In this episode of Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, titled "Leveraging LinkedIn: B2B Organic Social Strategies for Enhanced Personal Branding and Business Growth," we explore the power of LinkedIn for B2B revenue growth with Indrek Põldvee from B2BGrowth. Drawing from years of expertise focused exclusively on organic LinkedIn content optimization, Indrek shares valuable insights on crafting an effective organic strategy to drive brand engagement, enhance personal branding, and ultimately fuel business growth.

Indrek and Kerry discuss the answers to questions like: How can I increase the visibility of my LinkedIn posts? What are the best strategies to gain more LinkedIn followers organically? What is the ideal frequency for posting content on LinkedIn? How often should I post on LinkedIn to grow my follower base? What types of content perform best on LinkedIn for higher engagement and impressions? How do I optimize my profile or page to attract more followers?

Discover the strategic questions every business should consider before investing in LinkedIn, learn best practices for profile optimization, and explore proven techniques for producing high-impact, consistent content. Whether you’re a business leader, marketer, or entrepreneur, this episode provides actionable advice to maximize your LinkedIn presence and turn connections into measurable results.

Podcast transcript

 



Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:02.182)

So welcome Indrek, please introduce yourself and share a bit about your expertise.

Indrek Poldvee (00:08.61)

Yeah, hi, Kerry. Thanks for having me. My name is  Indrek Poldvee. I'm from a company called B2B Growth. And we focus mainly on the LinkedIn platform and help companies and people strategically and from strategy, also help them to execute the strategy. And we've been doing that the last five years. And we only focus on one platform for now because I really believe it's the expertise that is really important. It is not that easy.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:37.574)

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, and LinkedIn and using LinkedIn for business connections, personal branding, networking, and job searching has been on the rise. I know it's, I spend probably more time on LinkedIn than most teenagers spend on TikTok. Sorry. I'll edit that out. Sorry.

Indrek Poldvee (00:59.18)

No words.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (01:06.63)

So I know I spend more time on LinkedIn than most teenagers spend on TikTok, but it's because that's where, you for me, the audience that I want to be connecting with is there. and the businesses that I'd like to partner with. so it's been a huge asset and resource for me, but, talk a bit about from your perspective, why is LinkedIn so important?

Indrek Poldvee (01:30.806)

Yeah, so as we said, we are taking the strategic step. So the first question is that we are asking, do you need to be on LinkedIn or not? So, and coming from there we need to map out your audience. Who are you targeting? So for example, if you're a dentist and you're looking for new customers, then actually LinkedIn is maybe not the best for you because Facebook and Instagram and TikTok are much better because you are B2C.

But if you are mostly B2B, for example, if you are selling pizzas to the end customers, again, LinkedIn is not for you, if you are a frozen pizza business and selling them like 10 ,000 or 20 ,000 units in one sale, then LinkedIn is for you. So that is the easy way to start. That's also only for the sales part, but it's always good to build your personal brand there. So these are the questions we always ask from the company customers also.

We start, do you even need to be there? Because if we don't see that you can get extra revenue there or recruitment and etc. etc. etc. like these kinds of really, really important things to know, then again, maybe other social media sites are much better for you. So that's one way of thinking of it.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:49.51)

That's great. So for personal pages, are there certain industries, industries or kinds of areas of expertise that are more aligned with being on LinkedIn than others?

Indrek Poldvee (03:04.398)

Yeah, so now the thing is, this is where it's going to be a little bit weird because I think LinkedIn is for all companies. So it depends on the size. Normally the size should be like 10 or 20 plus people and so on, and the reason why I'm telling that it's for every company is because every company is also recruiting. So LinkedIn is the world's largest recruitment platform for office workers. again, like … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:25.116)

Mm-mm.

Indrek Poldvee (03:31.126)

Okay, so now that yeah, if your business doesn't have any office workers then yes LinkedIn is not for you so to say but other than that I don't see any point of not being there if for professional reason … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:44.444)

That's great. So can you talk a bit about some of the best practices that you and your agency kind of brands and people roll out for their presence there?

Indrek Poldvee (03:56.014)

Yeah, so when we talked about the strategic part, like if you get the answers for those questions, then the next step is that what we really, really recommend that most companies don't do, I think 90 % of LinkedIn personal and company pages, they have not optimized. And one of the key things, for example, is … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:13.691)

Mm-mm.

Indrek Poldvee (04:17.23)

… a good example right now is your background. For example, a lot of people on LinkedIn do not have any background picture at all. So to say it's blue or gray or whatever. So having only a, so when we go into a bigger company, for example, we do in the last four and a half years, we have done over 1000 profile makeovers. And what it means is like in a company, we go and train and get people to understand why your personal profile needs to have the company color the background or it needs to have some kind of a message because it's basically like optimizing your website. If you go to your website and there is no information about what your company does then it's really difficult to be on that page. So your profile is basically the same way. So the background image and then we're talking about the headshot like a profile picture. It's really important that a profile picture is like 60 to 70 % of your face because people need to recognize you from those pictures. then also the headline under your picture is also job title doesn't mean anything today. If I'm telling the head of procurement, what does it mean? Or I'm the CEO. So if you're in a smaller company, a CEO, you are accounting, you are HR, you are a salesperson, et cetera. So the CEO doesn't tell me anything …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:28.538)

Yep.

Indrek Poldvee (05:39.318)

And then the most I'm a CEO of a non-dynasty. Let's say that's the company name. So what does that mean? the company name. So better to have that kind of headline. The better one is having some headline with what is the value that you're bringing to your ideal customer. So for example, for you, like helping companies to boost their revenue by X and Y because showing you what you're because on average three to … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:44.336)

Yeah. Yeah.

Indrek Poldvee (06:07.79)

… seven seconds, one person who doesn't know you looks at your profile. So these are very small details that I just mentioned that have a huge impact, like how much your profile gets visits, how many people will stay on the profile. And again, like for us, it takes about seven to 10 hours to do one makeover for one profile. So again, like when we go into a company, then they say, I tell them in the training that these are the things you need to do. People say, yeah, I will do them and 90 -95 % of the cases nobody does these things. So then again, it's better. So this is one thing and the company pages are basically the same. Just the company pages, what we want to do there is we want to know who is your target audience. Then also we want to know like we have identified four pillars, what is the company page like goal, so to say, the purpose.

So number one is building the company brand. Number two is building employer branding. Number three is building trust with your partners and future partners and et cetera. And the fourth is the communication channel. So if we know like, for example, if you are building employer branding, then the content and the text about text and et cetera, they need to be totally different when ...

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:04.063)

Mm-mm.

Indrek Poldvee (07:29.164)

… you are building trust with your business partners or helping sales because the text and the people you are after are totally different. And we see that also with content. And this is the problem with a lot of companies and people, they don't think about the content. They only think I should write something, I should post something, but they don't think about the strategy, like who is the target audience and what do they want to read? And it's also, these are a couple of things.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:47.024)

Mm-mm. 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:52.742)

So with that, no, that's great. So let's dive in a bit more to the content strategy. So you're saying, think about your target audience, what's valuable to them and is the goal to educate your audience or what are some of the themes for the content that you recommend?

Indrek Poldvee (08:13.432)

So I think you hit the nail on the head with educating and also giving as much value as possible to your audience. Because the thing is, you're building a community on LinkedIn. And this goes with your personal profile and also with your company profile. It's really, really, really important. And the other thing is with the contest strategy is being consistent. So we just actually did last week, one of our partners in Estonia, … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:20.87)

Mm-mm.

Indrek Poldvee (08:42.654)

… retail store basically like a smaller version of your Walmart basically so a food store but they are huge in EU the second largest in the I think in the EU but basically what we did there we we've been working with them for eight months we saw that we did 70 posts and the competitors in our market they did 50 posts in the same … 

Timeline so in eight months. Okay, so another big difference, but where the big difference was Their post looked basically the same they started to sort of say copy our how we write but our posts Engagement versus their post engagement was three times higher So that meant that our post got three times more likes three times more comments and three times more shares on overall so and … 

Basically, they did the same amount, we still are three times better. And why? Because we kept it very consistent. We post like twice a week. We know basically the times we are posting. And also we are getting their own employees to engage more. And this is the strategy that the other competitors are lacking because they post when they think, I have today a topic I want to post today. Or, we haven't posted for a week and now we should post.

So these are the typical marketing managers or the persons who are managing the company pages have the struggle that they forget or they are so busy etc. But LinkedIn rewards consistency a lot. And now we start in eight months and we see already that we are pulling very, very heavily ahead of the competitors in that case. So that's one reason why consistency and all these really, really matters in LinkedIn.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:11.686)

Mm-mm.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:32.518)

So you talked about consistency and is that from the same kind of type of content, style of content? Do you recommend, is it a mix of video and images with text? How do you recommend mixing it up?

Indrek Poldvee (10:50.286)

So the best one is the mixing up of the different types of format, definitely. So really, really well goes PDF files, so to say carousel post or the thing is what LinkedIn measures. LinkedIn knows that 90 to 95 % of their users never comment, like or share the content. They only read, so to say they are the stalker, so to say. So, but what LinkedIn measures, LinkedIn measures how long time you spend on one post.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:11.28)

Yeah.

Indrek Poldvee (11:19.79)

So if you're scrolling down, you will see that one second or two seconds, then it counts as a view, but it doesn't count as a post -boost. But if you're doing the videos or the PDFs, so for example, PDFs that are like seven or 10 pages long, so that people need to press, if it's really well done, again, like a person who scrolls it, they see a headline, let's say, … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:20.006)

Okay.

Indrek Poldvee (11:47.31)

Who is Kerry and why does she work at revenue boost? Okay. I know Kerry I have seen her and I want to know more and then I click click the next page next page next page And then I don't spend two seconds on the post I might spend 20 seconds on the post and then LinkedIn sees that the post that you are doing Keeps me longer in LinkedIn if I normally spend on Kerry's post maybe two seconds now I'm spending 20 seconds. That's a huge huge upgrade … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:04.124)
Mm-mm.

Indrek Poldvee (12:14.479)

And then we start to see if this happens consistently. And then again, like with different formats, you can just test what you like to do most. And normally when we go with the company or personal pages, we create content strategies, so to say, that we don't talk about the same topics every post is the same, but we are going to from environmental social goals, are going introducing our colleagues, we are talking about the problem that we are trying to solve.

We are showing, but then maybe 10 % of the posts are selling our services. But most companies I see and also people they say they post, look at our new product, look at how nice a product we have, have such a nice product and like 60 or 70 % of the content is product based, but nobody cares about the product, I can say that.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:48.39)
Mm-mm.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:03.492)

No, I agree. The content strategy piece is important to you know, you can follow that awareness building the credibility and trust like you said, and then having that valuable content that's educational where they learn and you're building that relationship. And then once they're already familiar with you and trust you, then you can promote the features and benefits of your service or product, but not out of the gate. I think that's a really important perspective. And then, sorry, go ahead.

Indrek Poldvee (13:32.656)

Yeah. And now I just want to say that that is really important. So there are different things like one is the company page, which is exactly what you, what you mentioned. then the personal page, that's a little bit different. That's, that's going to be a challenging because the thing is whether you need to first do is look at who are your connection, what is your connection network? Because a lot of people, what I've learned is they have built their connection network randomly. Basically, if somebody sends me a connection invite, I will accept it.

Or they are my former colleagues, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But now if you say, hey, I want to start doing sales on LinkedIn. So first of all, you need to think about how many people of my ideal customer audience are already in my network. And most people have none. the content when we tell, hey, if you want to be an active LinkedIn member, you need to put like five to 10 comments per day. And then they say, OK, I will check it out. And then …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:16.828)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Indrek Poldvee (14:31.779)

They come back to me and say, hey, Indrak, there are no posts that I want to comment on. There are random posts. And the reason is because again, your connection network is built totally randomly. People do not make content that you like. And then they say, LinkedIn content is not so good. But trust me, if you're starting to add the right people into your network, search for people who do content that interests you, then it's much, much easier. And then it also becomes a little bit easier also. … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:58.054)

Yeah, no, definitely. I think that's a really good recommendation for building those business connections as well. And so talk a bit about frequency. So you mentioned sometimes it's multiple times a week. What's your recommendation on frequency? And then is there a time of day as well?

Indrek Poldvee (15:19.054)

Yeah, so frequency now it all depends on the goals and the resources that the people or companies have available. So for us, the company page where we go, we do a minimum two posts a week. And time zones, we start at the local time or the market that we want to focus on. And in the morning, like eight to 10 is a really good time. And also for personal pages, we also see weekends are working quite, quite well. The engagement is not so high. … 

But there's a lot of studies that show that, for example, if you're a C level executive or founder and set up, most of them plan their week on Sundays. Sundays are really, if you have a lot of that audience, then Sundays are really good time to post and personal page posting frequency. Now, again, it all depends on the goal and the resources and how much, but if you want to start becoming a little bit active, then … 

Always quantity is not better than quality first. do quality even if you do once a week do quality posts and that that is definitely gives your heads up, but If you do not want to post so much and then commenting is a very powerful strategy if you start to comment that say 20 to 40 comments per day … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:23.216)

Mm-mm.

Indrek Poldvee (16:41.134)

It's more meaningful than content, doing yourself content, because if you're adding like a lot of quality comments, and comments we mean that are more than 10 to 15 words long, and they add value to the post that you're commenting, then they are really good. And trust me, if you do that for a month or two, you will see a huge uprise in your activity, in your profile. 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:08.25)

Mm-hmm. No, that's great. I definitely have been trying to comment more, and I see that, because it helps build your network and people respond, and then they want to follow you as well. So one big question I have is the length of the posts. It seems like everybody's writing these diatribes, these long maxing out the word count on posts. Is there a recommended length or minimum.

Indrek Poldvee (17:39.566)

So the thing is it also now depends on the format that you are using. So for example, if you do PDF or video posts, then there may be like 300 to 500 characters, but text posts, picture posts, we normally do like 1000 to 2000 characters between that and why again, like because the LinkedIn algorithm measures how long people are reading your post. But ...

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:51.014)

Mm-mm.

Indrek Poldvee (18:05.294)

But also what matters a lot if you do it, the first three, four sentences on your post are really important because if people don't click to see more when they scroll, then the post, it doesn't perform very well. And we also like, we see a lot like in the last couple of months, even six months to 12 months, the reach of the posts are going down quite a lot. Like there have been reports that some of the people who have … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:12.048)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Indrek Poldvee (18:32.718)

… had before like 100 ,000 or 200 ,000 reach for one post. Now they're getting 20 ,000 or 40 ,000. It goes like 50 to 60 % down. And some of the assumptions are because LinkedIn wants to focus on your own niche. They don't want you to build your own professional niche in the sector where people know you.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:57.049)

That's really interesting. And how about linking out to another website in your post or recommended to do it in the comments? Have you noticed a difference in the algorithm if someone's including links to go to a website off of LinkedIn versus not?

Indrek Poldvee (19:15.34)

Yeah, there are multiple, some people say, yes, put it in the comments. Some say put it in the post. Like again, like if it's not Facebook, Instagram, YouTube links, then going to your blogs and setting up. Then for me, it's totally fine. If you put it again, it's all about testing and it's in LinkedIn. Like again, like there are a lot of different things. Like one says you cannot make anything with AI, all needs to be, but then some people repost that AI is doing a post only with AI. They're doing really well.

And the thing is these people know what they're doing. That is the thing. And I think only two to 3 % of people only know a bit about AI. And also warning about the algorithm. It's great to know about these whole algorithm tips and tricks, but the algorithm only starts to work if you do it consistently. And consistently, I mean like two to three months. If you post twice a week for two to three months, then algorithm will start to work.for you, but if you do it like once a week or and then no commenting, et cetera, and then you're using all the, there are a lot of guides of the LinkedIn algorithm, et cetera, like tips and tricks, but if you do it, then it doesn't matter how well you do it. It just doesn't work.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:18.673)

Mm-mm.

That's great. Thank you. And so this has been extremely helpful and actionable as well, which is really valuable. What is your kind of number one top recommendation for somebody who wants to go out and kind of revamp and build out their LinkedIn profile?

Indrek Poldvee (20:50.764)

Yeah, so that's not for me. That's the question. The question is always, always where you start, like why I want to do the revamp and who is my target audience? What is the goal of the revamp? Like who do you want the people to notify or notice it or who do you want them to start making connections? So that's really, really important.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:12.142)

Excellent. Well, thank you,  Indrek Poldvee. This was again, very, very enjoyable and valuable. So we appreciate your time. Thank you.

Indrek Poldvee (21:19.232)

More than happy. Thank you for having me and looking forward to the next time.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:23.014)

Thanks.