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Viveka von Rosen
Just let us know if you're not and then we'll get started. Yes, I am Vivica von Rosen, and we're here to talk about the anatomy of a showcase page. I kind of liked that title. It just came to me. And it's going to be best practices for creating, sharing and marketing your showcase page. Lishowcase Go ahead and feel free to sign into Twitter. Of course, don't go down the rabbit hole of talking to your friends on Twitter, but feel free to sign on to Twitter so that you can, of course, share my very, very valuable information today. And My hashtag is LinkedInExpert and I went ahead and put the hashtag and my username down at the bottom of every slide. So if you didn't get it here this second, no worries. There it is. So what we're going to cover today are some basic stats on LinkedIn, why you want not only company, but showcase pages as well. We'll talk about specifically what is a showcase page and what you want to showcase. We'll talk a little bit about the loss of products and services pages and how this is not necessarily a direct replacement, but kind of a replacement for those. We'll talk about the importance of knowing your audience. That's just basic marketing. And then we're going to talk about calls to action and contact info. We'll talk about what size images and logos to use and where to use them. There's some kind of ninja tricks with that. And then content marketing strategies for pages and then how to market your you page. It doesn't matter how many times you read this, there's always a spelling mistake. But that's what we're going to cover today. So we've got a lot to do in 45 minutes. We'll just go ahead and get started now. So, interestingly enough, 93% of marketers rate LinkedIn as effective for generating leads. This comes from the Sophisticated marketer's guide to LinkedIn, which is a great ebook that you should all download. Not just because I'm in it, but because LinkedIn went to a lot of effort with the folks over at topranked to create this ebook. And there's some really, really great stats, this being one of them. Now, Vivica, I thought you were talking about showcase pages. Well, part of the reason of having a showcase page is not only to establish your authority on LinkedIn, but yes, if you can use it to start generating leads. That's kind of another good reason for showcase pages specifically. This statistic speaks specifically I think to Pages and showcase pages. 91% of marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content. So that's important. And I know this is talking about marketers, but really small business owners, entrepreneurs. If you do marketing for your company in any way, whether it's your traditional role or it's just something you have to do in order to be seen and get clients, then you too are a marketer, including actually job seekers. I think 50% of LinkedIn members are 50% more likely to engage, or LinkedIn members are 50% more likely to engage with a company they engage with on LinkedIn first. That's huge. So again, it's important to have that corporate presence. And we'll by default, we'll be talking a little bit about company Pages too. You have to have a company page in order to have showcase pages. And then 65% of companies acquire leads. B2B leads through LinkedIn. So again, very important. And if you're B2C, have no fear you're going to acquire leads through LinkedIn too. I think it's more like 51% instead of 65%. So it's really important that you know how to showcase your company. And LinkedIn and LinkedIn company pages and LinkedIn showcase pages are a good place to do that. So let's back up a little bit. What is a Showcase Page? It's really a subpage. So you have your company page, which you create, which is free to create a company page. And that's basically your corporate essence on LinkedIn. It's not necessarily associated with the person who created it, whether that's you or somebody else. But you do want that corporate or that company page. Now, Showcase Pages are subpages. They are not a product and service page. You're not going to go on LinkedIn and create a showcase page for every product and service you have. And the main reason for that is Company Pages are really news feeds. So you don't want to have to create a whole audience for every single product and service you have. We will talk about what you want to showcase using Showcase Pages in just a minute. But know that they are not an exact. They don't exactly replace products and services Pages. You will be creating a unique audience for each page. So think of it more like a Twitter stream, actually like a Facebook Page or a Twitter stream. You have to create a unique audience for each page. Just because you have 10,000 people following your company Page, it doesn't mean you'll have 10,000 people following your showcase Pages. You could have People following your showcase page that aren't following your company page. So in that way, it's a subpage, but it's a little bit autonomous. The other thing is you can only create 10 pages, period. Now, LinkedIn might let us beg for more eventually, or they might loosen this up, or it might be a paid feature that you can buy more pages later. But right now you're only allowed 10 showcase pages, and it seems like right now you're only allowed to create about two a day. So that's the basics of a company page. I'm going to go live here for just a second for you guys. So when you go into LinkedIn and you create your company page, right, here's my company page, here's my showcase pages down here. In order to create a showcase page for the first time, I go to my main company page and I just come down here to create a showcase page. If I want to edit a showcase page I've already created, I can do that just by going into my company page and finding them here, or I can find them under interests and companies. And if you don't have a lot of pages and you don't have a lot of showcase pages, that's easy enough. I manage a lot of showcase pages and pages for people, so it's a little bit more difficult for me to find them there. I actually put my pages in a folder in my browser so I can easily reach them here as well, and then my clients get their own folder. But that's just kind of a quick little ninja trick that you can do when creating your showcase pages so that you can find them more easily, especially if you're creating. If you've got three or four companies that you're managing, especially for those of you who are like social media managers or community managers, if you have three or four pages and those three or four pages have 10 showcase pages each, yeah, you need easier ways of finding those showcase pages. So just to recap, it's a subpage, you have to have a company page first. Your followers don't have to follow your company page to follow your sub page or your showcase Page. You have to create a company page first. It's not a product or service page. It acts really more like a Twitter feed or a Facebook page feed. You can, I recommend, you create a unique audience for each showcase page. You're allowed a total of 10 pages. You can create up to two a day. So what do you showcase then with these showcase pages? Well, LinkedIn says you can create brands you can Showcase specific brands. So great, you can showcase a company brand or even a public figure or personal brand if you've got HubSpot, let's say. So you've got HubSpot, there's your main company. Well, maybe you want to highlight Mark Volpe because he's really created a name for himself within HubSpot. So you can actually create a sub page or showcase page for personalities within your business. You probably think on the top off your head, Ford. Who do we think of when we say Ford? Back in the day with Comcast, we thought of Frank Eliason. So he's gone now. But at the time that would have been a good personal brand or someone you could highlight. So that's another thing you can do. You can showcase individuals who really kind of skill speak for and represent your company. You could create a showcase page for the CEO and then share personal thoughts from the CEO. So lots of ways that you can use that. Of course, if you're a big corporate brand and you've got subsidiaries or verticals, but you don't necessarily want to create a company page for each vertical, consider creating a showcase page. Now the content you can share, which we'll talk about in just a moment, the content you can share on a showcase page is pretty limited. It's a header, it's and its 200 character description. So this is all about content that you share. It's not about the brochure, which is really what products and services pages were about. Those were more like a brochure. This is about content dissemination. But consider if you do have a company and you want to create verticals or subsidiaries, but you don't want to create sneak pages for them, Consider showcase page ongoing events that you have every year. So you know, like Social Media examiner, they have Social Media Summit and then Social Media Marketing World. Well, they could create a showcase page for those two events that are going on every year. You wouldn't want to create probably a showcase page for an event that only happens once because right now I don't know if LinkedIn doesn't know how to do it or what's going on with that. They don't seem to be able to delete pages. So if you create a showcase page just for an event going on, like say this one, if I created a showcase page for this event going on right now, this Oktopost webinar and now it's done and if I'm not going to do this every month or every year, then I've kind of wasted one of my 10 pages. So ongoing events are okay. One off events, not so much. At least not until you can delete pages. What I will tell you though is, is when you create a showcase page, you can't change the URL. It's stuck with whatever you originally create, but you can change the name. So I guess if you did do that by accident, you created a page and you're like, oh, I really shouldn't have done that. Like I did one for LinkedIn. I think I created a showcase page for LinkedIn for financial professionals. Well, that's really not my area of expertise. I usually refer that work to somebody else. But My URL was www.LinkedIn.com company linkedinfinancial. Oops. I could change the name though of my page and it shows up differently so the URL stays the same. You can change the name just in case you messed up like me. You can create a showcase page for a featured product or service. Not for every product or service, but like I've got a program called LinkedIn prospecting. So we just did a huge release on that. We're continuing to build that one up. So I created a showcase page for that particular product. Now I have several products. My other product has its own company page. I have several services. But I don't necessarily need to create a showcase page for each and every little itty bitty. I have one for LinkedIn consulting. Great. That's business consulting. That's personal consulting. That's one on one consulting. You see what I'm saying? It's really for a general or a featured service that I offer, not for each and every little individual product and service. Again, because you have to grow an audience for that. It's very time consuming. If you created a company page or showcase page rather for each product and service. And the other thing is you've got your 10 limit and then finally you want to consider those targeted audiences. So if my vertical is LinkedIn for lawyers, of course I'll create a showcase page called LinkedIn for lawyers. If your vertical is marketing for accountants, create a showcase page that's marketing for accountants. If your vertical is customer acquisition for the stars, you know, celebrity customer acquisition or client acquisition. So you can think about those target audiences and create showcase pages for those specific target audiences as well. Let's back up a little bit and I recommend actually get strategic about this. Create on a piece of paper or whatever, however you like to work. Think about the different types of, of showcase pages that you want. Be more strategic than I was. I was just like, oh, my God. And I went and created 10 immediately, and there's some there I wish I didn't create. But anyway, be strategic. Think about your verticals, think about your brand, think about your products and services, think about your different audiences, and really map out, I'd say, five to six showcase pages, knowing that you're going to focus and grow the first three and then eventually add the next three and then leave some blank. Because like I said right now, LinkedIn tells us we can only have 10. They may hold to that for the rest of LinkedIn's life, or they might change that next week, but we don't know that yet. So don't do what I do. I used up all 10 of my URLs and now I'm out. Now, let's talk about those URLs. Once you have in your mind or you've mapped out what you want your different showcase pages to be when you first create your showcase page, Right? So when you come in here and you go into your company page. Oops, there we go. And you go into your company page. All right, I'll play. We'll pretend it's my client here. And you come here to create a showcase page. We've already done 10. Okay. That's the thing you get. Anyway, when you click on Create a Showcase Page, this screen is going to come up. What you put in here becomes your URL. Later, you'll have the opportunity to change your name should you want to. But whatever you put in here becomes your URL. So if it is Customer Acquisition Celebrity or Celebrity Customer Acquisition, and you type that in here, your URL then becomes LinkedIn.company celebrity client acquisition. Or if you wanted to just put Celebrity client acquisition as one word without spaces, it would be LinkedIn.com companycelebritycustomerclient acquisition. One word. You can change that, so don't worry if it looks hinky here. Same thing for your company page. By the way, if you haven't created a company page yet, when they ask you to name it the first time, whatever you name it, that becomes your URL. Now, these URLs are unique. If someone else already has Celebrity Client Acquisition or Celebrity Customer Acquisition, then you're going to have to do Customer Acquisition for Celebrities or something like that. These URLs are unique, so it's a good idea to get them now. But don't do what I do and just rush into it. Be strategic, take a little bit of time, and then go and see if your URLs are available. LinkedIn will tell you if it's already taken. Once you've done that, now you have a URL that Google really likes. If you mess up, you put a misspelling in here or you decide you don't want to do LinkedIn for financial professionals, you're kind of right now at issue because the help department at LinkedIn, I've asked them already to remove help. So the help center, right underneath your name here, you come down to the help center and you reach out to them. You have to write in something like showcase page first. Okay, well, wait, you have to write something in. And then once you write something in the question box, there you go. So once you hit search, then the contact us section will turn blue. Now you can write them and say, I accidentally, you know, issue type is going to be company pages. I accidentally created this showcase page. Can you please remove it for me? And they'll tell you no, you can change the name though. Be aware, you can change the name, you just can't change the URL. Eventually, I'm sure they will be able to remove company pages for you. I can't imagine they won't. Or maybe you just keep asking and you get someone who can. But just be aware that right now, just right now, that is a little bit of an issue. Again, probably if you've ever heard me speak before, I harp on this. You have got to know your audience. You don't want to just write general information about general stuff. And you don't just want to create content that is sales, sales, sales, sales, sales. You want to be really, really clear on who these people are, right? You want, are, are they male or female? For each audience, not just your typical purchaser, but for each audience that you're trying to speak to, are they male or female? What economic bracket are they in? What kind of education do they have? More importantly, what are they interested in? Because that is the type of content that you're going to want to share with them. So you've really, really got to know your audience. And actually, this slide probably should have come before for the one on strategically creating your showcase pages. You've got to know your audience. So when you're creating content for them, they're going to be interested in it, they're going to listen to it or read it, as the case may be. They're going to like it, they're going to share it, they're going to comment on it, and really we want them to share it. We want those advocates Right. The other thing that you're going to want to do is put calls to action and contact info. You want to put calls to action because you want people to take action, whether that's in your header, your hero image, which is on your showcase page, which is 974x330 pixels. Don't worry, it's a little bit later. But that's kind of weird, right? 974x330 pixels, whatever. That's what it is. So you can put calls to action there. I highly recommend, even if you don't put a phone number, you put a Follow us. People might find your page, they might like your page, and they just don't even think about clicking on that follow button. So put that call to action, put that follow us right on your Hero image, on your showcase page, and quite frankly, on your company page Hero image as well. When you create a showcase page, you get to create a page description. It is a whopping 200 characters. So this is really more of a USP or unique sales proposition. But again, follow us for great information on marketing, branding and lead generation, or feel free to contact our consultants at and then put that contact information in there. So the calls to action, like follow us or read this or look there, that's to get people more engaged with your company page. Of course, the. The contact info, the phone numbers and email addresses, that's to sell. That's so people have a way of contacting you so they can buy your stuff. So let's make it easy for them. Right here. By the way, this is actually a portion of my personal company page. So not showcase page, but my company page description is 2000 characters. I just took a chunk out. The first part is customize. A lot of people take the about us section on their company page page and in that 2,000 characters, they'll just copy and paste the about us section from their website right onto their company page. But I recommend you customize it a little bit. Hey, thank you for finding our LinkedIn company page. We're so glad you found us at LinkedIn to business or at your company, we do this USP mission statement, vision statement, whatever it is, put that up front, let them know what they're getting and then guide them. If you check out our various showcase pages, let them know they're on the right in case they're new to LinkedIn or they don't know about showcase pages yet. You'll see we have all kinds of free resources like ebooks and trainings and new information and blah blah, blah, blah blah blah to help you. What's in it for them to help you succeed in LinkedIn, social media marketing and lead generation. And those by the way, would be keywords that I also want my company page found under. So your company page description, you can guide people to your showcase pages. Notice I bolded the or I capitalized just because there's no bolding in this section on LinkedIn. And then your call to action or your description for your actual showcase page. 200 characters and again, calls to action, telling them what they're going to get, what's in it for them. And that's really it. That's the copy. This is what your showcase page looks like. Hero image, page description. Oh, and then back up here. You need to make administrators who can add content to your showcase page yourself. Of course that's going to be automatic. You may want to add one or two other people if you can. If you've got a bigger company or maybe you've got someone, a VA or someone who's doing content marketing for you, make sure to add them as administrators so they can add content to your showcase pages too. And that's really all it is. Hero image 974 by 330 pixels and a 200 character page description. And then the updates that you create. I lied. And you've got logos. So let's talk about the images again. Your hero image 974x330, that's up here. Notice calls to action, phone numbers, website, there's nothing that unlike Facebook, there's no one on. And I've asked LinkedIn, is there anything we can or cannot do or anything we're not allowed to do on our showcase pages? On our showcase page, Hero image. And they said no, as far as we know, no. So you're okay putting calls to action and phone numbers and email addresses, etc. Now the other thing that you're going to do is a logo. Your logo is going to show up right here. Now, interestingly enough, your logo can be your actual logo. So this is my actual logo down here, but I've already got it up here, so why would I have that logo again? So if you have a very personality based business now my business is pretty much me. My exit strategy is work till I'm 98 and then die. I'm not likely to sell LinkedIn to business to anyone else because it is, it's, it might as well be called vivicavonrosen.com so if you have a business like that that's personality driven. Why not show them the person? So maybe do a picture of your personality, whoever that personality is. Of course you can do a logo, but really you can put anything in here that reflects back to your showcase page. So that's your rectangular or your main logo and that's 60 by 100 pixels. And that's going to show up bottom left hand side. That being said, by the way, guys, make sure you don't have stuff written down here. When I first had my design guy create this for me, he had a bunch of stuff written across the bottom. Well, this hides it. So make sure that kind of bottom left hand corner of your hero image is blank. So you can add your rectangular logo there and then whatever you name, it will show up here. So even though my URL for this might be LinkedIn.com company LinkedIn training to increase your expertise, the name, what I renamed it was LinkedIn experts. So this is where you get to rename your page. The URL stays the same, but you can rename it here. And that's what happens if you accidentally created a page and you're like spelling mistake or I don't actually do that. Or I thought I had to create a page for each product and service and now I realize I have to do it for brands or for featured stuff or for an event. So you can always change the name. And honestly that's what people are going to see. It's the URL that goes up in your browser. I'll even show you what I'm talking about. The URL that goes up in your browser. Here we go. So the URL that goes up in your browser could be different from the actual name of your company or your showcase page. So my browser, what LinkedIn sees, I'm sorry, what Google sees is LinkedIn.com company LinkedIn prospecting. But what you get to read is LinkedIn prospecting, get more leads. Right? So that's what I mean. You can change that. And if you need to change it again, this is where you change it. You literally just click on your showcase page name. It will not change the URL, but you can certainly change this page name. And then your page description goes underneath there. You've got your admins. You also get to add a website that you can point people to and it can be a landing page like ours is. Choose your industry, you can make it visible or if you go like I need to work on it a little bit more, you can un enable it so you can hide it, you can't delete it, but you can hide it. Then you can do your standard logo and then your square logo. Now, let's talk about square logos, because that was the last thing we had here. This is your thumbnail. So when people go. And you don't want this to be your standard logo. So when people go to your company page. Let's go back. When people go to your company page, what you want them to do is see a logo. Can't talk and type at the same time. What you want them to do is see a logo that reflects what the showcase page is, not just a bunch of the same logo. And that is the thing that most people make as a mistake. They use their logo and for their thumbnail, and then it doesn't reflect what their company page or what their showcase page is all about. So the other thing that you want to do is create a thumbnail or a little square 50x50 image that people are going to see either on the side of your company page or down underneath. When you expand on a showcase page, it will show you a little thumbnail that that represents your showcase page. And that's the mistake I see most people doing is they just use their logo in both places. And that is not going to guide you in any way, shape or form, in my opinion, to create or it's not really going to drive traffic to your showcase pages. We really want to drive traffic. That's kind of the whole point here is to get more followers and drive more traffic. All right, so that is basically all you have to do to set it up. Have your little image or have your big hero image, have a logo that reflects your company and then have a thumbnail that reflects the page itself. Add your administrators, add a link to a landing page or website that you want and then your 120 character call to action your USP and that's it. So that is in creating the page. Now we're going to talk about actually content marketing strategies. One of the companies that I've seen do this best is HubSpot. They do these series, right, 30 days to better Marketing, and then each day they add a new update. So what they do what HubSpot does very well, and what the HubSpot software does very well is, is help you create editorial calendars. Except that I love HubSpot, but they're really expensive. And that's where I use Oktopost, because Oktopost also has what I consider an editorial calendar. In fact, I was just talking to Valerie earlier before we started, and I said it's so funny because I designed Oktopost in my head five years ago. Now. I don't have the talent or the skills, so I wasn't able to actually create Oktopost. Thank God they did. But in my head, I created something where I could easily have an editorial calendar, where I could put in content, where I could easily move it around, drag and drop it, where I could have a library of content that I could plug in, popular posts of mine, events that I have coming up, where I could have this library of posts that I could just drag and drop, where I needed, where I could create these campaigns. And Oktopost does that entirely for me. Now, of course, you can do that on your own. There are other applications that do that for me. Ease of use is absolutely worth the cost of admission. But you can do this on your own as well. What I'm telling you though, is you've got to create an editorial calendar. Hopefully, especially those of you in marketing, you've got one that you're using already, whether it's your Gmail calendar, or whether it's an Excel calendar that you've created, or whether it's a big old sticky note on the side of your wall in your office where you've got sticky notes on it. I don't care. Create an editorial calendar so you know when there are holidays, so you know what you want to post on those holidays, so that you know when you have events coming up, so that you make sure you get enough coverage before the event, so that you have an idea of what different streams that you're talking to and what kind of content they'd be interested in. An editorial calendar is incredibly important. Now, what kind of information can you share in your company page news feed? Well, you can share updates, of course, you can share images, so you can upload images, you can upload files. That's one of the things I love about LinkedIn. You can actually upload files and then there are several types of different updates that you can do. You can do a basic update that goes out to everyone and then you can do targeted updates that goes out to specific audiences, and then you can even sponsor those updates. I have to say I'm not a giant fan of LinkedIn ads. If I'm going to spend money additionally on social media, I'm either going to spend it on tools like this or on Facebook. But Facebook ads. I'm not a huge fan of LinkedIn ads. I don't see the ROI in them, return on investment in them, except for very Very targeted Developing countries seems to work for that. But this isn't about ads. But sponsored updates is probably the one time I would consider investing money on LinkedIn other than my paid account and something like what HubSpot does, having very targeted, very strategic updates, then you might choose to sponsor them. If you are going to pay for an update, if you are going to pay to have an update seen to more than just your regular audience, then you are definitely going to want to put a call to action in that update. So whatever you share and then decide to sponsor later, whatever you share, you are going to want to put a call to action. For more information like this, make sure to follow this page so that you can in fact get more followers, get more interaction now. So here's an example of a post I've already done. What I love about company pages and showcase pages is you get analytics. So how many impressions did it make, how many clicks, how many interactions and what kind of engagement so you can see what's working and what's not working. Well, if something's working, do more of that. What works really well, doing stuff with other influencers. So here I am with Mike, right? He, he's got a large following. We got more interaction with that one. So you can go through and actually look at this and get a better idea of what's working. And then of course you can see in your analytics right here as well. Just kind of an outlay what that looks like. That's where I can decide if I want to sponsor an update or if I maybe want to target an update in my already targeted list. This is already a targeted list, but I can further target my update, but that's going to depend entirely on followers. So let me back up a little bit so you know what I'm talking about. This is true for both company pages and showcase pages. This is incredibly powerful. When you start to see the analytics for targeted updates, you'll notice they really work. So when I share an update here, which is just what you would do anywhere. So when I share an update, I have the option of sharing it with all my followers or I can even further target my audience. This part is free. Now the downside is I have to have at least 100 followers in each targeted audience for this to work. And that's where most people have the fail. Because showcase pages are relatively new and people aren't having hundreds and hundreds of followers on their showcase pages yet. But that will come. It's just a matter of time. But you can target your updates and this is true of your company pages and your showcase pages by company size, by industry, by function, by seniority, by geography, and even by language. How cool is that? So maybe I'm targeting legal professionals on LinkedIn and maybe I want to go visit Spain. So if I had at least 100 legal professionals who spoke Spanish who were following my page, I could send an update specifically to them and I could even write it in Spanish. Or I could upload a picture specific Spanish, or I could add a link to a YouTube video specifically in Spanish. Notice how this is very Pinteresty looking or it looks a lot like Twitter's new feed or a lot like Facebook's new feed, right? That's not a coincidence. There's a reason that LinkedIn is finally realizing that visual marketing is very, very important. Speaking of visual marketing, my friend at Katarina Walter, you've got to read her book, right? I think it's the power of visual marketing. Very important, not only in Facebook and Twitter, but on LinkedIn. So you need to have something that's visually arresting, that's going to grab people's attention. That's what it comes down to. When we talk about content marketing strategies. Obviously this is not new. You've already heard this. If you've listened to someone talk about Twitter marketing strategies or Facebook marketing strategies. In fact, you can also pay for updates on Twitter and Facebook as well. That's where LinkedIn got it from. And they have analytics as well. So it's, it's not new to you probably. But just the fact that you can actually do this on LinkedIn, that might actually be news to you when it comes to. And I've already talked about Oktopost a little bit and I don't want to hard sell because I'm a huge fan of these guys. But a few things that Oktopost can do, and I'm just talking about LinkedIn, of course you can share content on Facebook, on Twitter, on your G Content company page. They've got this cool. Depending on what program you get, if you do a lot of webinars, they can actually see if your tweets are converting. I mean, there's all kinds of really, really cool stuff, but above and beyond. So with Oktopost, you can do LinkedIn group searches and you can post to specific groups. And yes, there are other posting and scheduling tools that do this. I just find that Oktopost is so easy. I love the Chrome Extension, the Oktopost Chrome extension. It's just so easy. I love, love, love, love it. You can do Very tailored posting for LinkedIn. So I have probably 30 or 40 company pages and showcase pages, my own and my clients, and then a bunch of groups. And I can tailor exactly what content is going where and then of course I can schedule it to go out in a day, in a week, in a month, or on a recurring basis. It does post to both company page and showcase pages. Again, other tools are beginning to do that too, but for a while they were the only ones posting to showcase pages. You can do multiple employees, it depends on what package you have, but you can do multiple employee posting to LinkedIn groups. So if you do have a bigger corporation and you get their enterprise package, which is still extremely affordable, other people can post to different groups and company pages. I love their library. The fact that they have that message library and that you can set up an auto posting through that message library or just onesie twosie, it's incredibly, incredibly powerful. They have social inbox so you can go and see where people have shared your tweets, liked or shared your updates on LinkedIn, et cetera. So that's all in one place too. And then as I was just mentioning about the lead generation with. I know it's not just for GoToWebinar, but that's the one I use. They also sync with Marketo. I think with Salesforce, they're really engaging. I'm trying to get them to sync with Nimble. I think that would be like the world's best package. Having both Oktopost and Nimble together on one dashboard. Woohoo. Are you listening, John? And of course they have fantastic analytics. LinkedIn has analytics too. But here's the thing. You want to do it all in one dashboard in a couple clicks or do you want to go to this? You already saw how hard it was to find and go to your different showcase pages. It's so much easier when it's all in one place. Anyway, that's my sales pitch for Oktopost, and I don't think it's a sales pitch because I think they're awesome and I love them. Again, with targeted updates, that's just the ability to find individual targeted audiences. But you have to have at least 100 people in your specific targeted audience for this to work. So it works great for LinkedIn, it works great for IBM. I think HubSpot has enough people now in its showcase pages even for me. And certainly I know for a lot of you on the call, there might not be enough. There might not be enough. You might not have enough followers yet, but don't worry, it's coming. These are early, early days. Remember in the beginnings of Twitter, I can't tell you how long I only had like 2 or 300 followers. And then I think 2010 is when it all exploded and everyone started using Twitter. So it's early days. Just create it. If you create it, they will come, right? Feel the dreams then finally, sponsored updates. I've talked about them a little bit. To sponsor an update, you can just write an update and then either click on sponsor update from your actual homepage or you can go into analytics and sponsor an update from there. You have to pay for it. It's expensive. Where you can sponsor an Update for like 5 bucks a day. On Twitter, I'm sorry, on Facebook, you're probably looking to get any kind of coverage at all. You're probably looking at 25 to 50 bucks. So it's expensive. It does work. It definitely works. But you have to decide your roi and then how do you track it? Did we actually convert those people into a customer? Because that's what it's all about. If you are going to sponsor an update, please put a call to action in there. Follow our company page, Follow our showcase page for more information like this. At least get them to interact. At least get them to follow you to follow your page. If you're going to pay 25 to 50 bucks to sponsor an update, we already looked at analytics. Do more of what works. Here's a campaign that I did. 3,000 impressions, 11 clicks, one interaction, no followers. Was it worth it? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. Right here. What I want to get for my money is more followers so that I can then send them information, information for free later. So that's just some analytics there. Just to kind of give you an idea of how that works. And we already talked about that. And then finally. And then we'll go to questions marketing your page. So all of this depends on actually having followers. So let's talk about different ways that you can market your page. Well, you can put your page URL, it'll be LinkedIn.com companycompanyname. You can put that in your email signature. You can mention if you're a content marketer and you do a lot of webinars like this one, you can mention the page in the webinar. You can put updates for the webinar on your page and make people go to your page in order to sign up for it. Make sure to put your company page on your business card. Make sure to share your Company page on other social platforms like on Twitter. Drive people to your LinkedIn company and showcase pages on Facebook. Let people know about your company and showcase pages. Just not every tweet you do or update you do, but let people know it's out there. I did Email campaigns, which we'll talk about just a minute, are great for getting people to follow your company page. Consider ads. Maybe not on LinkedIn because they're expensive, but pay per click ads or Facebook ads. That's what my Linked prospecting program. We drive almost all of our traffic to our webinars and our company pages through Facebook ads. Go figure. Just remember, it has to be what's in it for them? Don't just put an ad up there. Ooh. Join our company page. Okay, why? Join our company page where we have information on LinkedIn that will help you close more business in less time or something like that. Within LinkedIn itself. Add your company to your experience section. Make sure that your company page and in your actual personal profile is linked and that's just a matter of going into experience and then just starting to type in your company name. A drop down image will appear. Find your company name, hit enter and the logo will attach. And then people can go to your company pages by clicking on the logo. Make sure that you share your company page in updates. You can even send messages to specific people in your audience right here. So you can send specific as a general update or let people in your groups know about your company page. Be very careful with that. That's a little bit too promotional. Y you don't want to get swammed, but you can let individuals know. Hey, I know you're a lawyer in New York City. I thought you might be interested in my page that I've created specifically for lawyers in New York City who are interested in social marketing. It's not a group, it will just be one or two pieces of information a day that will show up in your stream. We need no effort from you other than if you like the post to hit like or share it. Feel free to share it, but we just want to be another resource of useful information for you, et cetera, et cetera. So you can do that in a private message to people you're connected to personally on LinkedIn or you can pay for an ad. I'm just not a huge fan of that as you can imagine. There's a company page plugins if you go to developer.LinkedIn.com plugins it will guide people to your company page. There's not a plugin as far as I can tell for showcase pages yet. But hey, at least you're getting them to your company page. Now you can tell them to join your showcase page. And I said before, add your showcase page link to your email signature. And then one thing I love is this email campaign idea. One of the things that we did with link prospecting and who does a really good job with this is Jill Konrath. Actually she does it for her group, but she does a beautifully branded message that goes out to her email list letting them know about her group. Well, in this case it would be what we did was a well branded newsletter that went out to our email group about our company page, about our link prospecting company page with a big old click here button that was live so you could click on that and then it would take you right to the company page and then a call to action. Make sure to join us. So absolutely consider using your existing email list to let people know about your different showcase pages and your company page and tell them why they should follow it and then make it easy for them. Put the link right in there, please. All right, we talked about that. Okay, so yeah, that's basically everything. Probably more than you needed to know about company pages. We're going to go to questions in just a moment. But as we wrap up here, think about what content you have that you can just repurpose. Like in your company page. You're about us, but you might want to customize it a little bit. What needs to be newly created? Probably your hero image and the whopping 200 character showcase page description. You may just repurpose your existing logo. You might want to create new thumbnails for your showcase pages. Get really clear on who your target audience is. Actually that should be number one and how you will target them. Play around with once you have enough followers, your targeted updates and sponsored updates. Maybe LinkedIn often, you've probably seen it. LinkedIn often will give you like a $50 credit to try advertising. I recommend using sponsored updates as your effort. Use that money for sponsored updates and then think about different ways that you can market your page. Are you going to go ahead and just put that on your email signature? Are you going to put it on your business card? You don't even use business cards anymore. All of the things that I just talked about. Are you going to send an email out to your list? So that's what to consider if you want to try out Oktopost. I've actually got a deal with them. So your first month is Always free. And actually you'll get your second month for half off. And yes, I think they give me money for that. I'm actually not sure if you want to try it out for a month and a half for free. It's app.Oktopost.com signup. Vivica and I will just go ahead and leave that up and let's go ahead and answer some questions.
48:21
Valerie
Thanks for an incredible webinar. There were so many insightful tips and actionable advice that we learned on Showcase pages and I hope everyone that was with us really enjoyed it. So we have quite a few questions for you to answer. The first one is what is the name of the ebook that you mentioned at the very beginning of the webinar?
48:40
Viveka von Rosen
Sure. And I'll go ahead and put that in the chat box for you. And in fact, what I will do is, is give you. Here we go. I have that here. I'm actually just going to put the link in there for you. I think that's it right there. It is. The Sophisticated marketer's guide to LinkedIn. The sophisticated marketer's guide to LinkedIn special editions has a lot of really cool stuff on it. Oh, there's that noise again. I'm going to go ahead.
49:11
Valerie
Sorry, I'll mute it on my end.
49:13
Viveka von Rosen
No, it's fine. No, because you gotta ask me questions. Don't even worry about it. So there you go. If you want the Sophisticated marketer's guide to LinkedIn, go ahead and just double click on that link right now. It'll open up and then I can continue to take questions.
49:26
Valerie
Okay, great. So the next question is, do Showcase pages break the new Canadian anti spam laws?
49:34
Viveka von Rosen
Good question. No, they in and of. That's an excellent question. In and of themselves, they don't because people still have to kind of opt in if they want to get that news from you. They have to follow your page and it is still on the LinkedIn platform. It's not going to go into their email per se. Now, letting people know about your Showcase page also shouldn't be against the Canadian anti spam laws. However, if you have people on your list that didn't sign up and double opt in for your list, that goes against the icann, the Canadian spam laws, by the way. And I actually wrote an article on it because it just pisses me off. And this really does go against the Canadian spam laws. Just because someone connects with you on LinkedIn doesn't mean they signed up for your freaking newsletter. That really goes against Spam laws in Canada and I imagine they're going to crack down in the us. This is completely aside from Showcase pages. Just because you connect with someone on LinkedIn, do not automatically put them into your newsletter list. They agreed to connect with you on LinkedIn and that is all. So anyway, that was my. I'll get off my soapbox now.
50:57
Valerie
I think it's incredible that you have that much knowledge about the Canadian anti spam laws.
51:02
Viveka von Rosen
I was just in Canada. That's the only reason I.
51:05
Valerie
That could be why. So the next question, I think you might have touched on this, but just for those who weren't able to hear your response, we know that you can't delete a LinkedIn post, but is it possible to delete a Showcase page? And if so, what is the best way to remove one?
51:22
Viveka von Rosen
Okay, so you can actually remove a post. I'm sorry, I didn't make that clear. You can absolutely remove a post. Let me show you. What you can't do is remove a page. It's kind of like LinkedIn. It's kind of like Hotel California. You can, you can check out, but you can never leave. Right now you can, I imagine LinkedIn will figure it out. So any post that you write, you can absolutely delete anytime you want. You write a post and you're like, ah, I got a spelling. I did that just the other day. I did a post as an example and I had it for a client and there was a spelling mistake in it. Oops. So we just deleted it and started over. Of course, when you delete it, you delete the analytics for it as well. But you can absolutely delete a post. No problem there. And thank you. I didn't actually cover that before. What is harder to do and what I've been unable to do, and I do have connections on LinkedIn is I have been unable to get them to delete my showcase pages that I don't want. So to do that though, go to the help Center. So under LinkedIn, go under your picture there, go to the help center, start typing in like showcase page or anything you want. You just, basically you're just. See, I even spelled it wrong. Basically you're just trying to get this contact us button to turn blue and then ask them. You put in another email address. The issue is company pages. The subject is, can you please delete this showcase page for me? And then just say I have a spelling error on my showcase page. Or I made this inadvertently. I didn't know what I was doing. Can you please remove it for me, hopefully, maybe eventually they're going to be able to do that. Give it a try. Give it a try. I could have just had lazy people who didn't really want to help. So that's entirely possible.
53:05
Valerie
Hopefully for those people creating one, hopefully it won't be too difficult to remove one just in case. And the next question is actually a really good question. If you post an Update to your LinkedIn company page and to your LinkedIn showcase page, will people who follow both get duplicate updates? And if so, is there any way to avoid this?
53:26
Viveka von Rosen
Yes, they will. Actually. What happens is when you post to a showcase page, it will actually come through your company page when it shows up on someone's stream. And this actually I laugh here because this is one of my clients. So it was doing S2 S2 and they really hated the logo showing up twice like that. So now they only post from their company page. But when you post from a showcase page, it will actually show up on someone's tweet stream with both logos showing up here. So basically I would say post unique content in each place, don't double post. That's an excellent question. Thank you so much for asking that. I'm trying to see if anyone's done. The problem is most people don't have showcase pages yet.
54:14
Valerie
That's definitely an excellent question. And I think it encourages people to really create unique content and not just post everything twice on their company page and on their showcase page, but really to create unique messaging for each one.
54:27
Viveka von Rosen
Yeah.
54:28
Valerie
So the next question you spoke a little bit about making sure to pick out the correct company page because it impacts the URL. And one of the audience members asked, will the URL actually impact SEO?
54:40
Viveka von Rosen
Yes. Yeah. Google loves the showcase page. What's nice is you get on Google and you find someone's showcase page and it's horrible. Right. You go to their showcase page on LinkedIn or their personal profile for that matter, and it's horrible. They haven't put up a header yet and the description is terrible and they've never added content to it. And you just look and you know it's a shell. You know, they threw it up because they read an article on Social Media examiner and then they never went any further with it or they heard a webinar from me. The nice thing about showcase pages is it's. There's your image, which is important, so you definitely want that image. And then it's a 200 character USP. So unique sales proposition or a 200 character description. So it's really not hard to create a showcase page and then you add a little content to it and hopefully you use something like Oktopost or you just physically manually post to your showcase page once or twice. You can do it daily, once or twice a week, just so it looks good even before you have followers. But it's really easy to create what looks like a vibrant looking showcase page even if you don't even have any followers yet. So there's kind of no excuses. But yes, that was a really long answer. Yes, Google loves anything LinkedIn, but it certainly loves LinkedIn.com company, company name, it absolutely loves that. So it's going to show that up half the time before the actual website shows up. So make sure it's good.
56:14
Valerie
I definitely second your recommendation of using Oktopost for LinkedIn for social media marketing. The next question is that a lot of people were upset about the fact that LinkedIn removed the recommendations from, you know, what's going on with recommendations? Where can people post them now? Do you think that's a feature that they'll eventually introduce to showcase pages?
56:38
Viveka von Rosen
Yeah, you know, it's interesting because when I was talking to the guys over at in fact David Schneider from their small business department, he was my guest on the LinkedIn chat the day they did that was April 14th, and I'm like, dude, you're in so much trouble. So what LinkedIn told them was that there was going to be a way of exporting those recommendations. Well, we never saw that. It never happened and then they were gone. As with all things online, I hope that all of our company recommendations are living somewhere in a server somewhere and at some point LinkedIn will find a way to turn that back on for our showcase pages. But I'm not terribly hopeful about it. That was a big mess up if you ask me, because it seems like they could have created even just another tab to put recommendations in that. Yes, I think LinkedIn really kind of messed up with that issue. You've got to have recommendations. You have to have that crowd sourced opinion. They've got ranking on personal profiles now. Why wouldn't they have recommendations or something like that on company pages too? You can ask me.
57:49
Valerie
I agree. I really hope they bring them back. I know a lot of people would be extremely happy because customer testimonials are one of the best ways to really show other people that your product is successful.
58:04
Viveka von Rosen
Oh, I was going to say one thing you can do, of course, is if you want. I don't think I have one right now. It's dropped down. But you can always put a customer testimonial as an update with their permission, of course. One of the things that you can do with that is you can pin updates to the top. I mean, they literally call it pinning. So, like Pinterest all over again. Why isn't this working? Linked into. I'll show you what I'm talking about here. There we go. So when you create an update on LinkedIn, you can actually pin it to the top. So you could. So you just click pin to the top. So you could put a recommendation from a client, you know, even put their picture up there and then pin it to the top if you wanted to do that. You can only pin one thing to the top at a time is the unfortunate part. But yeah, I guess that's one workaround since we lost recommendations.
59:00
Valerie
That's a great idea for at least being able to show quotes and recommendations until they bring them back. So we just have one final question. Are showcase pages aimed, do you think, at a particular size organization? Do you think they're primarily for enterprise or can SMBs use them as.
59:21
Viveka von Rosen
Yeah, I think absolutely. SMBs should use them. Enterprise is easier because you've got that name recognition of IBM or Adaptive Insights or AON or whatever. So you've got that name recognition. So it's easier for them to get followers, so it's easier for them to create targeted updates. But absolutely. I'm obviously a very SMB, a very s. Small business, practically a solopreneur. I've only got, I think, four or five employees. I don't know four or five. I've only got three employees and interns, so I'm very, very small. And yeah, I think you can use them. I think the onus is on us not only to create valuable content, but also to let people know it's out there. Because most people don't even know about showcase pages. They barely know about LinkedIn company pages. So the onus is for us not only to let them know that they're out there and they should follow them, but also what the benefit is. It's the wifm, what's in it for them. Right. Or it's wifm. It's what's in it for me, but it's what's in it for them. Why should they follow us? What are they going to get out of it? And so that's really, really important for people to know.
1:00:30
Valerie
Okay, sounds great. So we've reached the end of the webinar and Vivka, I really, really want to thank you again and I'm sure that everyone enjoyed it. Just so much actionable advice. It's always great to hear that. And we're going to wrap it up. And don't worry for anyone who missed it or anyone who didn't hear properly during the webinar. We will be sending out a link to the recording in the coming days so you'll be able to re watch it. We'll just send it out by email shortly.
1:01:00
Viveka von Rosen
Awesome. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I love you guys.
1:01:03
Valerie
Okay, thanks, Vivica.
1:01:05
Viveka von Rosen
Thanks, guys.
