B2B social for when your company page gets three likes, and one of them is the MD

Hello, everybody. It's so lovely to see here. Honestly, this chat feature is wild in the best, best way. Also, people are coming from all over the world. So, Matthew, I think you're very right in the chat to be pretending you're coming from St Lucia rather than Basingstoke. But, you know, Basingstoke's pretty exotic as well, so good for you. So, anyway, Joe is in the shirt, Simon. Joe is going to something else. I don't know why I'm referring to myself in the third person. Let's stop that. We're a bit silly today because James, my co founder, is opposite me today and he's already laughing at me. So let's get going with today's introduction so I can stop embarrassing myself. So first things first, we're going to do a couple of community announcements before getting into today's session proper. So the first thing to note is ten days ago we launched our conference Campfire Stories, which will be happening on March 18 next year in London. Tickets are on the pre speaker rate presently up until the October 8, I think it is. So if you would like to join us, then please do. It's been a hell of a day for the past couple of years and we'll be delighted, to have you there. Second thing second. When we do these webinars, the way that we can subsequently grow the community and bring more amazing people like all of you into the community is mostly through you recommending the Marketing Meetup. So if there's something you particularly enjoy from today's session or take away from it, please do share. The community is here for you. We genuinely want to help. And if we can do and help people like you, then we'd be really delighted and appreciative of you sharing the Marketing Meetup. Thirdly, let's get going introducing our amazing speaker today. So today we have Nicole with us. Nicole is a senior consultant over at Battenhall, and genuinely one of the biggest hearted people, most proactive people that I've had the pleasure of getting to know over these past ten years. Nicole comes with both competence, but also just character bursting from the scenes like in just the best way possible. So, like, honestly, I think we're going to have a lot of fun in the next hour and hopefully learn a lot together as well. Today's session is about something which hopefully feels relatable, not because it's necessarily an enjoyable experience, but because it's real. And so we're going to speak about b to b social, but for when your page gets three likes and one of them is from your MD, which I think has probably happened to a lot of us over the course of our careers. We're not here to solve it with a silver bullet, it's got to be said, but we're going to have a conversation and hopefully leave you with a thing or two to walk away from with today to give a go and hopefully help out. Before we get started on today's session proper proper, let's say thank you to our sponsors because without these folks, we wouldn't be able to do what we do. So we have Canva as this week's featured sponsor. Canva are offering to the Marketing Meetup community three months free of Canva Pro, which is so, so lovely. And if you're not currently a Canva Pro subscriber, then you can use the code TMM3 at that QR code. It's also in the newsletter that went out today to claim that offer. Also, a big thank you to our other sponsors. We have Wistia, we have Frontify, we have Cambridge Marketing College, we have Prismic, we have Planable and we have Exposure Ninja. And these are companies that we will speak about on rotation throughout the rest of the coming weeks. So, that's my introduction done. Let me just acknowledge, a few amazing, amazing folks, in the chat. So we've got Dave, we've got Hannah, we've got Simon, we've got Julianne, Kaylee, James, so many more of you. Thank you all so much for taking the time. Let's introduce Nicole to the stage and say, it's over to you. Hi, everyone. And hopefully, I will live up to that amazing intro. So, you very much, Joe. So, yes, we'll be talking about Hi, everyone. Hi, Glenda. Hi, folks. We'll be talking about b to b social and how we can try and figure it out together because let's all face it. It's a bit of a **** show out there. And I apologize in advance for all the swearing. There will be swearing. This is not a safe work presentation. There's no swearing in the slides, but I will be swearing. So I imagine most of you are social media marketing managers if you're on this presentation and watching me. So you've been through this. I'm sure you share a post and nothing. Crickets. Dead. Then your next post. Amazing. Semi viral. 25,000 impressions. You're going places. Amazing. And then the next post, another 200 impressions. But why? Why? What happened? What happened? What? I have no idea. You have no idea. Everyone is relatable. Exactly. Everyone will will have gone through this recently, especially on LinkedIn. And if this is how LinkedIn feels right now, as we're all trying to figure it out, you are not alone. It's all of us. Every single one of us. We are essentially just wading through mud at the moment and trying to figure all these algorithmic changes. But, again, what to do? What to do? The truth is I don't, and nobody else knows what's going on with the current algorithm. Anyone who tells you they do probably is trying to sell you something, either service or a course or something like that or a report. There's a few of those on sale as well. I can chat about that, but today is not the day. But there are certain things that we know perform well and do well on LinkedIn and across b to b social more widely. But I will be focusing mostly on LinkedIn here today because this is really the sticking point for most of us. So our goal for today, yes, a stick in the mud. Exactly. Is to go from this frustrated, annoyed, confused, not knowing what to do to hopefully a little bit more like this where you'll feel at least a little bit more confident that you kind of have something to hold on to or at least to test out. And this is my goal for today is that you come out with a bit of inspiration, a bit of support from support group of people who are essentially being victimized by LinkedIn on a daily basis. I know that I'm feeling victimized by LinkedIn on a fairly regular basis. And hopefully, we'll all figure this out together. So there's gonna be a short presentation and then a lot of time for questions at the end. So use the q and a feature. A little bit about me. This is the only slide where I'll be promoting anything. And the only thing I'm promoting here is my beautiful dog, Ludo. I joined Patternhall. We are a social media and comms consultancy in 2021 as a pandemic hire. I also met most of you here during those times because that's when we started joining these amazing webinars. Before that, I worked as a journalist. I worked in marketing in house, and I also worked at other agencies. So, I've done a little bit of everything, and I've been frustrated by social media throughout all of those different careers. And I have been on social for a very long time from MySpace all the way to being one of the first 100 people on the planet on Twitter, RIP. We don't want to know what Elon has done to it. I have seen it all. So hopefully, we'll share a little bit of that experience here. And finally, I have visited over 50 countries and I'm a master foodie. So, if you need any recommendations, hit me up. I also have a challenge for you guys. Anyone who is a GIF fan like I am will be able to tell me in the comments where these GIFs are from, and I might give you a prize. But don't expect it really. To start with about exactly. There you go. Good. You are my people. I knew that. The LinkedIn algorithm. As I said, nobody really knows exactly what's going on, but we do know that some things have happened in the recent past that have affected the way things perform. So, first thing is that there is a stronger focus from the platform on knowledge sharing. So, they prefer content that is insightful or educational. Although based on performance alone, you might think that that is not true because sometimes you spend hours crafting the perfect post and then nothing. And then you share a meme and it goes viral. So, I know what you mean. It shouldn't be that way, but it is that way because it is social media. Anyone who thinks that LinkedIn is a professional network, it's not. It's social media. So the stuff that works on social media works on LinkedIn too. The second thing is, and I'm going to talk about this a lot throughout this presentation, is the importance of comments and creating spaces for conversation on your posts. Posts that do spark those conversations are deemed more meaningful. There is obviously a practical reason for that, which is every single social media platform wants people to spend more time on it. So if you are creating debate or a space for debate, it will obviously, you know, they want it. They they they will look at you favorably. So they will show your post to more people. The third thing is, especially from the start of this year, there has been a massive shift on the way the algorithm recommends content to other people. And for those of you who have access to the analytics on your personal profiles that show how many of your posts are being seen by what they call in network connections and out of network connections, so people who follow you and people who are not connected with you, you will see that there has been an increase on posts being shown to people based on interests rather than follows. So, like TikTok or other social media networks, your posts are now being shown by people who have an interest on the topic you're writing about, regardless of whether they follow you or connected to you or not. Then the third thing the fourth thing even is that also because of that, content has a much longer lifespan on LinkedIn now. So and you see that when you open up and the posts that you see on the top are like three weeks old. The content has a much longer tail now, and it doesn't have to work like some so called LinkedIn experts say in the first half an hour. And if it doesn't work in the first half an hour, have to delete that post and repost it because that's all that matters. It's not. I have posted things that didn't do too well to start with, and then a day later started picking up and really going a bit mental. And finally, again, social media platforms always want you to stay on it. So posts that keep people on the platform rather than driving them away, so links and all of that, are always more engaging from a platform perspective. Yeah. Exactly. So Joe is confirming what I just said. It does happen. So don't abandon a post just because it doesn't perform well in the first few hours. And these things are all things that we actually know from experience as in I do b to b social media and then on LinkedIn on a very regular basis for myself and for clients, or LinkedIn has actually told us themselves through their team or through updates. None of this is me making **** up. It's all confirmed stuff. Yes, Rachel. We can come back to LinkedIn articles, but yes, it is a good idea to use it. So the other thing that we have seen is, of course, company pages are not really the way to go when it comes to engagement at all. The same post, if you share it from the CEO page or profile and from the company page, will get wildly different results. Personal profiles are much, much, much better in terms of getting those engagements. But according to this study by Metrucou, who worked with LinkedIn and looked at loads of posts yes, it is. Thanks, Dave. It has and I'm happy to share all the links to the reports that I'm sourcing here as well, by the way. Just hit me up afterwards. Connect on LinkedIn. Whatever. I'm happy to share. We don't gatekeep here. So as you can see, engagement and, you know, personal engagement is really where it's at. Which of course gives you the opportunity to, if you're talking about a company profile or a client, engaging them to really talk about how they can get an employee advocacy program going on. So getting their leaders, getting their staff, getting their employees to actually post, not just share or repost what the company page does, but really siphon the content through then. So for example, if you're sharing financial results, get the CFO to post it, and then put it on the company page as well. If you're sharing something about, you know, performance more widely or a new contract, get the salesperson or head of sales or head of partnerships to post it first, and then put it on the company page. And test those things to see if that actually helps you. Yeah. You can do either, Simon. Either personal page first and then company page both at the same time and then compare. But again, testing this kind of more fragmented distribution, I think, is where where it's at here and the recommendation that I'm making. The other thing is obviously formats. We know that there are formats that work better than others. So we've spoken here native document is actually carousels, by the way, as we know them, the PDF carousels for LinkedIn. They are the best format for sure. This is from Social Insider data. They looked at, like, 1,300,000 business posts to gather this information. But even within our work, we have seen and we we have a lot of reporting from clients, carousels are the best performing type of post for engagement. But when we're talking about reach and awareness, things like video actually work well as well. So don't discard it completely. And again, every single type of format has a different purpose. So very much you should be testing what works best for you. And there are right ways and wrong ways of doing carousels as well. Please don't post the 70 page carousel as I've recently because nobody's gonna go through that. So talking about ways of activating on LinkedIn. And here you see some examples of of carousels that are done the right way. We have a tendency to try and cram as much information as possible on those PDF documents. But sometimes less is more. Quite often less is more. So, really have just key bits of information and images on your carousels. The carousel should be a teaser really to what your real content is, and then add more information on the post copy. A very important consideration for LinkedIn widely, and this is across every single format, is that whatever is on your carousels or videos is not being parsed by the LinkedIn algorithm in order to define who should be seeing that content. You need the keywords that you want to share or that you're talking about to be in the post copy in the caption. So please make sure that whenever you're sharing anything, video, images, carousels, do a good post with it as well, because that's what you need in order to get the algorithm recommending your posts to the right people. So, having these visually impactful but attractive and condensed, concise, I should say, carousels is where you need to put your efforts in. And we are seeing these work really well. Then the other thing is people first expertise. Again, we talked about having personal profile sharing information, but you can also have those people featured on your company pages. And I think this is really important to highlight and to remember. Have your leaders, have your staff featured in your content. I know that getting them to actually be in anything is a challenge in itself. Convincing people to make the time and that this is a good use of their time is also hard. But if you show them the data that proves that if you have someone's face in a post, it does better than if it doesn't have someone's face in a post, which again, I can assure you people first posts do best. You have to really do it this way and get people involved. So, yeah, smiley faces always sell, but I think it's more about showing the people behind the brand. Ultimately, we always say that whenever we have anyone talking about b to b marketing here, you're still selling to people. It doesn't matter if those people are running a business or not. You're still selling to people. And people want to see people. People love knowing more about the people behind the products and services that they are buying. Dogs as well. Of course. Of course. Even I already used that tactic today. Come on. Who doesn't love a puppy? So the last bit here on, again, people is using the faces behind the brand as an awareness tactic, but also as a recruitment tactic. So we see a lot of employer brand posts working really well. So if you use LinkedIn for recruitment, definitely feature your teams and definitely try and get people on board. Day in a life, behind the scene type videos that do well across every single platform also do well on LinkedIn. So do use those. You can actually have fun with content on LinkedIn. Shock horror. A lot of people think that you have to be boring. And if I see another we are excited to announce posts in my life, I'm going to kill myself. But, yes, you can be fun and exciting on LinkedIn as well. And obviously, it depends on your company's tone of voice, but still you do have to be aware that you can be a bit more creative on the platform and that these posts can work really well. And finally, influencers. B to B influencers is a massive and growing part of the influencer world. We have seen a lot of things happening on LinkedIn recently in terms of our own Joe Glover is a LinkedIn influencer or LinkedIn influencer, as we like to call them. And you can see a lot of results from working with people who already have an audience and using them as your your your spokespeople. So here are just a couple of of examples of things. And you can see here that it's not just for LinkedIn that b to b influencers work. This here is an influencer post from Instagram from GE Aerospace where they got a plane influencer to promote one of their planes. Weird, but it works. It's one of their best performing posts. Two and a over 2,000 likes. Thank you, Patrick. My potential death thanks you very much for for following my advice there. A few considerations that I think also are important to bring to the table and a few challenges for you. Employee voices beat polished brand content even on LinkedIn. So again, try to bring that to life if you can. Again, you don't necessarily need to replace completely your traditional thought leadership posts or super polished campaign videos. It's fine to have those, but try to intersperse those with some more fun people led content and see what happens. And the challenge here for you is how can you share thought leadership in more creative ways? And again, the answer will be different to every single one of you here watching today because each business is different, and what works for one might not work for the other. The second thing, and I think this is very important as well, which is conversations beat broadcast every single time. So, you have to really, with your content, be inviting people to share their opinions, challenge assumptions, or pose some nuanced questions that drive that engagement. If you just say, we're amazing. Here's what we're doing. You're not leaving really the space for people to engage with your content. So the challenge here is how can your content I had so much that I put can twice there. How can your content encourage people to participate in the conversation? What can you do? Is it changing the CTA? Is it putting something that's a bit funny? Is it including a mistake? What is it? Just figure it out. And finally, and I think this is not just for LinkedIn, but a more wide point about b to b as well, is that a lot of activity in the b to b space is now happening outside of social media altogether in what we call dark social, which is Slack groups, DMs, post comments, email shares, anywhere where you cannot track where these conversations are happening essentially. So it's really important to track your influence beyond that surface level engagement. So the challenge here is where are you being talked about that you don't even know about? So figure that out. Are there any specific industry forums or groups where your brand is being talked about and you don't know. That is important to figure out as well. A few considerations about, again, summarizing why social first content is important. Think about the audience first. I know that we want to share a lot of stuff, and stakeholders and our clients want us to talk about specific things. If you have a product launch, of course, you wanna talk about the shiny new product. If you have a service, you have to talk about that service. But this is social media. It's not necessarily a sales channel. It can be a sales channel, but it's not a sales channel. It's more of a top and middle of funnel, really, channel. So think about what your audience wants to see. What is in it for them? And what story are you trying to tell? The narrative building and the storytelling is incredibly important to make it engaging and exciting for your your customers, your your MCP. Try and think about how you can use those algorithm favored creatives. So use the right formats, the right hooks, the right styles, the right topics. So if you see something that's doing well in your industry, your competitors are picking up on something, test it. You know, it doesn't really cost much to try something a bit different, and it could actually pay off. I can see a lot of comments and questions in the chat, but I'm not going to be able to go to it now. So please use the Q and A as well if you have anything specific you want to ask. And finally, include that human touch wherever possible. Try to have a human element in your posts. It could be someone talking to camera. It could be just pictures that include people as well as your products or people providing your services or dogs. Dogs also work, but try and have that relatable aspect to your content. Now, we're going to go a bit beyond LinkedIn and talk about social media trends more widely. And again, another of my favorite references here. Thank you, Lindsay Marie. It's business. It's business time. Sorry. I couldn't resist. What's happening in the b to b social space more widely? The first one is obviously social SEO or geo or a o, whatever you wanna call it. But how AI search is actually changing the way we do things on social media. And LinkedIn plays a big part on that because when it comes to b to b social and sources of citations on the major MLMs, LinkedIn is top. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that. The second one is edutainment. So this is kind of more borrowing from TikTok and reels to a certain extent. Those kind of more low production video styles that actually showcase your product and services in different ways. And I'm gonna show some examples. And finally, comment as content, I think, is a huge trend that we'll continue to see going forward. This is across every single social media platform, and LinkedIn is no different. Social SEO, as I said before, LinkedIn is the most cited domain for professional queries across all major AI platforms. This is not going to change anytime soon. It's a reference point. It's where the professionals live. So it's obviously not surprising that b to b social content from LinkedIn is considered highly valuable and authoritative. There's also a very good Metricool and LinkedIn report on AI visibility that I can share afterwards for anyone who's interested. Again, LinkedIn is the number two overall domain across AI search for b to b categories. So, again, it just shows that LinkedIn content is important. However, and this is also important. It's not on this slide, but about 65% of that content comes from LinkedIn articles, not from feed posts. So, going back to Lindsay Marie's question before. Yes, LinkedIn articles are a very important thing to have also in your arsenal if you are interested in this AI search result citation malarkey. Also interesting that about 75% of citations come from individual creators rather than company pages. So, when you're talking about LinkedIn articles, get your leaders, get your experts to actually publish the articles from their pages rather than the company pages, and you will see the effects of that. In terms of word count for articles, 800 to a 200 words roughly is what gets the most citations, and for feed posts, about two, three hundred words are apparently the the sweet spot for again, this is all AI citations, by the way. I'm not saying that this is what performs best overall. And finally, original content rather than we share. So, really, you have to write your own original stuff. Ideally, without the help of AI, don't tell anyone. Entertainment. It's basically about showing not telling. So rather than doing a post about a particular product or service, do something that shows what that product or service is. So here's an example from an insurance client. Instead of a text and image post about risk where you have a single image with maybe a quote from an executive or a stat, How about instead doing a sixty second video from a first person perspective that says three things I saw in a £10,000,000 claim that could have been avoided. So just flip the way you talk about the topic to make it a bit more interesting, more again storytelling led, having a clearer narrative, having a human hook instead of a corporate tone. And again, we know that shares and saves and comments are worth more than just reactions and likes. So, that's what you should be aiming for. Making something that people want to go back to. And here are a couple of other edutainment examples. This is actually from TikTok, but it is relevant because it is a b to b example. This is from Square, payment provider. They use first person storytelling to educate restaurant owners about the product features. So instead of saying we provide payment services, they actually have someone saying, I used to spend loads of time doing this. Now I use Square's product and I save loads of time. It makes my life easier, etcetera. So that first person perspective is much more relatable, much more interesting for someone to watch and engage with and save and go back to. Salesforce, another good example here. They do kind of these explainer videos about complex and technical topics. So, again, using another restaurant analogy, I promise you I'm not hungry, but I do love restaurants and food as I said before. So they explain these you know, they're explaining AI agents and agentic enterprise using food analogies. So something that everyone can understand and is easily relatable. Finally, comments as content, as I said before, super important. Ever since LinkedIn implemented impressions for comments, you can really see the impact in visibility that your on visibility that your comments have. This is obviously not just for individuals, but also for company pages and which leads me nicely to community management, which is essentially replying to comments from your company accounts. And this can be done in two ways. You can do obviously reactive community management, which is replying to your own posts and comments on your posts, or you can do proactive, which is finding either people who are mentioning you or people who are talking about the topic that is interesting to you or that you are a leader in or that you are an expert on, and then commenting on that. So, for example, this is Google for startups. They were mentioned in a post from a startup founder. They commented and the conversation continued because the person replied to their comment. So, again, this can go on and on and on. And this creates added visibility. It creates a conversation. LinkedIn loves that sort of thing. So to cap this off before we go into questions, three things to remember in addition to everything else that we've already covered. The first one is obvious, but it's always worth reminding people of. Algorithms are changing all the time. So the report that you read today refers to content from six months ago and probably won't be relevant tomorrow because it's changed again. So you need to keep testing and learning and testing and learning and testing and learning to figure out what works for you specifically because it will be different for everyone. It'll be different for every industry. There are some learnings you can take from other people's experiences, but nothing beats your own data. The second is the era of break broadcast is over. It's all about conversations. So please know more. We are pleased to announce because yuck. And finally, people still matter the most. So we love seeing other people on social media. You should be featuring people in your content wherever you can, even on LinkedIn, because that's what people want to see. And puppies, of course. So that's all for me. We're now going to open up a question. And, of course, there is the necessary QR code for you to find me on LinkedIn as well. That's fabulous. Thank you so much, Nicole. You you smashed through so much there. And and, like, James and I have just been sat watching the q and a. So but before we before we do that, I'm just gonna take a moment to say thank you so much. It's really appreciated that you can share as you have. I think, we've got Elle in the, in in the chat here saying she's a real heroine. We've got clapping emojis going on. We've got, what a legend. We've got thank you so much, superstar. Thank you, Nicole. This is an important one, actually. That was so useful and also somewhat reassuring. I I feel like that's, if we can get a good outcome from these types of sessions, then that's exactly where we want to be. So I'm so, so glad. James and I have just been sat here in the room as you've been speaking, Nicole, and and looking at the q and a section and going, oh my goodness. There are quite a lot of questions to get through. So Good. We have time. Let's do it. We have time. I'm gonna take them from the top. So we've been doing our best to make sure we try and pick out the ones that feel really relevant to as many people as possible. So let's take the first one from Mika and this was one that you referenced earlier on in the conversation, but I think is worth speaking to because quite often folks will say, yeah, I buy into that theory of, my team posting being the people that I should post this stuff, but no one wants to do it. And I've offered them cash, I've offered them programmes, blah blah blah, you know, but nobody's doing it still. Where have you seen the most success in getting your, team to engage with stuff to start posting and and sort of, show up as employee branding, so to speak? So the top one, top piece of advice is you'll never be able to engage the people who really don't want to do it. So, don't even try. You need to go for the low hanging fruit. So, find the people who actually are willing to do it. It doesn't matter if they're super junior. It doesn't matter if they are the intern. Get them to do it and start there and encourage them and nurture them and help them. If you manage to do that successfully, you will see a result immediately, because you will see that, you know, what we're saying is true. Personal profiles just do better than company pages. From a seniority perspective, of course, you want to get senior leaders engaged. And if they don't, then engage for them. Get access to their accounts and ghostwrite for them. It's not the best solution, but most people do it. If we're being honest, the amount of clients I have that I actually write their posts. I'm not naming names, obviously, but plenty of very senior people who get other people to write the content for them. So if you can't win and you can't convince them, then do it for them because it's the only way you get it done. And then eventually, when they see the benefit, because they will see the benefit, they might actually get more engaged. I love that so much. And if I can offer a build on on your, not trying to push people to do it who just won't do it, one of the best examples that I've seen in house in the agency, b to b side, was they asked for volunteers and then they really fanned the flames. So I think they called it like their advocacy programme and called it out of a group of 100 people, I think it was in this circumstance. I think 12 of them put their hand up and they gave them resources, they gave them time, they gave them, you know, a camera to sort of play with and and stuff like that. And it just became, like, you know, really sort of encouraging and and facilitating, I guess. Yeah. Barclays have a really good case study for this, actually. So, I can again, if anyone's interested in reading more about this, I can share interviews and case studies about this. But that's exactly what they did. They created an internal employee advocacy program. They identified the, what they call ambassadors. So, the people who are really, really engaged and want to do it and they empowered them. They gave them kit. They gave them equipment. They gave them training. They gave them resources. And then they went out and did the work. And now they're winning awards for it. So That's fabulous. So helpful. Thank you so much, Nicole. Let's let's go on to the next question. Not because I don't want to deep dive into that, but there are 25 outstanding now. So I wanna make sure we hear out as many folks as possible. So we've got we've got James next. And the reason I found this question interesting, which is can Agentic AI do posts on my behalf across all socials, is, you know, we're living in this period of time with AI, of course. And so I can ask you to answer the question directly, but I guess I can also ask you to speak on AI as a bit of a catch all. Yeah. Because there'll inevitably be some questions in people's heads on that. Absolutely. So, the answer to the question is yes, AgenTiKi can do everything for you. Now, should you do it and should you use it for that? And my answer is absolutely not. Please don't. There are a number of reasons for that. Reason number one is the content is not going to perform as well as something that you wrote yourself for several reasons. First, people can tell. You think people can't tell, people can tell. More and more people can tell. And even if the AI becomes more sophisticated, people's knowledge of AI becomes more sophisticated as well, and we can still tell. So, we can tell if your post is AI generated. Secondly, and more importantly, the platforms can tell your post is AI generated, and all of them are now downgrading AI generated content compared to human generated content. So, LinkedIn has already announced that they are actually using AI detection tools in order to prioritize human written content. Even content that is written in the little LinkedIn text box rather than pasted from words is better already. So, they can detect that. So, if you're using AI to create all your content, you will see the performance deflated because of it. And thirdly, save the planet, guys. Write your posts. You know, it's it's Don't use all the water for that. Use the water for useful stuff. I love that. Thank you, Nicole. Let's go to the next one, which is about knowledge focused posts, which came early in the presentation. And I think you actually also provided a a stat on the ideal, post length. Yes. But, we'll we'll take this one nonetheless because I think it is interesting. So since he prefers knowledge focused posts, can we focus on creating a bit longer posts? Because we usually keep them crisp followed by a call to action. So, there's something about post links there, but there's probably something about saying what you want to say as well. Yep. Like Absolutely. And the solution for that is articles. Keep the articles long. Use articles instead of having the long posts. Use the tools that LinkedIn gives you because articles have also the advantage that they're essentially like a blog post. You can use headings. You can use bullet points, you can do formatting. So, if you want to share long information, articles are much, much better. They are the tool that LinkedIn gives you to do that. Posts are not supposed to be super long. Feed posts have a limit in characters exactly because of that. That's where articles And now with all the AI stuff as well, articles have a double bonus of being great for citations as well. So, if you want to share knowledge posts that have a lot of information and can be broken down in several different sections, articles. That's really interesting. There's a lot of chatter in chat feature around articles. So, we may well loop back around to them later in the Q and A as spot the questions as they come. Let's take a really good one from Lindsay, though, around reporting. So specifically in the B2B context, then this is quite tricky because we're speaking about longer sales cycles and we're speaking about stuff which may be quite tricky to attribute longer term as well. So we'll do our best to kind of report on these things. So Lindsay says, with the longevity of LinkedIn content, how can we best report on performance? I pull a monthly content performance report, but this might not reflect the true performance of posts made in that month. Yep. So, again, I'll I'll sort of ask the direct question, but I'd be interested in any observations or reflections you have on your commenting as well. Yeah. That's always the catch 22 because we have the same issue with our clients where we have monthly reports. Sometimes you share a post on the last day of the month and the report is due five days later. That post hasn't really had the time to stew and live its full life. You can only report on what you have at the time that you're reporting. So, it might be that I think a good practice to do and I'm not saying I do this as often as I should, but probably you should really be doing that is revisiting your posts that are a bit older. So, a good way of doing that is if you go into your analytics on LinkedIn, you will see which posts are still getting traction regardless of when you posted them. Yes. When you look at your, you know, best performing posts. Normally, the top performing posts will be newer, but every now and again you see some, you know, outliers hanging on in there. So, keep an eye on those. And then if you feel that there is a post that is continuing to perform, has a long tail, longer tail than usual, then go back and report on that. So, Anna is saying a good example here. She's saying that she's tracking the post for one week, then again at four or six weeks. So, that is really the best practice, but sometimes you see that the long tail I have posts that are still showing up in my posts being engaged with that are a year old, which is insane, you know. It's so silly, isn't it? Yes. I found one. I found the tab that you're speaking about. So, the analytics is, in the top left corner, you've got your, number of folks who have viewed your profile, and underneath, you've kind of got page views with, post views, within the last ninety days or something. Exactly. That the other day and and, likewise found some posts from, like, six months ago that had, like, two impressions from last week or something like that. I'm like, what's it doing being shown to people? Yeah. Very silly. And on this, because Gabrielle is asking in the chat, yes, ideally, you want to leave a bit more time between the end of the month and the reporting if you can. I know it's not always possible because some clients just have their own internal cycles that you can't really align with properly, but if you have the power to advise them and consult on that and say Can we please do the reporting on the tenth of the month instead of the third? That already gives you an extra week to let those posts stew and get a truer picture of what their performance is. Nice. I love that. Thank you, Nicole. Let's take the next one from Ollie, saying regarding social social only content, is it better to lose external links altogether or to opt in for commenting on this post? So that would be like at the bottom of the post Yep. With the word Christmas. Yeah. Linking comments. The usual. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is interesting because LinkedIn themselves have said time and time again that having links in your posts does not affect the performance of your posts and shouldn't We affect the performance of your have seen that to be the case in some cases. The best advice I can give on this is if the post is really relevant, like a great post and the link is relevant to that post. So, if you're sharing loads of cool information about a report and then you link it to the report, it shouldn't affect the performance of your post. If you're just saying sharing a press release and then putting a blurb on top and then linking to your website, that's not the same. So, not all links are made equal in this particular case and I think the strength of the post is more important than rather you have a link or not. So that is, I think, the thing to consider. I wouldn't I mean, I use links in my posts. I don't necessarily see posts with links performing much worse than posts without links, but the link has to be relevant to what you're posting about. And I think this leads into a really interesting and important thing that we we should have in mind when we're thinking about posting, right, which is like knowing what the goal of what you're posting has to be. And the reason I say that is there's a question down here from Gabby who says, Any insights on webinars, events and how it's best to promote them on LinkedIn? And if I was to jump in and sort of offer a bit of an answer to start off with, for me, if I was looking to promote a webinar, I wouldn't be thinking, for example, about the amount of likes I get on that post because that post is there for a different version, for a different reason, you know. And so I would put a link in that post because it's saying go to this thing and LinkedIn has recently added in the option so you can see how many people have clicked in, which is great. But, you know, we tongue in cheek called this session like what to happen, you know, what happens when you only get three likes on your post. If you only get three likes on your post, but you get five potential decent prospects signing up for your webinar, then it's a great result. And so, like, I think I think this is probably a really important mindset that you got across in your content, Nicole, which was, like, think about your goal first before posting because we can give you as many catch all things about getting as many likes. But if it's doing nothing for your business, then there's no point. Exactly. That's I'll jump to on you. No. No. No. I mean, do you do way more events than I do, Joe, so I think you're probably in a better place to answer this question, to be fair. But, again, promoting anything on LinkedIn, the principle is the same. What you need to think is what do you want to achieve with that post? So, do you want people to sign a form, link to your web, visit your website, take an action, do something else? Who is it targeting? Then you create a post that is interesting to that particular audience in some way, and add some value and spark their curiosity, whatever it is that you're trying to achieve. And then you promote whatever it is you're trying to promote that way. It's It sounds counterintuitive to a certain extent, but ultimately that's what marketing should all be about. Right? You start with the objectives and then you ladder down to the tactics. The objectives are part of the strategy. So, first tactics later. So think about what you want to achieve first, and then you go down into the tactics of how to do it. Love that. Thank you, Nicole. Let's take this next one from Aoife because it was part of both your content and then also the conversation that we had in the chat feature going on. And there's a stat from Dream Data which says something like 81% of the sales cycle is untraceable before folks actually sort of get in touch with your sales team. So, again, I'm not affiliated with them anyway, Dream Data are a tech solution example of people who are trying to solve this. But Eva asks, I'm a bit late to the party with questions, but would love to hear what works for tracking. Are there any low cost tech solutions that help connect the dots between post and a lead? My favorite low tech solution for this, to be fair, is asking people. Because, I mean, ultimately, I think one of the most effective things in marketing is surveys, right? And it's one of the most underutilized features, but especially in B2B where volume is probably lower than in B2C, just make sure that whenever someone actually performs an action, whether it's a sale or hiring a service or whatever, ask them what made you do this? How did you find this? What was the thing that made you do this? And they'll tell you. Nine times out of 10, they'll be happy to tell you. And nine times out of 10, they'll be honest about it. So you will have your answers without needing any tech. Just ask people. That's the the lowest tech option that I can give you. And the reality for a lot of b to b businesses in addition to that is that we're not gonna be getting, you know, for SME level businesses in particular, you're not gonna be getting such a huge amount of leads on a daily basis, you know. My general theory is that most b to b businesses at an SME level can do with 10 new clients in a year, it's probably a good day, you know. Exactly. So so you have that. Yeah. You you can ask 10 people. Right? It it's not a heavy lift, you know, and you can add that to your, you know, sales process where when people are finalising the setup or onboarding or whatever, just ask the question. Thank you, Nicole. Let's take the next one from Georgia because there were some questions when you were going in on GEO and search around sequencing more than anything. So folks were speaking about posting an article to LinkedIn and then repurposing it on their blog. Some folks were saying they were posting it on their website first and then repurposing to LinkedIn and so on and so forth. I guess to ask the black and white question, is there a recommendation for how folks should go about sequencing and where to post what first, etcetera? I still think, and again, I'm not an SEO expert or a GEO expert. Yes. Should caveat that front. Yes. So that's my first big caveat, but I still think that good geo is good SEO. So, if you're doing something that is going to negatively affect your SEO, you shouldn't do it, because it'll probably be bad for geo as well. That's the first thing. The second thing is geo also changes very, very, very, very rapidly, because the models change even quicker than the algorithms on social media change. So, what's working today might not work tomorrow. We have seen, for example, with Reddit and Chattypeauty massive shifts just in the last month or two, Whereas like six months ago, everyone was going on about Reddit being the next big thing. Now, it might not be the next big thing anymore. So, again, do the basics, do the fundamentals. Marketers love talking about fundamentals, but not necessarily focus on doing them. Do the fundamentals. So, your website is your real estate. That should be your priority. So, make sure that that's working super well, because that's ultimately where the client who's probably going to spend money with you is going to land. LinkedIn is an added bonus. So, get that right, but it shouldn't be your first priority unless you get all of your leads from LinkedIn because you're a freelancer or something else. You don't have a website, then it's a different conversation. But if you have both and your website is your, you know, golden egg goose, then obviously your website should come first. Thank you, Nicole. I just want to pause for a sec to appreciate the answer because I appreciate your caveat upfront, you know, the two of them, GEO changes, not a GEO expert, but I think so often we can hedge our bets and not give an answer. And you gave an answer there to, you know, the best of your knowledge and capabilities, which is really appreciated. So, I just wanna say thank you for that. We're coming to the end now and I can see that there's bunches of questions still open, but hopefully, folks will feel like we've done our best to get through as many as possible. So we've got this next one from, James. So not James Sandbrook, I set up a ceremony. James Proctor says, what if the content, that does well doesn't strategically improve the business's prospects? I've never gotten a sale from a Christmas jumper day post, for example. And I guess it probably comes back down to that goal stuff we were speaking about before. Absolutely. And, again, remember that social media is top of funnel activity as well. So, not every social media post needs to be we're going to get a sale from this. A lot of social media posts might actually just be increasing your brand awareness. Some social media posts might be sharing company culture because you want to make your company a nice place to work and attract potential employees. And if you're going to attract prospects, Christmas jumper day is the post to do that. It's not going to be your product post that is going to do that. Sharing that you are a group of people who cares about each other, who does fun things, and who enjoys being together is how you're going to attract potential staff members. Not sharing a super snazzy video about your latest product. I love that. Thank you so much, Nicole. I I think we'll we'll call it we'll call it there, because I feel like we could go for a long time. But what we're gonna make sure that we do is is capture as much as we possibly can both from the answered questions and the unanswered questions. And then Yeah. And, again, feel free to, you know, come and tap me up on LinkedIn if you have any further questions that weren't answered. I'm more than happy to chat. Beyond grateful for that, Nicole. And and like I said at the beginning, like, so often you'll be found in the comments. And if this is my opportunity to just sort of say thank you for being part of this community as well and giving so generously, then then, yeah, it's a small opportunity to do that. So thank you very much. And thank you everyone, for your brilliant, questions, your brilliant chat throughout. It's always endlessly appreciated and and and like there's probably a comment here which has summed up everything, which is, Madelyn says, thanks so much. So helpful. My hand hurts from writing notes. And hopefully, that's mission achieved for a lot of you, today. So thank you all for being absolutely wonderful. We hope to see you, next Tuesday, for our next webinar. But in the meantime, if there's anything we can do for you as a community, then just know that we're here for you. So, thank you very much. So thank you, Nicole. Thank you, everyone, and hope to see you next week. Take care. Bye. Bye now.