Welcome to episode 214. Due to time constraints, this will be a much shorter episode than normal but I did want to focus on company pages and specifically the issues that I have with them.

But first.....

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

• WikiLeaks publishes identities and information about ICE employees amid intensifying anger

LinkedIn Kudos - My thoughts

The day after I published last weeks episode, I got the new kudos feature (and the Q code, see below).

Having played with Kudos for a while, I'm not that impressed.

• The graphics are truly awful. Who do LinkedIn employ to do this stuff?
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• It's purely an activity, a post so there is nothing permanent about it. It doesn't show on your profile and there it's not searchable.
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• I haven't seen many Kudos posts, my guess is that it will be largely ignored and fizzle out.

I also got the new QR code feature

• This is pretty useless until it's full rolled out to all users.
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• Once the above has happened it can make connecting easier when you meet someone. People often say they can't find me on the app (there are 3500 Mark Williams'!) so it would be handy to simply let them scan my Q code
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• Could this be useful for events? I sense it might be but I haven't quite worked out how! Any ideas?

This not only went viral but it's also a really good post that asks a great question. I like to think I make some good videos but this guy is a real pro (and a listener to the show)

Company Pages

This subject came back into my view this week when Tony Restell posted this;

Can you believe it?!!!

The more I thought about, the more I realised that this was a major weakness of the job posting and company page process on LinkedIn. So I decided to try it out myself!

Firstly I took one of my fake/testing accounts and changed their employment to my company on LinkedIn. This has always been a frustration for many of us - literally anyone can say they work for your company!

The next stage was to try posting a job

As you can see, I made it clear that this was a fake vacancy!

The interesting thing was that I was able to use the email address associated to the personal profile so all job applicants would come to that emails inbox!

I then set the PPC rate and bingo, the job posted!

The only caveat is that despite the above, I actually couldn't find the job on LinkedIn! Could this be because they have blocked the ad?

That is possible but I suspect it is actually just a current glitch with job postings.

I also had an interesting conversation this week with someone who was advocating the use of their company page

"What are you getting from your page" I asked. "We get a high number of page impressions" was the answer.

"And what do they give you?"  pause...... "It's good brand exposure"

Is it really?

Company page posts gain almost zero engagement - they often attract Likes (mainly from employees) but very few posts attract comments. If you get comments, you know for a fact that someone is paying attention to your post, in addition it gives you the opportunity to build a relationship with them. It's the main reason to post and by far the most important metric - Likes are 'two a penny', Shares simply don't work and page impressions are a meaningless figure (how do we even know they are true?).

If you can prove that your posts (updates) are sending a decent number of people to your website. I don't mean LinkedIn per se, I mean specifically updates. If they are then your activity has some value but otherwise, without comments you are achieving very little (apart from showing that your page is active).

Why don't people comment?

• People on LinkedIn are much more interested in engaging with people
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• Company page posts are usually promotional and less engaging
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• Even when you do comment on a company page post, it's highly unlikely you will get a response because the administrators are not alerted (unless they are on the page)
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• Have you ever @mentioned a company in one of your posts?......What response did you get?

Mentioned in this episode:

This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.