Meet Wayne Breitbarth
I'm still, as in three years ago, helping folks, organizations, companies understand how to use LinkedIn better. I know the site is confusing. It has a ton of power. And that's where, you know if it was easy, people would need me but it's not. It's complex. It's confusing. The objectives for people change so they don't know how to use it. And so I'm still in that space of helping people understand how to take the world's largest database, which now has almost 700 million and put it to use for them.
Are there new rules to how you use LinkedIn now or are businesses jumping on board? Because everyone's online now, what do you see happening?
So it's interesting because I do think there is more recognition of virtual tools like LinkedIn. Because virtual is something that like sales teams, especially sales teams have been at home, not able to go to networking, not able to go visit customers. And so they've had to find a way to stay in contact with their existing customers. Start some new prospecting balls rolling and I've got more business owners since COVID hit reaching out to me from years ago when they saw me speak way back in the day and say I think it's finally time for my sales guys to understand this crazy thing. And even me, I should understand this better. So those kinds of openings are happening.
So what are some of your top tips or some of the top trends you're seeing specific for companies?
I think especially when it comes to COVID that posting and sharing updates about what your company is up to and things going on has been hotter than ever. That people are now getting more comfortable with the posting process and starting to understand that there is an algorithm and that they have to play, let's call it or work the algorithm. I think that's something that people are learning or have learned. They've also learned the importance of having a better profile and company page than they probably did because they're getting more views. People are viewing profiles, because it's something you can do online. And so I think that improving profiles, improving company pages and understanding what a good post is seems to be the focus of a lot of the conversations that I’ve been having.
Is there a framework or a formula for what creates a good post?
Yeah, there is, and it boils down to understanding the algorithm. And how much organic reach LinkedIn is going to give you. So it's as simple as this. There are several things you can post you can post a document, you can post a link, you can post a video, you can post a text only. Here's the way LinkedIn looks like the algorithm is working currently, they do like polls because they're brand new. Whenever something is new on LinkedIn, they give it more organic reach. They like videos. And I don't mean videos that go to YouTube or Vimeo as they do not like those. But organically uploaded videos perform well. Documents perform well. Links perform the least well, text only will actually perform better than a link and it boils down to this. LinkedIn does not want you sending their users off site, if you can avoid it. Now, that being said people like you and I, we like to get people to visit our website. And so that's the lowest organic reach that you're going to get that being said, do you still do it, you bet you do it, we still do it. But what you want to try to do, in all these cases, especially if you're going to do a link to a website, or a blog post, or something like that, is you got to work on getting your engagement up. And that typically means this that you need to get some folks in your organization or if you're a real small company, some friends, too, that are going to engage in your posts, especially in the first hour.
What about the company pages? What I'm seeing right now on LinkedIn is very heavy with the individual posting content and not so much content coming from...
