Takeaways from Naturally Chicago’s “Boosting Your Business with LinkedIn” Webinar

Linkedin is the digital public forum of the CPG industry and has become a place to connect to industry leaders, share successes and failures, and build a brand. Its importance as the must-use social media platform for professionals was the reason why Naturally Chicago presented its webinar, Boosting Your Business on LinkedIn, on November 16.

The conversation was led by Jordan Buckner, founder of Foodbevy, which helps food and beverage companies build successful businesses, creating a pipeline for them to grow from startup to scale and reducing the resource and network gaps. Through Foodbevy, Buckner is able to impart his knowledge about LinkedIn acquired during his own entrepreneurial experience.

Buckner was joined by a LinkedIn-savvy panel made up of Jonathan Lawrence, Vice President of Center Store at Fresh Thyme Market; Erica Rankin, founder and CEO of Bro Dough, who in a few short years built a massive social media following (which in turn prompted her to become a mentor through her Grow With Erica company); and Karuna Rawal, Chief Marketing Officer at Nature’s Fynd.

Jim Slama, Managing Director of Naturally Chicago, introduced the panelists.

The following are excerpts from the webinar, starting with the tutorial shared by Buckner at the start of the program.

Jordan Buckner’s presentation

 “I was selected as one of the 100 LinkedIn Creator Accelerator Program members. This was the first of its kind program that LinkedIn put on to really help to amplify creators within the community, and I was selected to kind of represent the food and beverage space. As part of that program, I learned a ton about how to grow my own personal and business brand on LinkedIn, and I want to make sure to share some of those tips with you.”

“A lot of people ask, ‘Why should I get involved on LinkedIn?’ For me, it comes down to three major areas to be able to help you grow.

“The first is finding community. There's a thriving food and beverage community on LinkedIn, let alone for every other industry or category, and it's really become a professional, social kind of meeting ground for everyone within the industry. What I really love about LinkedIn, compared to other social platforms, is that you can actually have engaging conversations with other colleagues, potential mentors, potential customers, and build genuine relationships…

“The second is building your personal brand… You can really highlight yourself and amplify the work that you're doing to share it with the world. A lot of times we're working in silos or with our teams, and the larger world doesn't really know what we're working on…

 “And third, it's developing relationships with potential partners… I hear from founders of food and beverage companies who use LinkedIn to connect with retailers, potential marketing agencies, accounting firms. And those can turn into business relationships as well.”

“There's this asynchronous kind of communication that's going on, and that's really where the power of community lies within LinkedIn. Second, make sure that you're delivering value. One thing that I do, almost every month, is pose to the community a simple question, ‘How can I help?’ What I'd like to do is open up my network and experiences to other founders, other partners in the space to be able to share those resources… By delivering value first back to the community, other people are more open to giving back as well. The third area is some of these kind of partnerships that develop… I've really been able to build friendships and professional colleagues through LinkedIn. It's not a superficial kind of surface-level interaction, there's actually people that develop genuine friendships.”

“How often should I post depends on your goal… If you're looking to maximize your follower growth, you should really aim to post once a day to maximize that exposure. It's not going to be for everyone, you might not know what to post about. So at least start by posting once a week to maintain that relevance…”

“One way to actually do this is to plan out posts in advance, something that I was really encouraged to do a part of the LinkedIn accelerator program. So at the very beginning, we planned out three month’s worth of posts… I thought, ‘Hey, these are the main topic areas that I want to write about, sharing my own stories of being a founder with food beverage, or with Tea Squares, being a founder with Foodbevy, and now helping to share tips and resources to the larger community, and then making those kind of connections and values.’ So having these buckets that you can post within the content will really help to make that process easier.”

“And then another way is to create a repeating series of posts every day of the week. So it might be Mondays are thoughts that you have over the weekend, Tuesdays are kind of news and interesting articles that you can come up with or see.”

“So what's the anatomy of a good post? It definitely varies, but one thing that LinkedIn does is creates previews of typically the first three lines of a post. So if you're doing something short or long, make sure that the first three lines have a very strong hook, a story and that will stand out and get people to read more… Second, in terms of some of the buckets that work well, you'll see a lot of people posting about educational topics, personal experiences or stories of success and failure… There tends to be a sense of showmanship on LinkedIn of only sharing the positive things for your business, and that was certainly the case in the last five years. But you see a lot more recently brands and founders who are sharing their negative experiences as well to make and share that kind of holistic experience of their business. And then last, know your audience and what kind of content they're looking for. And so are you creating a specific content for people in the food and beverage industry? Do you talk about wellness, working out exercise, whatever you post about, post consistently within that, and you're going to attract a audience that follows those.”

“There's lots of different ways that you can post. There's text only, text and image, video carousel posts and polls. The real key is to mix it up and see what your audience engages with the most… And most importantly, I think it's important to put the social back in social media. Instead of just posting highlights and then getting off the platform, make sure that you're actually engaging with people starting conversations, continuing conversations, and really meeting people along the way. A lot of these will turn into really engaging relationships and friendships that will expand beyond the platform… Definitely see this as not just a social network, but a place to build and maintain friendships.”

 Karuna Rawal on curating content in which your community is interested

“One of the things that I really enjoy about LinkedIn is once you kind of know what what areas you're passionate about, you can leverage that. So for me, there's a number of different areas that I have a personal interest in and a professional interest in, whether that's food and beverage innovation, a lot of passion around alternative proteins, vegan lifestyle and vegan foods, as well as being a working mother.”

“In every area that people who are interested in some of these topics, it's hard to keep up with everything that's going on… I try pretty hard to pick a few areas that I try to read as much as I can or watch different podcasts and things like that. So sharing those insights, as a curator in those particular content areas, I find is really helpful.”

 Erica Rankin on how she quickly builit a 50,000+ following on LinkedIn

 “I went on LinkedIn initially out of a need for like guidance for my business, I literally did not know how to grow my business… And then I just started posting really transparent stuff… Very few people talk about the other side of the coin, the down days and the crap that you go through when you're in the trenches. And so I think just being transparent and posting consistently, and then posting consistent content as well, keeping it in the same realm, and reaching the right people has really helped me get to that following and then just showing up every day.”

“By having an engaged group of other people who are constantly engaging with your content, and making sure it's valuable, then that post will begin to expand and share to others. And so you always want to make sure that you're commenting on, replying to comments on your posts that people have.”

Jonathan Lawrence on remaining approachable on LinkedIn without being inundated with messages

“On my LinkedIn page, I have my face and I have Fresh Thyme in the background. So you clearly know I am both representing myself and the organization I care so much about…

“Because of my position and because it's Fresh Thyme, I'll get a lot of different brands that will reach out. It is tough to manage because you do get a lot, you don't want to be that person that doesn't respond, but you also have to be careful with your time. So what I'll typically do is I'll reach back out and I'll let them know, ‘Hey, here's the person who you should be connecting with, to at least guide them to the team member…

“If you're a brand or whatever you're doing, do a little bit of homework before you just throw things out there… I want to help them, I want to direct them to our team because that could be the next great product on our shelf. But if you're asking me about finance or something else, you need to do a little bit more digging…”

Erica Rankin on being vulnerable on LinkedIn

“There's pros and cons, definitely, but I think there's more pros… The main reason why I started putting out stuff out there because no one was at the time, or I couldn't find it anyway. I was beside myself, and I thought, Okay, maybe entrepreneurship isn't for me, because I'm not fundraising, I'm not building a team, I’m bootstrapping, I'm working out of my apartment, I felt like I wasn't doing things the right way. And then I started talking to other founders [who were] kind of at my stage, we were going through the same challenges, and they felt alone too. So I decided be the voice for them and for myself, and put out that content and see if that resonated with anyone or can help at least one person.” 

Karuna Rawal on mixing the personal with the professional

“When you look at folks in my generation who started with LinkedIn a lot earlier, it was very much that this was the professional network and everything had to be perfect and curated… People have gotten more comfortable with sharing, and COVID had obviously a big part in that… One of the things I love about my job is this is where my personal values and the company values have come together… It's a lot easier now to talk about where those two things collide and showing that, and it's okay to say, ‘Hey, I'm a working mom with three kids who's trying to balance work and family and try to be a professional and show up and all of those things… That's true for everything, as a working mother, you're not in it alone, as a startup entrepreneur, you're not in it alone, and you can rely on the community.”

Jonathan Lawrence on using LinkedIn to track brands and products

 “You're kind of rooting for those brands, but at the same time you start to see that momentum. That's where I started asking my team. Hey, did you see that? Do we have this product? Are we watching it? So it's really good to kind of keep tabs on what's going on out there. Who's growing? What are their new innovations? And then again, this is a mission based industry too, right? So what are they doing outside of just the product? What are they doing that's better for humanity. So posting what their what their mission statement is is also kind of key to learn more about the brand…”

There is much, much more to learn for the full recording of the webinar. Click below to access the recording.