This episode was recorded just before the New Year, but couldn’t be released until now, so don’t be weirded out with the mentions of upcoming holiday travel 🙂  It’s definitely worth a listen!

Show resources:

Here’s the Pages Resource that Ting mentioned

LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course

Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you’d like AJ to cover.

Transcript:

LinkedIn Pages are inextricably connected to LinkedIn Ads. And we’re talking to the head of Pages today about the newest features, and you’re not gonna want to miss it.

0:14
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads show. Here’s your host, AJ Wilcox.

0:23
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. On this episode, I interview Ting Ba, LinkedIn’s Head of their Pages product. I’ve been excited about this one for a while. Since pages are so crucial to advertising, I thought you’d love to hear the most recent updates on the product. First off, I have to apologize for the sound quality on this interview. Ting is amazing. And she’s also incredibly busy. And we couldn’t make this happen while I was there in person. So as soon as I found out that she could do it over zoom without good audio equipment. I said screw it. I’m happy to record however, we could make this happen.

0:56
So let’s hit it. Hi, everyone. I’m super excited to introduce you to Ting Ba. She is the group Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn over Pages. Ting, first of all, welcome. Thanks for coming on. And we’d love to hear about you tell us about you personally at work, anything you’d want to share.

1:13
Thanks, AJ so much for having me happy to introduce myself. So like he says, I’m a group Product Marketing Manager for LinkedIn Pages. I’ve been with LinkedIn for actually just over a year. It’s crazy how time flies by. And in my role, I lead Product Marketing for LinkedIn Pages, and reallyall the different kind of organic opportunities a business could take advantage of on our platform. And I have to say, I truly, genuinely love my job. I get to really help businesses of all sizes all over the world find success on our platform, which is really very gratifying for me, because I come from a background of, you know,family that’s largely small business owners and so very personally gratifying. Just in terms of me, personally, you know a bit about me, I live in the California Bay Area, in Paul Alto, with my husband, and we’ve got two little girls, Audrey and Sophie. Audrey is one, Sophie is four. And yeah, just very blessed to be able to, you know, do a job I love and have a family that I get to hang out with after work.

2:09
That’s awesome. And you’re in the right place because you are leading a product that we all use. And I’m sure love. And so thanks, first of all, for all your hard work on your product. As many of you may know, LinkedIn Pages are inextricably linked to advertising. So that’s my interest in having Ting come on and talk about this. But there was also a recent quarterly update that went out. And so stay tuned here at the end, we’ll get to talk a little bit more about that. I think foundationally we really have to start with what our LinkedIn Pages give us the very basics of how we should understand how this fits into our roles to our companies to our marketing mix.

2:47
Yeah, AJ, that’s such a great question. I think it’s really important to start with something foundational like that, which is essentially what is the LinkedIn Page? So really, quite simply, a LinkedIn Page is what I would consider to be a business’s most Important online asset. It’s essentially your foundation in the world’s professional community. It’s a place where businesses of all sizes really all over the world can share their mission, their vision, their values, and also promote their products and services with a professional community. It’s actually the first place that LinkedIn members go so they can learn more about your brand, what you stand for, and why they should do business with you or work for you, for that matter. So I would say actually, in the same way that a LinkedIn profile offers this unique value to members to grow themselves. A LinkedIn Page offers this unique value to organizations.

3:35
And you did mention in there about kind of these employment opportunities as well as promoting the company. Can you share a little bit about how how companies can go about buoying up your page to help it look better for recruiting versus trying to look good as a company and maybe trying to get business out of that?

3:54
Yeah, it’s a great question is, you know, kind of the way that you would strategize corporate branding versus talent branding. It’s a great question. If you’re really focused on talent branding, there are things you can just do completely for free, without spending any dollars on our platform to help showcase your talent brand. Some things I’ve seen some brands do a good job of is they spotlight their current employees and really showcase, you know, what their passions are for working for the company, but also by their passions outside of work, I think spotlighting employees is a really great way to humanize your brand and show your true talent potential. But in terms of corporate brand, there’s a whole bunch of things that you can do with your page to really showcase what your company is all about. There’s some of the features that I’ll definitely talk to you as we talk about what recently launched, but some ideas that I have are off the top of my bat is just you know, leveraging video, right, or potentially leveraging document uploads to showcase the best of your brand. With document uploads. You can upload PDFs, PowerPoints, and Word docs to showcase perhaps your menu of services or customer testimonials. With video, video is just really taken off in our platform. You know, it’s actually the fastest growing content type, completely free to use, and members really engage with it. So those are just some ways of how you can use some of our features to really better promote your corporate brand.

5:08
That’s fantastic. So let’s say there’s someone out there who does not currently have a a business’s company page, or sorry, I keep calling a company page, we should call them organizational pages. What would you tell someone? Why should someone go obviously, who isn’t an advertiser? Why should someone go and set up a page on LinkedIn? And how should they think about filling it out and making the most of it?

5:31
That’s a really common question that I get AJ. Oftentimes, people ask like, well, that’s great you’re sharing all this with me, but why should I care? Like, why should I actually put the time and effort into creating a LinkedIn Page? So, I can answer this question by just kind of taking a step back and sharing with you more about the LinkedIn platform.

5:49
So as you know, LinkedIn is a professional community. And generally speaking, we’ve seen some incredibly strong growth when it comes to the number of members that are actually joining our platform. In fact, as of today, we have over 645 million professionals that are actually on our platform. And I also want to mention that for the third year in a row, LinkedIn has been votedas the most trusted social media platform, which I think is really important in this day and age. Lastly, I want to also share that last year, an independent research agency actually put together this report, pretty cool, to understand the different mindsets that consumers have when they log into different social media platforms. And what the research showed is thatwhen people log into LinkedIn, they actually log inwith an intent and a mindset to learn and to actually look for opportunities versus when they’re on other platforms, they’re actually really more focused on passive entertainment. And I think it’s actually really important to note that because what this means is that this is an incredibly unique and powerful opportunity for businesses of all sizes, to really get in front of a growing professional audience that’s actually paying attention and engaged from the moment they login. And considering that the LinkedIn Page is really the first place people will look when they want to learn more about you want to perform means that you should really invest the effort upfront to set it up and keep it maintained.

7:06
That’s perfect. I love it. What would you say to someone who is, let’s say, marketing manager, they know they have five different channels that they need to manage? Why should they come to their LinkedIn page and share content specifically?

7:21
Yeah, it’s a great question because we all know that people nowadays, especially in marketing are very time strapped, right, they’re getting pulled in different directions. And people’s attention spans are generally pretty short. And so if you do spend your valuable time on another platform, it really has to be worth your time and attention. And so in order to really influence people that LinkedIn is really a platform or the best again, I kind of go back to those stats around how we have over 645 million professionals on our platform, and that is the most trusted platform actually, of all the social media platforms. I think that trust actually is what really makes it go a long way. I think when you have trust, that means that the messages that you’re hearing are actually landing with you, and actually leaving an impression on you much more so and much more long lasting than if you want a platform where you really can’t trust all the advertisements and all the direct messages you’re hearing. I think trust is inherent to building relationships and so of our platform has it, it’s definitely a place you want to be investing your time in.

8:15
I agree. I love when I go and check out a company. And I see that they’ve shared something today or they shared something yesterday. It shows the lights are on em someone’s home and I tend to trust that brand quite a bit more.

8:26
Yes, exactly. And it’s the trust is definitely a key component. And another thing that I think a lot of brands will immediately recognize once you start investing is that the engagement quality is especially high. You’re not just getting reactions or kind of like you know, your affinity metrics of like impressions and likes, you are actually getting a quality comments from people. Because, as you know, on LinkedIn, you’re not anonymous. Everything’s tied back to professional profile. People go on not only to learn, but they also want to demonstrate that they’re thought leaders are that they’re experts in their professional field. And so you oftentimes can have these really great, engaging quality conversations around topics that people care about. And I think that’s very rewarding, I would think, as a marketing manager, right, to be able to actually engage and build a relationship with the community. I think that’s that that kind of people will engagement is what really we should all be aiming for in marketing.

9:14
I agree, it’s not just an asset you set up once and tick the box. And it’s done. It’s a place to actually spend time and a place to really provide value, I think.

9:22
Yeah, I think it’s really all about the long term value. And I think when you have these kind of quality relationships and conversations being built, that’s where you really have like, I think the framework for a long term, long term success.

9:33
So I remember the days of old where the company page, you really had four things, you could put a logo on it, you could write a paragraph, fill out a few fields, and that was kind of it. Those days are gone. Your LinkedIn page really does more now, what are the types of things that you can now do with with an organization’s page?

9:51
Yes, you’ve been there on the journey with us from the beginning and things I’ve really uh, there’s things have really evolved since then. And so I would love to share with you what you can do with it. Did pagers actually so much. And just to kind of make it a little bit easier to kind of understand the different opportunities, I’ll bring it up into things you can do organically, as well as things you can do through paid solutions. And so in terms of what you can do organically, I’m really proud to share that actually, you can get great organic reach on LinkedIn, which is not super common lately, right? There’s actually no cap to the amount of organic reach you can get. And in fact, we’ve created features to help you maximize your organic reach. And so a couple things I want to highlight that are my favorite features.

10:28
One of them is communities hashtags, which we introduced a couple of months ago. And so with this feature, what you can do is associate your page with up to three different hashtags around topics that you care about. And you can also see real time how many members are following these hashtags. Now, the beauty of this feature is you can actually click into the hashtag conversation feed and kind of just see what people are talking about, see what kind of posts are trending within this hashtag. And you can actually click into the conversation to actually talk to people from the perspective of your organization. Now that to me is one of the most authentic and best organic ways to grow your brand’s awareness is by actually having conversations with people who care about the same topics, but just maybe haven’t heard of your brand. Like, that’s pretty cool.

11:12
And it’s not just the followers that you get to to have. It’s not you’re now getting your brand in front of people who are having real active conversations. That’s a big deal.

11:22
Yeah, exactly. It’s not just your followers is way more broad than that. And you’re still talking to people who care about the same topic because it’s all around a topical hashtag. So completely true.

11:31
Another thing I would highlight as something you really effective you can do organically to increase your reach is a video. I mentioned it earlier, but I’ll say it again, you know, video, it’s, you know, organic video is free use on our platform. And it’s such a fast growing content type. It’s actually five times more likely to generate engagement than just a standard post. And very recently, we also introduced LinkedIn Live, which is essentially live video streaming on our platform. And this has just really taken off on the platform. It actually drives, even compared to regular video, 24 times more engagement, and brands are just really loving all of the engagement that they’re seeing. And so that’s another thing I’d highly recommend is something you can do right now today organically on your page. Now, once you start to really, you know, invest organically in your page to really make sure you’re taking full advantage of all the learnings, what we recommend is that you actually check out your LinkedIn Page analytics, because there’s a robust set of information you can find there. And you’ll really be able to get a sense of who’s visiting your page and have deeper insights into their role, their function, level of seniority, and also what kind of content resonates most with them. And once you get a sense of this target, demographic profile, and like what kind of content you should be sharing, this is where the paid solutions can really come into play and impactful role. We actually have a really strong portfolio of paid solutions that can amplify all of your organic efforts. I’ll just quickly highlight some examples. Sponsored content is a really great example of a paid solution. These are essentially apps that live in our LinkedIn feed. And they include static image, video, and carousel ads. And we actually combined a sponsored content campaign in parallel with a sponsored inmail campaign, which are basically targeted messages you can send to members, you can actually see a two x lift and your overall conversion rate.

13:16
I love those stats of how each of the ad formats really works together to help your overall goal. And that’s something that we can’t see from our side. That’s like, you guys can see it on your side. And so we love it when you share that. Thanks so much.

13:30
Yeah, for sure.

13:32
So you just recently released a new update. This came out on October 14, I believe it was a Tuesday. Oh, 15th. So it was the quarterly update for pages. Can you tell us about what you announced and maybe the effects how we as LinkedIn members, how we should use it, what we should be excited about?

13:53
Yeah, I’m so glad you asked that because we did make a pretty big announcement. We’re super excited about it. I’m happy to talk about you know, what we what we talked about. So, at a high level, what we launched are a series of features that will actually make it easier for organizations to build meaningful professional communities with members. And the first feature that we launched is something called employee notifications. Now, this feature is really exciting. It’s one of its kind. And what it does is it enables brands to transform their employees into brand advocates. And I think this is really important because employees are oftentimes every brands best advocate, right? They work for you. They’re proud to work for you. And they do want to actually talk about the great work they’re doing. But we’ve found that historically, it’s actually pretty hard for any brand to kind of scale this. So that’s why we introduced this new organic feature to make it easier for brands to leverage their employees voices to build meaningful awareness. Now, in terms of like how this should be used by members. The way this works is, if a brand has an important message that they want to have their employees share on their behalf. What they can do is they can actually prompt their employees through a push notification to reshare, that message, the employees will actually get a push notification on their mobile device available on iOS and Android. And they have an opportunity to consider whether or not they actually want to share that with their professional network. And we recommend you know that it’s really something you don’t do more than say once a week as a brand. So you don’t over notify your employees. We actually have a built in guardrails for you can’t use this feature more than once every seven days. So that’s the first feature.

15:28
I love that one. I have to say, I get asked all the time from those who are marketers, obviously, on the ad side, but they’re saying organically, we want to do something with our company, page too, and maybe we don’t have that many followers or when we share it doesn’t get all too much engagement or doesn’t get more than let’s say if the employees themselves shared it. And yeah, this just seems like such a great vehicle to leverage the networks and the networks networks of all of your employees as well as grow your company page. Following, this just feels like a total home run to me.

16:02
Yeah. And AJ, I think you made a good point, because I think it all comes back to what we talked about earlier, which is trust. I think the reason why a lot of brands want to lean on employees to really be brand advocates is because employees are, they’re humans who are trusted within their own professional communities. And I think when you you know, really speak on behalf of a company for the company speaking itself, it lands so much more, right with like, local communities. And so I think it is actually a really powerful feature. And I think I really what I really want to encourage brands to do is really think about the messages that you’re sharing, make sure that they’re ones that you feel are important and are true to your company’s mission versus more short term, you know, kind of messages really make sure that their core to driving forward, you know, I think a more long term message, and again, you can only use this once a week, so make sure whatever message you do pick that it’s something that is a value to a larger community and is more long term thinking.

16:54
And it seems like something that we as, let’s say community managers inside of companies should probably letting employees know, like, hey, just a heads up, you’re probably going to start seeing notifications about the stuff that we as a company care about the most. Do you recommend that kind of a pre messaging strategy, letting them know, before you start sending push notifications?

17:14
That’s such a, that’s such a good insight, actually, that probably giving a heads up to your internal teams wouldbe helpful. So they won’t be as caught off guard or like they won’t find it jarring when they get a notification. And so I actually think that is a really good best practice that and this is a feature you plan to use frequently and right off the bat. But it’s actually really helpful to give people a heads up, so they’re not surprised by it or that they don’t just ignore it.

17:36
That feels really good to me. So that was the first part of the announcement. What were the other two announcements that came out?

17:44
Yes. So along similar lines, right, you can kind of notice a theme around you know, kind of leveraging employees. We also introduced employee kudos and team moments as a way for brands to recognize their employees and their teams on key milestones such as work anniversaries, major Project completions or promotions. And personally, I think that recognizing your teams and your employees, the people who really do the work is important for all organizational cultures. And I believe this is actually going to be key for helping brands, humanize their brands in front of members, and also better showcase their talent brand. And so we’re really excited about having watched that as well.

18:21
Is that an external thing? Or is it Do you have to be working for the company in order to see those announcements,

18:26
So anyone can see those announcements. It’s going to be broadly available on your LinkedIn page. And one thing I do want to mention is that you can only give kudos or share team bonus moments with people who actually work for your company. Meaning like, you can’t recognize a partner today, or you can’t recognize a customer. But I think those are compelling use cases that we might consider in the future. And we’re always looking for feedback. So if there are, you know, optimizations people like to see to this feature or anything I just mentioned, please send them my way because we’re always looking for ways to optimize our product experiences.

18:57
Great, I think this is actually a positive thing that they have to be associated with the company page to be recognized. Because every once in a while we’ll find an employee of a company who didn’t type the company’s name in properly or set up their profile before the company had a page or something, and they’re not associated with it. This feels like a great way to get your employees all on associated to the right company page.

19:20
That’s a good point, AJ, I did not think about that. That is really, really good thinking. Yeah, that absolutely is true. It’s like a forcing function.

19:26
Yeah, totally.

19:29
All right. So anything else you want to share about the kudos feature?

19:33
No, just that we are really excited about it. And definitely, as you see it, you know, being launched to your page, definitely check it out. Again, I think it’s really key to establishing trust and really humanizing your brand.

19:46
Great. And now tell us about the third feature announcement, or the third feature announced?

19:51
Yes, this one I’m really excited about and it really comes I would say just completely based on feedback we’ve gotten from our amazing page admins. They’re always giving us feedback. And one of the top themes I’ve heard in general is like, you know, like, I get the importance of a LinkedIn page, you’ve shared it, I know why you’d create one, just help me, what are the first few steps? You know, I mean, and we’ve created kind of more long form content, or we have playbooks and videos. But, sometimes you just need something that’s really simple in product that can guide you. So that’s exactly what we launched is essentially a pages completion meter. And this is essentially going to be your guide for building out your LinkedIn page. And at LinkedIn, we’ve done the analysis on the back end to really understand what are the top actions every page needs to take to just find like baseline success, and we’ve broken down those steps into a simple guided onboarding process. And so every page is going to have this where they’ll show you how far along you are in the journey, what additional steps you need to take, you’ll get reminders, you’ll be linked to best practices. Super excited about the potential this has for onboarding getting people started in a successful way.

20:52
Well, I’ll tell you I’m super excited about this one, because the more complete a company’s page is, the more effective we are at advertising to those companies, if you have this forcing function where you’re telling someone not necessarily forcing, but you’re telling someone, “Hey, your page is incomplete because you haven’t included your company size, or your industry” or something along those lines, I think this can be great for advertisers.

21:15
Yes, I think so. And I think it’ll be great for anyone who just wants to start promoting themselves on LinkedIn, because there’s a lot of information that people don’t realize, for example, there are six required fields that you need to have in order to have a complete page. And if you’re missing even just one field, your page just will not come up during member search. It’s such a light lift to just, you know, add a logo, add your URL, and so we’ll tell you exactly what you need exactly what you’re missing. And just like that, if you just simply fill out those six fields, complete pages actually get 30% more pageviews. So you’re literally just boosting your traffic by these several steps, and so really excited for the potential as well offer to two pages, both new aswell as existing.

21:57
And to capture that 30% lift you, really, I mean, these aren’t hard questions. It’s not like an exam, you just go and fill out the company’s basic information.

22:05
Like it’s like your logo, you know, the city in which your business operates, your URL, your industry, you know, pretty straightforward things like that. And so all that is not going to be documented in a very clear way directly within the products.

22:19
I love that. So other than logging in and watching things change as they do quite rapidly in LinkedIn world. If someone wants to learn more about pages in general, see the announcements, where do they go? What resources do you have for them?

22:33
Yes, I have a resource that I love to share. It’s our best practices page. My team keeps it updated in as close to real time as possible. The short link is lnkd.in/pagesbp. Quite a mouthful so I’ll repeat that again. It’s lnkd.in/pagesbp. BP for best practices. And if you scroll to, I would say the bottom third of the page, you’re gonna find a section that says dive deeper. And there, we basically house all of our best practice materials, including playbooks. And we have playbooks for SMBs. For enterprises. for startups, we also have video tutorials for how to use all these different features. So definitely check that out.

23:20
Oh, that’s a great resource. And don’t worry if if you were exercising or driving in the car, you don’t have to write that like down, don’t worry, that’ll be in the show notes. So on the employee push notifications, what should you encourage your employees to do with that post to create the maximum impact for the company? Is it a, you know, Hey, everyone, if you would comment and kind of build this social proof like or is it a, you know, reshare it to your network? What do you see as the best practice there?

23:49
That’s a great question, AJ. I’ll start by saying that ultimately, it’s up to each individual employee if they actually want to engage with and further promote their company’s content. And so it’s really something they should think about. forehand if they actually do want to engage and reshare because it’s not required, it’s a decision they can make. But if they do decide that it’s something they want to further promote. What we do recommend is resharing the post to really help boost that message with their professional network.

24:13
That’s perfect. That comes to the end of our questions. So the biggest question I want to ask to you is just what are you most excited about? This can be your professional life, personal life, a hobby, anything that you’re working towards, but let us know what’s most exciting to you right now.

24:28
I love that question. And this is the right time to ask because I’m all about the holidays. And with Thanksgiving, Halloween and Christmas coming up. This is like my favorite time of year. And I’m excited to be taking two weeks off to go to Tokyo and Taipei to visit my family with my children. So that is what I’m the most excited about. And I also just got a nice new camera to help document all the photographs. And so this is something I’m really looking forward to.

24:52
Oh, that’s fantastic. Well, we’re gonna be cheering you on in the holidays. Enjoy that trip to Tokyo. I just want to say thank you so much for coming on to the podcast and sharing everything about pages. I think we are much better for understanding this as even advertisers. And again, thanks for all your hard work on the product making it so helpful to us.

25:13
Of course, thank you so much for having me. This was such a pleasure to chat with you.

25:23
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

25:33
All right, I hope you really enjoyed that episode, that awesome interview with Ting, the Pages resource that she mentioned, the link lnkd.in/pagesbp that link it’s actually the full drawn out link in the show notes down below. So click that to check out the resource she was pointing you towards. Also anyone who’s looking to get started with LinkedIn Ads, definitely check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. And of course, if you are listening to this for the first time, thank you for showing up and on whatever podcast player you’re listening, make sure to hit that subscribe button. I would love to have you back here every week listening to all the updates here. And if you’re liking what you’re hearing, which I hope you are, hit that rate and review button wherever your podcast player is as well. I would love to see more people finding out about the show who are using LinkedInAds in their job. With any show ideas, any feedback about the show, please email us Podcast@B2Linked.com and I will see you back here next week cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

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