who's behind that.
There's obviously yourself, like who else is making the magic happen?
That would be me.
I am the LinkedIn brand of Manychat.
Um, we do have occasional help from design, um, when we do need it,
although there has been a change just in how often we are using
that kind of polish to do things.
We had design come in and do our new logo, which is cracked.
And then the cover photo behind that Page too, which was more of
a corporate look before, but now it is quite different as well.
But yeah, it is me doing all of the commenting and the content
creation and, um, managing our DMs, which has become a lot more of
the job than I expected it to be.
It sure is, right?
A- and so I just wanna set that scene importantly because there
are people out there that say, "We can't do that," or, "That's okay
for them, they've got huge teams."
So we've taken that excuse away.
But I'm gonna rewind the clock for people because three months ago, I had a look
at the timing, three months ago, I wake up, and thank God for the LinkedIn feed
sorting things by topic, 'cause it's the one time that I was like, "Yes, loving
this new feed." It always shows me things about Company Pages, and in this case,
the post that I saw from the Manychat Company Page was essentially this.
"This is a Company Page. It's not going to act like a Company Page
anymore. We're breaking this profile on purpose in public," and on it went.
Talk me through what was happening with the Page before that moment that
led you to, putting that post out.
Yeah.
Um, my thing is, I do think that most Company Pages have
become a kind of office lobby.
Oh, they're beautifully vacuumed, there might be a nice plant in the
corner, probably somebody replaced a motivational poster, but no one
actually comes there to hang out.
Companies think that the purpose of a Company Page is to tell everybody
how amped they are about Q3 or to congratulate their employees on
their anniversaries or talk about things that you could much easily
share in your own internal channels.
But our audience is creators, so meanwhile, the creators, the people that
we actually are building our product for, are out there on the streets, and
they're sharing their wins and failing publicly and making predictions and
fighting and swapping advice and building audiences, much cooler things than
we're, like, letting out on LinkedIn.
And we were not involved in those conversations when it came to LinkedIn.
Historically, Employer Brand did own, um, the LinkedIn Manychat Page, which
makes sense because their mission is hiring, and their job is to make people
think, "Well, maybe I should apply for a job at Manychat." Marketing,
of course, has a different mission.
I don't need somebody to wanna work at Manychat.
I would like to have cool people there, and I hope that what we're doing makes
more people wanna come, but I need people to wanna hear what Manychat thinks.
So I wanted creators to intentionally visit our Page because they knew that
they can come to us to find creator news or opinions or funky experiments or
cool customer stories or conversations that are actually worth their time, not
like another HR post happy international whatever day graphic, whatever that is.
There's nothing the matter with employer branding, of course.
It's just solving a totally different problem, and the LinkedIn Page, in my
opinion, had way too much unrealised potential to just leave there
. You've hit the first nail on the head.
Who owns the Page is a question that I'm asking people when
I'm doing audit and strategies.
And you might think it's such a simple question to answer, but in
my experience, absolutely isn't.
It's either everyone or no one seems to be the answer.
And I think that is literally where things start coming unraveled, followed
by what's the goal of the Page?
And you've already said, like, within your business there might've been at least two.
I'm sure the sales team probably had something else to say as well.
But ultimately, this is what, for me, why I'm having these types of conversations
is you don't get to do the cool stuff, if we don't all agree on what the goal
is up front and who's gonna run the show.
Because it is the thing that is literally making more Company Pages
come unstuck than anything else.
I'm so glad that you shared that because I, I think getting
that agreement is probably the hardest part, I would imagine.
Oh, yeah.
This was going on for a while.
Yeah.
Right?
So, and I'm gonna dig into that a, a little bit later.
If people aren't following you on LinkedIn, they are going to be
doing it after this conversation 'cause your content I always love.
It makes me think, feel, smile, like, just sometimes go, "Did she say that?" Like-
… there's a little bit of everything depending on the day, and I, I love it.
But when I was reading your profile, you describe your job
as making content do things.
What did you need the Manychat Company Page to do in relation to getting
content to actually do something?
I have, I think, what many people would think is an unusual metric in,
in that I don't care if people find us.
I care whether they think to involve us.
Before we would get tagged maybe when an automation was broken or
people had a product question.
All of that is fine and dandy, but I wanted Manychat to be included in things
like people are in the middle of a debate about creator burnout, and they would
say, like, I don't know, "Tag Manychat, I wanna know what they think." And that
wasn't happening at all, and I think that LinkedIn, the way that it is now, we have
this big opportunity to get included if you're doing the legwork to be thought of.
It's a completely different relationship too, because you're not just being
thought of anymore for customer support.
You're becoming part of the culture.
And for us, we wanted to become a part of the culture of creators.
Oh, I want creators on there arguing with us or agreeing with us or disagreeing with
us or stealing our ideas or telling us who we should interview or pitching us a hot
take or maybe even inviting us to things.
If nobody misses your opinion when you're absent, you haven't actually
built a voice in my opinion.
I would agree with that so I had zero clue what Manychat was before.
I'm not over on Instagram.
I had never heard of it.
I knew you personally.
Had no clue what the product did, and it's been really funny because
I've been sharing about the Page and, you know, big fan of it.
Um, now my audience is asking me, "Do I trust your brand? Should they go and
check it out?" They'd been considering it, and now they wanted to know
because they trust me, and I obviously had been talking about you guys.
Then all of a sudden now there are people that are reaching out, probably testing
your product, that I was like, "Yeah, you should go and do it," because if it's
anything like the effort you're putting into a Page, like I can normally tell
if people care about their customers, they care about their Company Page.
If they don't, it is, I'm gonna say it's like the internal notice board.
You know, I'm gonna go one more level.
It's like we wanna post and tell you about this because that's what
we wanna say, and we actually don't really care what you want to hear.
We don't really care what you say in response.
We don't care if you don't even respond.
It is literally what we wanna broadcast at you, and your Page
is completely the opposite.
And again, it's the gold star example that I use, not just because you're
on this podcast, 'cause I've been talking about it for three months.
I was sharing about it as an example at Social Media Marketing World.
I was like, "You guys need to go and check this out because it is in
action living your brand," not just, "Hey, we're gonna break the Page.
Go us." It was more than just breaking it for breaking its sake, you know?
A- and so this is why I, I wanted to talk about this because you're living it, not
just saying you're gonna do something.
Yeah, and I just don't think that we value dialogue on social media
the way that we should be doing it.
Like, it, it is in the name.
I know people think of LinkedIn as a job board, and a lot of people don't think of
it much beyond that, which is unfortunate.
I do think it is my favourite platform.
Not that I don't complain about it all the time.
There are a lot of things they could be doing differently, and
they have heard from me on them at least I think they have.
But, you know, like, what's the point of, uh, acting like you care about
social media if all you're doing is shouting at people and not involving
them into actual conversations?
And those dialogue moments that we get become new content, and that
helps me in my job because my primary job is I'm a content marketing
manager at the company, and I focus on the education and activation
and internal content at Manychat.
And now I have this too, and this is actually helping guide a lot of that now
. Yeah, there's just an untapped, just world of ideas that will come out if
your community's actually talking to you or you're involved in conversations.
And I think what you've been able to do is get the wording and how other
people describe their pain or what's going on, and really speak to that.
Because I think when you read your content, it feels like you know creators,
like y- you- we know what it's like and I think it's that relatability, it's
the empathy, it's, all of those kind of feeling words which I love, which
most corporate Pages are devoid of.
Like, they are just- … heartless, soulless, Pages.
And then we go, "Oh, nobody's engaging with Pages. Company Pages are dead." Yeah,
well, you stripped the soul out of them, and then you wondered what's going on.
But I know that there are gonna be some people that might go and
check out the Page and see what you guys are doing, and they are
gonna be rocking in a corner going-
"There is no way I can do that. I would get the sack if I did that." How did
you make that magic happen internally?
What were the objections that were coming up, whether they were
perceived risks or real risks, that you had to overcome before the
business is going, "You know what?
We trust you, Ashley.
Go forth, break the Company Page.
Let's do this new thing." I don't reckon that that happened
just in a one conversation overnight "Please can I do this?"
No, this has been, the talk of it went on the end of 2025, and the
funny part was it wasn't my idea.
I know people generally at the company and beyond thought that I was the one
who launched that, but it was actually our Chief Marketing Officer, Ido Mart,
who came to me late November last year and was like, "Why are you not the one
that's managing our LinkedIn Page?"
And I was like, "Is that an option?" At the time I was- Primarily- Excellent
… they only let me touch before this the weekly LinkedIn newsletter, um,
which we use to promote things like our favourite passion project, which
is our Chronically Online magazine, which plug, now Webby winning.
I was able to use it for that.
But other than that, the leash was on me tightly because employer brand
was the one that did everything else.
So I was allowed to do that and comment on things about that,
and then that was kind of it.
Other than that that was the only thing- Wow … I touched.
And that was how it was the entire time Manychat was around, is that
nobody but employer brand was doing anything on our LinkedIn Page.
But Ito thought based on what was going on on LinkedIn, especially things
with, um, the fact that they were all of a sudden at that point the comment
engagement metrics were showing, or you would actually find out at that
point finally, I think LinkedIn should have done it a long time ago, how
many views your comment actually got.
And when you look at things like that and the fact that we were kind of neglecting
that game totally, he thought that I would be a good individual to come in and
kind of take the Page over from there.
I would say the biggest hurdle wasn't convincing leadership, because I did
have leadership buy-in, but it was the ownership thing because employer brand had
always owned it from the very beginning.
They had built their own processes around it.
The conversation wasn't like, "Oh, you guys are doing this
completely wrong," which it wasn't.
They were doing what it was that the goals that they were attempting to attain
at the time, but it was me kind of going in there and going, "We're trying to
accomplish something totally different.
We don't want to just get talent interested.
We wanna recruit attention." And it took a long time to talk them into, um,
being okay with losing that channel.
And of course there's a little give and take.
I do help from time to time to get promotion going for their employer brand
content when we can, but when I'm posting it now, I'm thinking of it as a creator.
Like, why would a creator care about this?
That's the angle it goes through before any of that content goes up now.
Um, my big thing was we wanted creators voluntarily coming back to our Page, and
I kind of already was lucky that I had proof that I know how to do this because
I've done this with my own audience.
And I think the majority of the company knows that that is a big part of my life.
Um, I've always treated LinkedIn like an actual social network,
not like an online waiting room.
So people internally had watched me do it and knew that I could handle
it, which I think made the leap a lot less scary Although I am pretty sure,
I can't prove it, but I'm pretty sure that there was at least one meeting
at Manychat where somebody wondered if letting me near the corporate account
violated international treaties.
Look, if they didn't have that conversation, I don't think you were
doing your job properly- … because it does skate sometimes to that
line, and I love it for doing that.
But I mean, that is something that I know people out there
are gonna be where that line is.
You know, I, I speak to people in similar roles to you around the world that are
like by the time it goes to the legal team to approve it there's about 20
different people all have an opinion.
By the time it comes back, forget about trends, forget about
anything cool, anything fun, anything with any personality.
There is a definite fear that it will- … break the whole brand.
Like, it will literally destroy everything in the business
that anyone's ever created.
And I always wonder, like, what makes you so insecure about your actual business
that you think that a post could do it?
And, and I'm not saying that there aren't examples out there where people just got
it totally wrong and tried to do something fun or cool and just were tone deaf and,
there's gotta be some processes involved.
It's not just a free-for-all.
And this is where your experience comes into it.
but it was interesting to see that commenting has become such
a big part of your strategy.
So it's not just content, it's also commenting.
And you did say on that post, I'm gonna keep coming back to that post
over and over 'cause it literally is like something that I've saved that
I keep referring back to for people.
It also said, it also said, and we've spoken about it, that the
Page would spend more time in other people's comment sections.
How did that fit into the strategy that you were coming up, and how
do you guide the team on where to show up and how to show up?
'Cause it's a particular style of comment that you have.
Is it just you, and so therefore it's easy?
But what happens if somebody else had to do it?
How do you con- you know, like, not control it, but make it, like, a safe
process for them so, the brand lands?
Yeah, definitely.
From the top of that question I think we have to get past the
idea, like, in the company that, um, social media is broadcasting,
which we talked a little bit about.
It is not, or it shouldn't be.
It should be, attending the party, maybe we can call it.
Imagine somebody who only speaks when they're standing behind a podium with a
microphone, and then they leave And they don't talk to anybody after, and they
don't let anybody ask them questions.
Would you invite them back?
But that's how most brands behave.
Yeah.
So we wanted Manychat to become recognisable even on days when
we don't publish anything.
That means we don't have to publish more than three times a week.
We can if we want to, but we should be able to get as much engagement
by visiting other creators' content that they have going up there
and leaving a valuable content.
To have people constantly bumping into us is kind of what we're looking
for, to have people and creators think, "Oh yeah, Manychat is all over
LinkedIn." Like, that's ideal for me.
But I never wanna leave a comment that only benefits Manychat.
I want to leave comments people would actually enjoy reading, even if they just
tuned in for a minute and they didn't know who it was coming from, or they
never looked at our profile picture.
Maybe we add data when we can, or insight, or maybe we ask a better
question, or maybe we make people laugh.
If your comment could've been replaced by like, "Great post," like quit
wasting people's electricity generally.
Is, is… don't think we need any more of that, just like I don't think
we need any more comments that are clearly AI generated just going to tell
you exactly what y- you just told me.
That thing needs to go.
But I think just looking at it like It is entertainment.
We want to entertain people and we wanna educate people, but nobody
cares about being educated if they're not entertained, either.
With me doing everything at the moment, I know, at least I hope that
it won't al- always be me one day.
I would like to have a little bit of help eventually.
This is actually not my only job at the company.
Although I do show up all the time and I'm all over the place, like i-
it would be cool to have people that would be able to pitch in and do what
I'm doing without having to ask me if everything was okay, which is why I do
have, like, a tone of voice document.
That way if tomorrow I get hit by a van and flattened and die on the spot
hopefully people can pick up the tone of voice and go too bad Ashley's gone, but
we'll carry on." And then maybe talk about me in hushed, reverent tones later on.
Oh, they probably would, as it's an AI commenting, you know, sponsored
van that goes past "Bye, Ashley."
They would move on the next day.
It would be fine.
The world keeps spinning.
But, I, I think that's the, the funny thing here is, you know, I can just
imagine… Sorry, I'm stuck, you know, imagining what this van's doing and
you just like giving a little wave.
"Don't forget me."
But- Yeah.
"Bye everyone. Bye LinkedIn."
Yeah.
It, it's been fun, and I think this is the thing, is trying to just
realise that there's so much power in showing up to help other people, you
know, and add to the conversation.
If I was to sum up what you just said, it's like adding to the conversation,
not showing up just to say, "Hi, here we are. Someone told us to use
the search bar with the keywords to get involved in conversations."
You're not adding to anything.
You're just becoming like the AI comments and- you know, no one
needs more of those in their life.
Let's just say that.
Nobody needs more AI comments in their life, and I still do not understand
why any human being on the face of this planet thinks that they're a good idea.
Do you wanna talk about jail?
I could bring that in here if you like, the LinkedIn jail moment.
Oh, my God.
Oh, yes.
Tell me what happened.
So the day after that post went out and we were like, "We're gonna be doing this,"
the next day- I went to LinkedIn jail, Manychat went, went to LinkedIn jail
for over-commenting on external posts.
And I have never got to the bottom of what too many comments is.
I have escalated that many, many times, and they have never told
me what the magic number is.
We have never been in jail again either, even though I don't think
that we have commented any less.
But I don't know.
I wish… If you could ever find that out, 'cause you got the high-up connections-
I do.
Let me know.
I do.
It was hilarious.
I mean, for people who don't know, like, m- after that post blew up,
and it did blow up, the post, like the gold star post, when it blew
up, like you guys were responding to everything, every repost, every mention.
It was like hardcore.
Like, I can imagine you sitting at that keyboard, caffeined up to the
gills, like, "Gotta keep going.
Gotta keep typing."
I had my newsboy hat on.
It was- Ex- … lovely.
It was crazy.
A- and literally, it… they said, "That's it. That's enough. No more comments,"
which I, I think was just, you know, the icing on the cake, so to speak.
But I have a question for you, . What's actually happened for the business?
What have you noticed, in the way that people are maybe responding?
Are you getting the things that you were setting out to
do from a business perspective?
'Cause, you know, I'm sure that there's some skeptics that listen
that go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, it's cool.
It's fun.
It's whatever," but is it generating anything for the
business at the end of the day?
Okay.
Definitely.
Now, just metric-wise, if we were only minding about that, which you
kind of have to a little bit, because when you take over an account like
that, generally the company, no matter how many good things are going,
they want like the number, number.
So, the followers went up a lot in three months.
Thousands up, which is the highest we had ever had of that many people
in that short of a window coming up.
Newsletter engagement climbed a ton.
We have been able to get a lot of interest in things that we were doing,
like we had, it just closed, but there was a contest for a billboard a creator
to basically enter this Instagram or TikTok video, and they would have a
chance to, um, basically get their face on a billboard in New York City.
Amazing.
Like, a lot of that was, we got a lot of contestants into that from LinkedIn,
which even though you can't use a LinkedIn video, we have a lot of audience
that are actively creating content on Instagram and TikTok that use LinkedIn
now too, um, especially for videos.
But we've had unusually high post engagement.
We have unusually high activity in comments of course.
Um, again, went to jail for too many external comments one time.
People come back to the Page.
But my favourite KPI doesn't exist in LinkedIn analytics at all.
I think it's probably in the screenshots, but we are always getting screenshots
now, and a lot of them are, "Hey, have you seen what Manychat is doing?"
So companies are using us as a, as an example of corporate Pages that don't
feel like a corporate Page, and then we get tagged into those conversations
that we usually wouldn't have been invited into, and we're getting all
of this amazing content from creators who wanna be interviewed by us for our
magazines and our blogs and whatnot because they think that we will actually
appreciate them because we are actively in the community showing that we do.
And I think that ultimately for me, that was the shift that I was chasing.
I want people to instinctively think, "This conversation would be better if
Manychat showed up," and that is a much more difficult thing to measure, but
you absolutely know when it happens.
Yeah, it is so cool.
Like I said, my DMs were lighting up.
I had to go and look up and see, like, what do they even do?
And so for those of you who are interested after this conversation in learning
more about it, Ashley, I'm gonna get some links from you so that we can send
the listeners to a place that they can go and check out Manychat, especially
if you're active over on Instagram.
Especially I know that it's super popular over there and really
helpful at the end of the day.
Like to do more to grow your business because, I'm all about
we're not just doing social media for social media's sake.
We're doing it so that the activities that we do help grow
businesses and that is definitely a tool that will help you do that.
So I'll make sure that we do that.
Thank you.
Now, unfortunately for me, I have to wrap this conversation
up, but I've got one more bonus question which I'm hoping can help.
Yay.
The purpose of this podcast is to help people that are in roles like
yourself really get more out of their time on LinkedIn to help grow their
business and I know that some of them, there might be some marketers
out there going, "You know what?
I know my Page is boring.
I know that it's putting people to sleep.
I have these great ideas but I'm not sure that I could ever get this
approach approved internally." Where should they start in your experience?
What's one small action that you think they could start taking that
may lead them to get to this place?
Like, so if we can get one safe boring Page a step away from that and a step
closer to actually an effective Page that works, what would you recommend?
I don't think that people are inherently dull but I do think that
a lot of marketers are waiting for permission to become interesting, or
like to become interesting publicly maybe is a better way to put it.
You're probably not gonna get an email from legal that says, "Congratulations,
we've decided you may now develop personality." So I think that maybe don't
think too big from the top, especially if you don't have … The advantage that I
had was that I have a LinkedIn Page of my own that thankfully Manychat is very okay
with me having which a lot of companies might not be, but I think it's totally
okay to experiment on a smaller scale.
So pick an au- topic that your audience maybe they argue about, or maybe you
know for a fact that they have an opinion about, and go leave, I don't know, 20
thoughtful comments on that this week.
And then show that is making a difference that way.
Maybe start out with one post that sounds like it's written by an identifiable
human instead of an HR software update.
That might be a good beginning launch.
My thing is that I know, and you probably know too, that your competitors
are probably obsessing over what to publish next, but meanwhile, there's
an entire internet of conversations already happening without them.
So I'd guess maybe my advice is to stop treating your Company Page like
it's a museum exhibit behind these velvet ropes that we're imagining, and
maybe treat it instead like the most extroverted employee you have ever hired.
I think the goal is to make people feel like there is something missing
when your brand is not there.
I love it.
And of course, as I said, all the details to go and follow the Manychat
Page, check out the product itself.
Go and follow Ashley, connect with her just because it will brighten
your feed, just because it will make you smile, it will make you
laugh, it will make you think.
Ashley, thank you for being that beacon in the feed in amongst some days where
it just feels like it's… we're stepping through the swamplands and it's hard work.
Uh, appreciate you being that beacon of light that we can all gravitate towards.
And, you know, I think that's the upside.
That's what makes you memorable.
So thank you for coming on and sharing all about this.
I wish you and the whole team at Manychat every success.
This is something that people can take away and implement today, and I think
that's the most important lesson of all.
So I appreciate you, and thank you for coming on the show.
Thank you for letting me talk about my favourite topic.
It's mine too.
. So until next week, cheers