Issue 10: Zero To Hero - Has LinkedIn Replaced Facebook's Organic Reach?
The most overlooked platform for small business would like a word.
A Smart Business Strategy.
Getting your latest message or update out into the world means cutting through the noise. Social media platforms and audience building comes with pros and cons. Let’s discuss.
TL:DR (too long, didn’t read).
LinkedIn is good but email is better.
Make it a priority to build your audience using an email list.
Organise your list using a free tool like Airtable until you outgrow it.
Audiences you reach by email can be engaged by improving your open rate.
Audiences you reach by social media are restricted by each platform’s own need to increase your spend (e.g. you spend money to reach followers).
Social Media Benchmarking.
Test & learn how much it costs on average to boost a post on Facebook that reaches most if not all of your followers. That’s your platform communication cost baseline (excluding your time to create and schedule content).
Test & learn the difference between an organic Facebook post reach compared to when you boost it.
Small business invest a lot of time posting to Facebook and yet very few people see it organically at the time when it is most needed or relevant.
Test & learn how that compares with other platforms’ purely organic reach.
LinkedIn is shaping up to be the social media community for grown-ups, where rude or childish behaviour is less likely to interrupt constructive criticism.
LinkedIn video, especially live streaming, has huge potential.
Successful businesses use one tactic to drive traffic to another source, such as using TikTok clips to drive traffic to YouTube.
Social media noise is expensive to get through to people. Email lists are infinitely more valuable to get through to people.
Previously On Big Pond…
Last week we covered why performance marketing tactics (the final step in your marketing plan) such as PPC and SEO are far more effective in delivering value when you have a strong PR plan in action.
If your mindset is, “we’re too small to think about branding”, reframing it in terms of measuring how famous your business is in your town or region (press and media mentions) can help you overcome that mental obstacle.
Even villages can have a famous local pub or bakery. Or two local entrepreneurs who clean car engines. Don’t defeat yourself in your own mind before you try.
Successful small to medium sized businesses know how to use local and regional PR to grow the fame of their business. You can too.
Create a webpage to host all your media mentions and focus on building it up.
The natural next step is how you get your message out into the world.
Benchmark Your Work.
My thoughts on the power of email are in the summary at the start of this newsletter.
We’re all guilty to some degree of allowing our Facebook habit to override common sense plans.
Treat social media for business as work, not a distraction from work, and be open to constructive criticism. What you do as an individual may not be the best path to growth for a company. We all bring our own bias to every plan we create.
The dopamine hit from Facebook is so powerful that small business persist with it years after organic reach has died.
Sure, your potential and existing customers might see your latest post in about three to six months from now when they specifically search for you. That’s not remotely useful from an audience building perspective. It’s the opposite of useful.
If you’re a business posting on Facebook then it needs to be part of a plan with an end goal such as increasing the number of people you reach, or increasing engagement.
Posting without some kind of measurement and progress comparison is a waste of everyone’s time.
If you’re going to use Social Media to promote your business, know to what degree it is better or worse than the alternatives.
You don’t need money to create a free spreadsheet in Google Sheets and begin benchmarking the impact of your efforts in social. Track what works and what doesn’t. Rinse and repeat. Get a little better every day.
LinkedIn Hides In Plain Sight.
I’m going to take a wild guess that you’re familiar with LinkedIn.
A lot has changed since it was acquired by Microsoft. Before the takeover we all made jokes about it, as that place recruiters would stalk you with out of date CVs you uploaded and forgot about back in the day.
You might check in once a year but that was about it.
Enter Microsoft. The demise of Facebook (as a source of organic traffic), combined with Microsoft’s vision (to create a social media community worthy of your time) has radically changed things.
How exactly, you might ask.
💡 Discover Inspiration: If you’re passionate about your career, LinkedIn makes it easy to find other likeminded people and experts you can follow. You don’t have to connect. Many people allow you to follow them and read their insights.
🎨 Creator Friendly: Creator profile option allows you to highlight content you publish in a much more user friendly way than Facebook ever did.
👀 Company Page Visibility: Easy to update company pages with your logo, with a clear link to it from your own individual profile page. Again, much better than how your personal Facebook page doesn’t help to showcase your business page. That sounds obvious when you write it down and yet SMEs keep posting on Facebook and tell me they don’t update their LinkedIn content - or even have a company page! Yikes.
🏆 LinkedIn Recommendations: Business reviews on sites like TrustPilot are helpful but don’t forget about your colleagues and co-workers. If the people that work for you have great recommendations (testimonials) then your company looks like it employs great people. That’s often a factor in deciding who to do business with. You can’t hide employees and other staff from the internet! They should be your biggest advocates.
🔁 Content Engagement Options: Slides can be uploaded to visually make a point. So too can videos up to 10 mins or so. Beyond that you can enable Livestreaming which is my current favourite choice as it removes the need for editing.
🧪 See What Works: LinkedIn’s most viral and engaged content is often shown in your newsfeed and while it may not apply directly to your industry, you can learn a lot by looking at what naturally grabbed people’s attention this week. You cannot say the same about Facebook or Instagram where those platforms are entirely designed to get you to spend money, or else reach hardly anyone.
The most shocking discovery I’ve made to date on LinkedIn is how superior it is for lead generation with cold audiences when you use video.
Publishing a five to ten minute edited video every day, Monday to Friday, for two weeks had more quality lead impact from people who don’t have a clue who I am than any other method at the same resource level (time, money, effort).
Yes, LinkedIn wants to make money. But unlike Facebook it hasn’t totally strangled organic reach to death. With the right plan you can absolutely build your own audience and reach people interested in your topic of choice.
We’ll cover LinkedIn ads another day. That’s a whole other ballgame.
Consistency Of Your Company Identity.
As I’ve written before, LinkedIn and Facebook company pages carry entity SEO value. That might change in the future but for now it’s what semantic experts have tested to be true.
Often LinkedIn taglines and bios are the afterthought of afterthoughts!
Here’s a simple Entity SEO scoring exercise.
Replace the bio lines in italics below with your own bio lines from those sites, and compare to determine how easily Google will understand what you are and what you do. From a brand or fame perspective, ask yourself how memorable the wording is.
Company Name: VisitScotland
LinkedIn bio line: Our Scotland, Our People.
Twitter bio line: Scotland’s national tourist board. Share with us using #VisitScotland or #ScotlandIsCalling! Also @VisitScotland on Instagram.
Facebook bio line: VisitScotland is Scotland's national tourist board & we want to showcase Scotland to the world!
YouTube bio line: Subscribe to our channel for an awe-inspiring selection of Scotland videos from all across the land, from our spellbinding islands to our iconic cities.
Instagram bio line: Share your Scotland with the world! Use #VisitScotland or #ScotlandIsCalling to give us permission to repost on our social media channels. go.visit.sc/eFE
ProTip: if you want to improve your visibility in Google, make it easier for Google to work out what you are and what you do. Especially if you want your Google Knowledge Graph to appear.
A great copywriter can make it memorable as well as informative.
I love a great tagline as much as the next writer. It doesn’t have to be at the expense of your commercial growth. If you use social media to promote your business, understand that consistency of branding and bios help Google.
Everything you do in SEO, if it is to create value, needs to help machine learning better understand why you might be a relevant search result to a query.
News
Ayrshire: January business news roundup from the Chamber of Commerce - LINK
Glasgow: Loganair has introduced a new £30,000 community grant scheme dedicated to supporting local renewable energy projects - LINK
Dundee: Meet the family-run car repairs firm aiming to fill a gap in the Dundee market - LINK
Edinburgh: Newtongrange bakery wins World Championships pie awards - LINK
Deadline for entries for the StartUp Awards National Series is 28 February - LINK
Scottish National Investment Bank investment to help Highland Coast Hotels deliver sustainable hospitality - LINK
Mark Ritson: Good purpose, bad purpose. Marketers shouldn’t oversimplify the arguments - LINK
AdAge: Why M&M’s Ordered A Mascot Makeover - LINK
US Talk Show Host Making Fun Of M&M’s Mascot Makeover [Video] - LINK
Pi Datametrics’ Jon Earnshaw discusses how to boost your SEO strategy in 2022 [Video] - LINK
Tech SEO geeks get excited as Google introduces a new robots tag - LINK
Googlers discuss all of the changes to best practise PPC, and what Google ad account structure should look like in 2022 [Video] - LINK
And Finally…
Successful people and companies do the hard things to create competitive advantage.
Even at a local level, how people feel about your products or services could change within a year. What could you do differently to encourage more people to use your business?
It’s exactly when things are going well that it is hardest to find the motivation and budget to innovate.
The more often you spend time learning about where technology is headed, the easier it becomes to see what could potentially disrupt your own business and industry.
Who would have thought fitness classes over Zoom video would become a thing? Or that cashierless checkouts would come to Aldi?
Gerd Leonhard is one expert to guide you on this journey to Tomorrow’s World.
Until next time - good luck!
Andrew @ Big Pond
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