Crushing it on LinkedIn Company Pages with Max Lammertink [Podcast]

Full Transcript: Crushing it on LinkedIn Company Pages with Max Lammertink

Davis

Hello everybody, thanks for joining in. Today, we have a very special guest. I’m your host Davis Rajan, and we have with us Max,
who’s the co-founder of Talos and is building a very interesting company. We can probably hear a lot about Talos as we speak. It’s going to be a very interesting conversation. So, let’s welcome Max. Max, how are you doing? 

Max
Thanks, Davis, I’m good. Thanks.

Davis

So Max, do you want to kind of go through a broader introduction about yourself? You can introduce yourself better than anybody else. So, would you like to introduce yourself, please for the audience?

Max

Yes. So, I’m Max, I’m thirty-three years old at the moment and I’m the co-founder of Talos Growth. So let me talk
you a little bit through what I did before starting Talos.

I was always like an entrepreneur. I was always building websites when I was younger. And I even had a little museum where I charged my parents ¢50 to see stuff I found on the streets.

And then when I finished studying, I thought maybe I need to work at a real company. So I had some conversations, and I decided to work at a consultancy firm. I worked for international clients like Elsevier, Arcadis. And I noticed even real companies don’t really have their stuff together.

So, a lot of stuff was still done with excel sheets, people were emailing everything, and it was a good experience, but I was not sure if the consultancy was for me. And we moved to another town, so I wanted to work a little bit closer to home.

So, I decided to go working for Bol.com, which is a big eCommerce player in the Netherlands. Today is my last day there so now I’m fully gonna focus on Talos.

Davis

Wonderful, Max. I think it’s very interesting that you are hustling after work and you’re building a company which is great. And I think it’s an inspiration to look at people like you, especially people who would like to build their own businesses. You’re a good inspiration.

They can look forward to you in terms of what you’ve done so far. We all say that it’s difficult to build a company, but you are building something very meaningful. I, myself use Talos, so I know your product and what you’re building.

So, while we are on this topic, would you be able to talk a little more about Talos—what really triggered the thought of building this product, and what Talos really solves as a problem? If you can take us through that in detail, it will be wonderful.

Max

Yeah, sure, thanks for the kind words. Well, what started to build was Talos actually. I was running another company which was using some kind of app to like stuff customers posted and it was not really getting traction.

So, I thought maybe I need to do something real. Like a real company does. And that’s making a LinkedIn Company Page. Then you can invite your Mom, Dad, and friends, and then you have maybe 100 or 200 followers. But that’s about it, and you’re not really enthusiastic to create content for them because it’s really hard to really get followers to your Company Page.

And then one day I received a notification from LinkedIn saying, “Hey as a company, do you want to like this and that post or comment on it?” I opened that, and I noticed that a lot of companies were actually responding to that.

So maybe it was a post with 300 likes of which 200 were from companies, but it was not really relevant for me. But I noticed that LinkedIn did a little trick to make it possible to respond as your company. And then I thought, well maybe if we use that we can like any post we want using our Company Page. And then I used to do this on Instagram as well and liking posts of others always attract attention and this can be good attention or bad attention—it really depends on what kind of posts you’re liking.

So, I thought when we’re gonna do this, it needs to be really specific. So, the end user needs to be able to set what posts they want to like, and they need to be fully in control of that.

So, I built a prototype of this, and it actually worked. So, I had some friends testing it and our Company Pages were growing.

I thought I cannot do this alone. I think you can always do something better if you’re looking at it with multiple pairs of eyes. So, I called an old colleague of mine, who I actually did some work with on Instagram, and I said hey maybe we should look into this. And that’s what we did.

He’s a really good programmer so we built Talos right from the start because there’s nothing else like it so we had to figure everything out. Yeah, I think that’s about 2 years back. Took some time to do some testing, but now we are growing more and more Company Pages. So, it’s really good to see.

Davis

Nice and in my opinion, every company should probably have a Company Page. Any startups or any new businesses. That’s going to be key because all your B2B companies and your customers are actually on LinkedIn. So, what do you think is necessary and what is the necessity of using or growing your Company Page? What do you think is the key benefit over there? I’d like to hear from you.

Max

Yeah, it is a good question. You see, a lot of companies have salespeople that grow their own network while they’re working for the
company, which is great. But if this person leaves you, they also take their followers with them so to say.

So, the main benefit of a Company Page is that the followers are actually the followers of your company and not from some person
that is working for your company. Even for entrepreneurs like myself, if I build a big list of followers who are interested in a company I have. When I sell it or start something else, those people might not be interested in what I do next, but they are still interested in
what my company does. So, I think the followers really belong to the company and not to a single person. And that’s why it’s really important to build your Company Page above everything else.

Davis

Right! And I think that’s a very good point because people keep changing jobs and careers and they go on to do other stuff. But if you build a Company Page and you have followers, it’ll always be there. So that’s a very good point that you make.

I was just wondering what you think should go on the Company Page. I understand Talos helps to grow or network your Company Page, what do you think people should actually have on their Company Page? I know there’s a lot of things that you can add to your Company Page, but what are the best practices, in terms of posts? Or is there anything specific that you have seen while you’re building Talos? Do you recommend companies doing certain things with their Company Page?

Max

Yeah, we actually just tried something ourselves, last week. LinkedIn now built a feature where you can post a newsletter as your Company Page, and that goes to all your followers.

So, your followers get a notification saying, in our case, “Talos Growth published a new newsletter, are you interested to see it?” That gives you a huge reach if you have a great follower base. And imagine what happens if they all get a message from LinkedIn saying “hey, check out this company, it just posted a newsletter.”

So, I think it’s really interesting to keep taking a look at new features LinkedIn is rolling out and, of course, your base should be in order, so you should post regularly, let’s say at least once a week and try to have people engaged.

Davis

Fantastic. And I think that newsletters thing is something that I’m going to check out. I didn’t know about that to be honest, so I’m going to have a look at that as well.

Max

It’s kind of a hidden feature, I think you need to click Article and then click 3 times and then you find Newsletter.

Davis

Oh really? Okay I’m going to have a look! If I have issues, I want to get in touch with you.

So, people put in a lot of posts, do you have any recommendation in terms of what actually a company post should be like? Like, it’s not always talking about your services and all of that, right? What should really a company do if there is a smaller company which is just building up their Company Page on LinkedIn, what do you recommend they post regularly?

I know that they have to post regularly, that’s one thing, you need to have some cadence in terms of doing that every week,
maybe a couple of posts every week but what should they really post?

Max

It’s difficult to answer that with one quick answer because, of course, it really depends on the company. But what I’d always try to do is create your own brand. So, for us, for example, we are of course all about LinkedIn. And then it’s interesting to post basically anything about LinkedIn about new features as I just told you but also about “hey when it’s the best time to post your content”, “why would someone have a Company Page”. And I really think you don’t have to link every post to your website or try to get anything out of every post because then it’s basically only a sales page and you should try and post stuff that’s interesting to your followers.

Davis

So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, you’re basically providing information while you’re also building a brand which is more of a silent way of building it. But what you’re also doing parallelly is you want to provide good information for your readers to keep coming back to your page which is great.

So you know when I speak to my guests, one of the things that I always ask them is, and this is a topic which I like to digress a little bit, I talk about books and what books and not necessarily books, it could be a podcast or any information bank, that has influenced you the most and why do you think it has influenced you the most?

Max

So, I actually have two. So, it’s now the end of August and the holiday period just finished for us.  And during the holiday period I read The $150M secret. It’s from the guy who started Lemlist, which is a cold email outreach tool. It’s a French name so it’s really difficult. I don’t want to get into that. And that was a really interesting book because what I liked about it was a lot of people tend to say hey you should really focus just on one company or one thing you’re building, but he actually said the opposite.

So, he was building Lemlist and he was building Lempod at the same time which was something completely different, except for the name.

I could resonate with that because I always have multiple things to do and I try to work on multiple angles, and I really like the diversity in that. That’s why next to my day job I used to start other companies and start to work with other people because it’s a diversity I like. So that’s a book I could really recommend.

I’m now listening to a series of podcasts which are in the Netherlands. It’s about the KVK[1]  which is basically the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, and they interview all kinds of founders in all kinds of industries with good and bad experiences. And it’s good to get the word out that it’s not always successful to start a business and it could go wrong as well.

Davis

Wonderful. Good thoughts, and you know it’s very amazing. So, when I talk to entrepreneurs or founders like you, there is not just one thing that you have to learn, right? You could build a product; you could be technically sound but there are so many other things that you have to look at and a lot of the times you are not prepared, and you learn as you build your product.

I’m sure you might have come across a lot of situations like that, as you built Talos and the other companies that you’re going to build as well. I’m sure that there are other things.

What do you think, apart from being technical, what are some of the other things that you think is key to building a company?

Max

It’s the clients. I think it’s always good to start from your own problem if you at least solve your own problem, you know there’s at least 1 person that has that problem then probably other people are facing the same as well.

But then it’s hard to find people that actually want to pay for your service. I think that’s the hardest part. You can have such a great product that, sometimes they say a great product sells itself, but it actually doesn’t because you need to find people who want to buy your great product. That’s the hardest part there.

Davis

That’s right and it’s always customers, isn’t it? There’s a lot of buzz right now in terms of people building companies, valuation, and all of that. But I think what’s more important is how the market responds to you. When I say market, it’s basically your customers. And it’s rightly said that you focus on your customers more.

Max

Yeah.

Davis

I just want to also talk about being successful on LinkedIn. I know that LinkedIn is B2B and if you want to be successful on LinkedIn, as far as B2B marketing is concerned, what does it really take for any company? What are your recommendations or advice?

Max

I think that the phrase content is king is really important here and it doesn’t have to be long articles. It’s good to post them sometimes but it is just to keep a flood above all posts that are there just try to post at least once a week.

Which we actually provide a service for now as well because I know for a lot of companies, including myself, it’s really difficult to post once a week because you have to think about “hey, what can we post?” then you think hey now it’s Wednesday, one o’clock it’s about the best time to post something but you have to be on top of your computer or your phone because you’re not able to schedule posts on LinkedIn, yet.

So that’s why we also created that functionality that you can get us to create your content. We can also post it once a week for you and it’s really what we call snackable content, it’s a short post with a photo or video with it.

However, people do, I think that’s the important part because once somebody referred to me like nobody wants to sit in an empty restaurant and that’s also for Company Pages. You know you’re not going to follow a page that never posts anything because why would you follow if there’s no content on it.

Davis

Absolutely, that’s a good analogy – you don’t want to sit in an empty restaurant for sure and it’s not just posting as we mentioned, right? You got to post some good stuff. People are interested to read about it, and have to build an audience, right? So that’s going to be the key.

So now if we have to take this forward a little bit and talk about the future of Talos, what is it that you’re looking at, where do you see yourself in terms of building Talos, if you have to talk about the next year or a couple of years, maybe 5 years?

The reason I asked that is because Talos is a product which is interdependent with LinkedIn success as well, right? Because it’s dependent on LinkedIn in many ways. So how do you see this growing and how do you see LinkedIn growing as well because LinkedIn’s growth is also key for your success.

Max

Yeah, so what we saw in the last year I think is that LinkedIn is focusing more and more on the Company Pages. So, as I mentioned we got the newsletter now you can if you’re in certain industries you can add products to your Company Page.

You can even feed stuff from your Company Page directly without changing anything in the URL. So, it looks like LinkedIn is also picking up on this whole Company Page which was a bit in the corner first. But I think they’re focusing more and more on this which makes it for us, only more interesting. Because, yeah, we are all about Company Pages and now LinkedIn is focusing more on it. People will be focusing more on it.

So that way, we will be growing and what I really like to do is take the whole Company Page out of people’s hands, the whole management.

So, we take over the posting, or we help with the posting. We help with responding to likes because now we see if you like a post sometimes you have to respond. But yeah, of course as a page you really need to respond to that as well because otherwise it’s kind of an empty light you give out.

Which is more manual work, right? We think you cannot really automate commenting on anything because you never know what the post says where alike can also be like a thumbs up like “Command Good job” and a comment is a bit harder.

So, I think we go more and more into maybe even manual work where we help people actually manage their Company Page.

Davis

Yeah, I think it’s a great product, right? As you mentioned, I’m just wondering how you are looking at this product to reach as many people as possible or as many companies as possible? What is it that you’re doing right now that’s taking the word out or spreading the word to multiple companies?

Max

Well first of all, we use our own product which is a great marketing tool because I never believe when anyone says, “hey I can grow your page” and then you go to their page, and they have 10 followers. That’s always a bit of a joke to me. So, we use our own product which really helps people drawing into our own page.

Next to that we run true resellers. So, people are actually reselling our product. You see a lot of companies already focusing on building personal brands on LinkedIn. For those people, it’s an interesting add–on to also use our product for their clients to build a Company Page.

And we run affiliate networks. So, when somebody is already a client or not even a client and they think this might be interesting for someone, they can get an affiliate link. Get a nice kickback.

Davis

Nice. So that’s a lot of things that you’re doing to spread the word out.

I heard you saying that talk about personal brand can Talos also be used for a personal brand? Can an influencer or a person build their own brand with Talos, is that feature available now?

Max

Yeah, absolutely. So, we started out with only Company Pages, now we’re in a beta period, almost finishing the personal pages. So, what we do there is basically the same as what we do for companies. So, we give likes out your own personal profile, which results in a lot of followers of your profile if you have creator mode on and otherwise a lot of connection requests. And there we can also take care of your content and build your brand.

Davis

Fantastic! I think you can also probably provide us the link if any of our audience would like to buy this product by Talos, I will also put that in my description and direct them towards you. If they were to use and try Talos as Well.

Max

Yeah, that’s perfect.

Davis

So, what do you see in terms of your personal goals? I know we spoke about Talos’ Goals.

I see that you’re a new age entrepreneur building something new. What are your personal goals in terms of the next few years? It will be nice to hear your perspective and your mindset because you’re building something new, and I don’t think there is any other product. I haven’t heard of any other product which does what Talos does. So, what are your personal goals in the next few years?

Max

It’s true, we are the only ones actually focusing this much on Company Pages. We don’t find any competitors here which is not an invitation of course for anyone to be a competitor because it’s good to be like this.

One of my major personal goals was stopping my day job – which actually happened today.

So, from now on, I will be working full time on Talos and I’m also setting up another company where we help brands to be successful on marketplaces.

So, marketplaces like Amazon but also Bol.com where I used to work. And there we really think the focus of customers is more and more on marketplaces where they buy their products and brands are not really taking that up yet.

So that’s also one of my major focus points for the coming period. And then probably next year I will be doing something else as well because that’s how it goes with me.

Davis

Sure Max, I think that’s fantastic. I know you’re based in the Netherlands. Do you see yourself moving around the world in the near future or do you think that you’re going to be in the Netherlands itself?

Max

Well, we are actually planning to go to South Africa for a couple of months in January next year. That’s one thing, but then again, I also have small kids. So, they need to go to school somewhere next year, so then we probably will be stuck around here.

But to be honest, in the Netherlands it’s just great to work from here because the internet is good, the environment is good for entrepreneurs. So yeah, I really like it here.

Davis

Perfect. You know what, as we move into the last section of this podcast, I had some notes, and I was curious. You mentioned posting at 1pm on Wednesday – is that really true? Is that something that you recommend? What was the logic? Because I know you spoke about that. Or was it just a random time that you just suggested?

Max

No, it’s actually 1pm on Wednesdays – it is kind of the best time. But then again it really depends on what time zone you’re in. So, for us, it’s really difficult because we have followers from around the world. But if you are in a specific time zone and your followers are as well, you actually should post 1pm Wednesdays. Around that time, because it’s kind of the middle of the week.  People have their lunch break around that time, and they start opening LinkedIn.

Davis

Wonderful. I think that’s a great recommendation. And it becomes easier if your market is US or UK, you can pick the local time and post actually at 1pm and all the audience are listening to us. Here’s a great nugget or piece of advice from Max – 1pm Wednesdays is for posting. So that’s great.

So Max, as we try to conclude this podcast, our viewers and listeners would like to know where to find you in case they want to reach out either to buy your product or get to know a little more about Talos in general. What is a good place to find you online?

Max

You would have guessed it, but it’s LinkedIn of course. I do get a lot of connection requests since we’re running Talos for ourselves, but just when I try to do a connection request, I always add a personal message. Just do that and I’m probably able to get into a chat.

I like it much more if someone just sends a personal message with it because then you know, “hey this person is adding me because they heard me on the podcast, or they’ve seen some of my work”. So yeah, I think LinkedIn is the best place to go.

Davis

Perfect. So just before we drop, would you like to communicate anything about Talos or the audience as we conclude this podcast? Any messages, advice, or anything that you want to talk about?

Max

Ah, yeah, just try it. You know, we do the first 14 days free of charge because we really believe in the tool. We really believe in what we do, so we don’t want to lock anyone in with supplying their credit card details or anything else. Just say hey try it out, it will work for you. If it doesn’t, no hard feelings and you can just stop your trial.

And I think now is really the time to focus on your Company Page because it’s getting bigger and bigger, the coming years.

Davis

Perfect and you know just to add to that Max, for our audience, we at Ondeckeo use Talos and we have seen fantastic results.

Our Company Pages are growing every day and we see that and there’s a lot of benefits that we have.

So, I have you know I can only talk about great and good things because I’m a user here. I’m a customer and Talos is wonderful to be very honest. Max, you’ve built a fantastic product and I wish you all the luck and all the success in growing Talos to the next level. And good luck.

Max

Thanks, thanks for having me.

Davis

Thanks Max. You have a great rest of the day. I will talk to you soon.

Max

Yes, bye bye.

Davis

Thank you, bye.