Welcome to episode 224, this week I want to mainly focus on company pages. A feature of LinkedIn that I have often been very critical of.

LinkedIn have announced their Top Company Pages of 2018 list so I thought I would take a closer look at some of those companies to try to understand what benefit they are gaining from LinkedIn.

I also want to return to the new groups experience as I now have the new features and thought I would add some further thoughts and things I have experienced.

But first….

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

• LinkedIn Top US Startups Article – top 25 
• LinkedIn Top US Startups Article – 26-50
• Talent migration section in LinkedIn report ‘misunderstood’
• We ranked LinkedIn execs on how ‘LinkedIn’ their LinkedIn profile pics are
• LinkedInLocal Manchester 4th October

New Groups Update

I was delighted to find on Tuesday that I now have the new groups format, the fact that I got it just a week after the first batch suggests that the roll-out is going to be very quick and should be complete by the end of September as suggested in last weeks show.

LinkedIn also officially announced new groups this week with this blog post and this official Best Practice Guide.

So having played with it I have a few extra observations to share with you.

• Video postings are very buggy. I posted several videos and each one disappeared during the processing suggesting it had failed, then approx 30 mins later it appeared in the group!
• Hashtags are suggested in new posts (conversations) but do not appear in search results as yet!
• I started a new group and created a list of connections to invite, this message could not be personalised (no different from before) and when I tried to send it flashed up an error message saying the action could not be undertaken, try later. In fact the invites had been sent (via a notification) as those connections soon joined the group!
• You can add a logo image to your group but it can’t be a ,gif file (unlike company pages)
• Messaging other members is still possible but not as good as it was because the option to message when hovering over their name has disappeared. You can only message from a member search result.
• Group posts are not showing up in my feed but my group conversations are showing when I check my own activity and list of recent posts.
• Engagement on my posts and those I have contributed to are showing up in notifications.
• The initial list of groups did have my new group at the top, this is the one I have been most active in so it’s possible that list will be effective. They do need to add the ability to search rather than just scroll though.

It’s clear that new groups are still a work in progress with many glitches and bugs but I do think the ‘homepage feed’ style is a good idea.

I do wonder if the ‘play’ LinkedIn have decided upon is actually a way of phasing out groups, at least in the way we know them. The focus and underlying direction seems to be to move away from groups that are controlled by managers and towards a focus on topics, conversations and engagement. The concept of ‘joining’ a community may be disappearing…not yet but I wonder if this is the play. LinkedIn have always been strangely possessive about their site, they want to control everything and group managers had built their own communities on their platform, which never sat right with Linkedin.

Is this a good thing?

Group owners will lose out big time but I still believe groups should be about members, not managers. Whilst I might not like LinkedIn’s reasons for moving in this direction, it may ultimately be better for members so I’m in favour….so long as they iron out those glitches quickly!

This weeks post was nominated by John Espirian

Over 92,000 views are impressive for a video. It’s an old one that has been posted in many other places before but if he had posted that as a link from another site, the numbers wouldn’t have been anywhere near that! Content of this nature tends to gain Likes but fewer comments, so it’s good but not so engaging.

Please get in touch with any posts you see with high Likes and comments and that you enjoyed seeing.

Company Pages

I have covered company pages before, most recently in episode 214 and it’s fair to say, I’m not their biggest advocate! Despite that, I thought I would take a fresh look at company pages to see if we can uncover some tangible benefits from using them.

Firstly let me point out that every company should have one, that’s a no-brainer. The question is  ‘How much time and effort should you put into posting from them?’

LinkedIn have just produced their Top company Pages of 2018 report so I thought this would provide an opportunity to look at what the ‘best in class page’ companies are doing and what the benefits might be.

Announcing LinkedIn’s Top 10 Company Pages of 2018

So let’s look at the top three on this list;

Number 1 – Hays

What LinkedIn say;

Hays showcases its leadership through branded imagery that cuts through the clutter and establishes authentic thought leadership.

Takeaways:

Inclusion of branded imagery gives your posts a slick and consistent look.

Leveraging company leaders alongside key messaging puts a human face on your mission and vision.

What I say;

Hays have an amazing amount of followers, 2,444,486 to be precise. Their posts are almost all job seeker related (no vacancies) so their target audience seems to be candidates so it’s less of a B2B page.

I saw no video posts and no use of # or @mentions in their posts. They only occasionally ask questions to encourage engagement and most of the content was not about themselves.

Engagement stats: 103 likes and 4 comments ave per post (last 10) so 0.004% of their followers ‘Like’ their posts and 25% of them are on average, internal Hays employees!

Number 2 – Schneider

What LinkedIn say;

Schneider Electric stays on brand with its visuals — scroll through the Company Page feed and you’ll see its signature green colour scheme everywhere. Content often highlights achievements and successes for the business and its employees.

Takeaway:

Sharing exciting company news makes your Page feel like an exclusive community while attracting top talent.

What I say;

This company has an impressive 1,238,569 followers which is pretty good for a business in this sector. Their content is pretty good, yes they do highlight internal stories but this is balanced with the majority of their content being focussed on the readers’ interests, very little in the way of promotional content.

Good use of video posts which seem to do well, they also use hashtags in most of their posts.

Engagement stats: 140 Likes and 1.5 comments ave per post. They often encourage engagement with questions but rarely get any. Many of their posts are external links but not all. There appears to be no disadvantage in posting external links though as they often performed better than image and text posts. With 140 Likes they achieved a follower Like rate of 0.011% and about 16% of their Likes were from employees.

I like this page and their posts a lot, it’s actually fairly hard to find much wrong with their posts.

Number 3 – PTC

What LinkedIn say;

The Massachusetts-based computer software company has many different business lines, and gives each one its own unique space on LinkedIn through Showcase Pages.

Takeaway:

By creating distinct platforms for different aspects of your business, you can tailor messages specifically to target audiences for each.

What I say;

This company has 10 showcase pages, the largest only attracting 2795 followers and that is the problem, splitting content in this way just waters down reach and engagement.

The main page has 144.013 followers, so much smaller than the top 2. Their posts were OK, they didn’t use video or @mentions but did use Hashtags and they focus too much on themselves rather than the viewer.

Engagement Stats: 36 Likes and 0.9 comments per post. Very few questions and I thought their content was pretty poor which is why only 0.025 of their followers Like their posts and on average 48% of those were internal staff!

A Personal profile

As a comparison, let’s look at one of the worlds most successful personal pages on LinkedIn, my favourite attorney Jonathan Pollard 

Jonathan has 39,247 followers, impressive for one individual but a drop in the ocean in comparison to the above three company pages.

Engagement stats: 954 Likes and 132 comments ave per post (last 10), so 2.4% of his followers Like his posts and he even gets 0.33% to comment which is a higher % than the above 3 get for Likes!

Conclusion.

Company pages are not for engagement!

The only benefit of posting is to get more traffic to your website. I have no idea whether these companies actually achieve that but based on the amount of posting they do, I assume they do – either that or they don’t measure and assess the effectiveness of their actions!

Therefore the only content worth posting is content from your website – there appears to be no suppression as there clearly is for personal posts (which makes me think that few people are clicking on them)

Engagement is virtually zero so the best technique for company posts is to schedule them – less effort and time involved.

Will things improve?

Quite possibly, LinkedIn have stated privately that they are currently working on a major overhaul that will be launched in the New year (that means next summer in LinkedIn’s world!). We have already seen the link on the left of the home page that gives you live stats of visitor numbers plus they have stated that they are bringing back the ability to see who your followers are.

What changes would you like to see to Company pages? Will they ever be popular on LinkedIn or are we just more interested in people?

That’s it for this week. Don’t forget to get in touch with your comments, questions or suggestions.