What do I do with my LinkedIn company page? This is a question I get asked a lot, and I love when people ask me because I definitely have an opinion.
So if you're a consultant or a service provider, or small business founder this episode is for you because I'm going to explain three important things you should know about the LinkedIn company page. Number one, I'm gonna talk about the basic functions of the profile versus the page.
Number two:
how the profile and the page interact with the larger LinkedIn community and how that's going to impact your lead generation goals. And number three: whether you should be actively sharing content and engaging on your LinkedIn profile, ,on your company page, or both.
Welcome to the Sales by You podcast, where I talk about all things sales, mindset, LinkedIn, and how to build a lead to client sales process that works for you.
I'm your host, Celina Guerrero, sales and LinkedIn coach. I help consultants and service providers attract high quality leads that become their best clients. Okay,
Now let's talk a little bit about the basic functions and differences between the profile and the LinkedIn page. And for those of you who are experienced LinkedIn users, it can't hurt to listen to this piece to remind you. The LinkedIn profile is you as a human. It's you, your personal brand, your thought leadership. And when you look at that profile, I don't know if you know this, but there's like 40 sections in the LinkedIn profile.
There are your skills, your experience, your volunteer work, your education. It's really focused on what you bring as a human to the work that you're doing. I. The page is not about your personal brand, even if your company name is the same as you. It is about your business brand, okay? It's gonna have your website, it's gonna have your location, and it's gonna also be a place where you can list jobs.
And to be clear, you cannot list jobs on your profile. Having a LinkedIn company page also allows you to create ads. You can't create ads from a profile.
You have to have a page. So, with that in mind, one is really gonna be about you and your experience and your thought leadership, and one is gonna be about your company your products and more about the services and the business brand disassociated from you specifically.
And the tone is gonna be different. A good example might be, let's say you, the founder, went to a conference. On your personal profile you're gonna write, Hey, I went to this conference and I saw so and so speak, and it was great. The post on your page is gonna say, Hey, our founder went to this conference and they saw this great, speaker X, Y, Z, or something like that.
Okay? So that is gonna be a difference in terms of the, the tone of the content. With that said, with that said. Most cases, your profile is going to get better organic reach. So if you have the choice of doing a post or a page post, and you can only do one, you only have time for one, do it on your personal profile because it's gonna get better organic reach.
It's gonna go to those first connections, and then depending on the algorithm, it might be shared to your second connections as well. Okay? Now, if you post on your page, the only people that would see that post about the founder going to the conference are the followers of that page.
And what often happens is people don't have any followers on their page and then they're posting content and then no one sees it. And even then it's more competitive in the feed for people to see your posts from a page rather than a post from you. So just keep in mind, you're gonna need to get followers to that page, just like you would need to get connections to your profile in order for people to see those posts.
One next step. Just, just keep going with that content idea, is that both the profile and the page can host LinkedIn lives can host audio events, can also create newsletters. So your business can have a newsletter, and you can have a newsletter.
Think about that conceptually for a second. One is going to be you talking about this particular subject, whereas in a business newsletter you might be the author, but it really is more of like, I'm a business and I am telling you about this thing that we as a company know.
The last thing I wanna say in terms of the differences is that on the page, for example, let's say you do have followers and you're posting in order to increase the likelihood that people will see that post, you can buy ads.
You're, it's sort of pay to play. You're paying LinkedIn to get your post in front of your followers, and even people beyond your followers. Okay? So you don't really have to run ads. I'm just adding, no pun intended, that the ads are gonna get you that extra visibility. You're gonna pay for that to be in people's feeds.
All right, so now you kinda have a sense of like the basic function differences.
Let's talk about how that really impacts lead generation. So for example, on your profile, you are going to connect with other members.
You can message other members. You can join groups, and post in those groups. You have way more access to other humans essentially. And you're building that one-to-one trust through your thought leadership and conversations. Okay. The page cannot connect with other members. The page cannot follow individuals. Your page cannot message members. your page cannot join groups. It's more of a one way relationship. You're thinking of that business as a brand, and you're bringing people into that brand.
Allowing them to follow you, allowing them to message your company. Right? The small exception to that is that as a LinkedIn page, you can comment. Okay, I'm not sure if you knew that, but let's say your company is Bumblebee. And somebody writes and says, I love this app, bumblebee. And then you, as the founder, could go to that post and say, "Hey, thanks for, telling about how you enjoyed our app". But you could, if you actually click on your photo and little dropdown, you can actually switch if you're an admin of that company, to have Bumblebee, the company actually comment on that post.
That's where we get into having other people on your team acting on behalf of your company page. So from an engagement and lead gen perspective, the profile is way more effective one-to-one. But commenting is a specific piece where you can engage directly with the members
I just wanna sort of set that differentiation for you.
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All right. So now what, let's get to the crux of the issue here. You understand the strengths of the profile on the page, and the question is, should you be active on both?
Whether you post on LinkedIn as a company page is going to be determined by the type of business that you have and the volume of clients that you need in any given period. So for example,
if you are a B2B consultant and you primarily get clients through one-to-one outreach, referrals and networking, then you may not need to post or be active on your company page. It is a thousand percent acceptable to create that company page, and then do nothing else with it
-- just have it exist as a placeholder, if you will. Let me say that again. You thousand percent should be okay with creating a page and then not posting anything on it once you've created it. If you're primarily getting your clients through your thought leadership and your relationships, then
thinking about investing the time, money, resources, staff to post content on your page, it's just a question of does that make any sense? On the other hand, if you are a B2C company doing high volume, for example, selling a product or some type of software, you may want to invest time in getting followers
for your company page and sharing content on a regular basis. In other words, if people are using your app because of the app and not because of you, the founder, then they're gonna follow your company page so they can get updates and news that are important to them,
But they're not gonna follow you, the CEO. They're gonna follow the business, They may not know even know who the CEO is. So let me just recap that a little bit. The profile is about you, your experience, your relationships, and your thought leadership. Your page provides you with legitimacy and a logo and it also can help you build the brand of a company regardless of whether you're a founder or not.
Secondly, if you are solo provider and you primarily get your clients through thought leadership, outreach, networking, then I suggest you create the page, connect your profile to it, but do not invest time and effort in getting those followers and posting content on your page. It is absolutely unlikely in my experience if you work for yourself that you are gonna have the time to also post on your page.
Generally speaking, my advice would be for you to invest your time and resources where you're getting results. And that means staying active on your profile. I mean, most clients who work for themselves struggle to even get that done. So unless you are a larger company and you have a team and you have the revenue for that team to actually get those followers and share content and comment as the page
it's okay just to get that company page going and then leave it alone. I know somebody who started off as an independent consultant and the name of her company was her name. And then after 10 years in business, she's now rebranding under a company name.
But it often takes 10 years, you know, in some ways to, to feel like that makes sense. So it's not either or. It's really about where you are in your business and whether you're actually gonna get the benefit of posting on your page. You have to get followers. You wanna post, and then maybe you wanna throw some ads in there to get those posts in front of new people.
That's a different strategy than it would be if you are just a solopreneur, getting most of your clients from relationships. Okay, and I have one final thing to say about all of this. I have had many clients say to me that I wanna seem legitimate. I feel like I should be posting from my company page.
Okay. I was definitely one of those. My actual company name is Tessellate Partners, and this was a name that I created. It's my legal business name, and I was using it in my marketing, but then I realized nobody even cares who Tessellate Partners is. You know what I mean? They're hiring me because they know me.
And then from a resources perspective, I was just burning myself out, trying to keep up with content on my profile and my page. Right? So you know, I would say I can appreciate very much if you're a consultant who's selling to big corporations, And you wanna seem bigger than you are, but my answer's always the same.
People are hiring you, okay? They're not hiring the name of your company. It is always easier to sell as a human than it is as a business unless you really have the resources than marketing team to back it up. Now, when I tell people this, I say, look, just post as yourself. Then what they do is they go and they post on their page, and then they repost that company post to their profile.
Lemme say that again. So on that company page, the founder went to this conference, and then the founder reposts that to their profile. And this is their way of like, just not fully wanting to let go of this identity of their company. Which I can appreciate, but I just don't see a lot of value in, here's why.
You know you're gonna get more organic reach if you send that as a post of, I went to this conference. And have you ever seen like reposts, like people repost something from a company and I don't know, to me personally, it looks like regurgitated promotional content. You know, let's be honest, that's kind of how it feels.
So again, I'm not against it, but you'll get more more of the results that you want by simply posting from your profile. Alright, well I hope that was helpful for you. If you are looking for more support in your LinkedIn and sales journey, I suggest you sign up for the Connect newsletter.
You can find that link below in the notes, you, you can find it on my profile. I send tips and advice every week and this can really help you begin thinking about how to improve your ability to sign clients using LinkedIn. And secondly, you are always welcome to send me a DM on LinkedIn. If questions came up for you about your profile and page, I'd love to hear what that question is.
Go to my profile. Send me a message. Tell me you listen to the podcast, ask me a question and I will respond. That's it for today. I hope you have a great day, and I'll see you on the next episode.
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