How Global B2B Brands Balance Company Pages, Paid, Organic and Employee Advocacy

G'day everyone, I'm Michelle J Raymond, and this week, listeners, we're gonna be talking to Molly Hopkins, who lives and breathes this stuff every day at CBRE, and we're gonna be talking about how global B2B brands can actually balance Company Pages, paid, organic, and employee advocacy. Do you have any time for this conversation? You make it sound so simple. I've got all the time in the world, Michelle, thank you for having me.

I'm excited to be here and have the conversation. Look, I, as I said to you before we jumped on this call, I am excited to be talking to people this year on the podcast that are actually living and breathing this stuff, so the actual people that are doing the work in social media because there are things that I read on LinkedIn, and I'm sure you're the same, where I roll my eyes and go- Yeah I would be dreaming if that ever happened in corporate land. I guess you have that experience as well.

All the time. I also follow, I think it's my own fault, I follow a lot of s- especially the direct to consumer versus the business to business social media approach. I was like, "Oh, that looks so much fun. I wish I could do that.

I wish I could do those fun, trendy video…" Which I can, and I'm pushing for, but even in the social media world there are different camps, so it's always funny kind of seeing what people are experimenting with and what people are focusing on while I'm very much in the corporate world. Yeah, it does make me laugh when everyone just throws away the line, "Don't make B2B boring." And I see all of my clients are, like, rocking in a corner going, "If I tried that," literally one of them said, "I would get the sack."

And I was like, "Yeah, let's not go there." But you're the Associate Director of Social Media at CBRE. Can you just share a little bit about what your role involves and what a typical week looks like for you? Like, what things are you juggling?

I will start off by saying there is no typical week, but that's kind of a given. So I joined CBRE about almost four years ago now. And my role has definitely evolved a lot in those four years. I originally was hired strictly, as most people do, get started in social media, to manage the corporate accounts.

Before I joined, there was no social media team. I was the first hire in the US. It was a bit of a free-for-all, so when I joined there were I think over 350 CBRE-branded social media accounts across the landscape. Um, Yeah, wild.

Mind-blowing. Absolutely. Um, we're still working on it, but a big effort that I was brought in to execute was the consolidation effort, specifically in the Americas, but then also managing the corporate account to be sort of the example of what these accounts should be emulating. With that, I also was tasked with creating a process for managing, you know, I have 20 different teams contributing content, so I had to put a process in place of, like, this is how you submit content, this is what our calendar organisational workflow is going to be, this is what our approval process is going to be.

So it was, the first two years was, like, creating processes, which I loved. I'm type A, very organised, project management background, so really enjoyed that. But I think that my role, especially over the past year and a half, has really sort of evolved into managing the ecosystem around these channels. So it's not just managing and executing content on the corporate account and making sure that our organic content is strong and strengthens our business units, but also helping to support our C-suite executives, running paid social campaigns, enabling our brokers, enabling our business units to better show up effectively.

I mean, there's a lot of conversation going on right now about how I know we'll get to this later, but that corporate pages aren't the end all be all on social media, and a lot of times people wanna hear from other people. And so seeing that shift happened, my role has shifted to support our people just as much as our brand on social media. It has changed a lot in the last four years. Like, even just if we look at LinkedIn, the platform itself, like where we're at in those glory days post-COVID when everyone was online and it was all amazing, to now there's been a monumental shift on the LinkedIn feed.

And so I think for social media, you know, directors like yourself, I can only imagine trying to keep up to date with that and roll that out and keep everybody on track with those processes. It's gotta be a little bit crazy some days. It's just for me, when I'm working with my clients it's a very similar situation. Normally what's happening is we've got teams with the best of intentions, and I know we're gonna dive into this one a bit more, but they tend to go everywhere.

If someone's starting out in a role as a social media director and they don't have these processes in place, what advice would you give to them? Like, how important has that been in your success? I mean, my biggest overarching piece of advice is have everything in writing. It's the easiest way to share processes and workflows and strategies.

If someone asks you, "How do I do this?" or "How do I go about this?" or, "What's our policy here?" "Here's a document on it."

It's written, it's approved, it saves me from having to have 10 of the same conversations. But I also think with that, criteria is huge, so really thinking about, you know, I have a global audience, and so my criteria needs to be pretty strict in that the content needs to be relevant to a global audience. I can't post a niche client dinner in Tallahassee, Florida, which I have been requested to put on our corporate global account. So and I think one thing that I love to do, and I, I learned this from a previous manager of mine, is prioritising the term "no, but…" So it's delivering the no, being able to say no, which I admittedly was not great at early on in my career.

I've gotten much better at it. Um, but following a no with a but. So, "No, we can't put that on the Corporate global account, but here's a great opportunity for you to consider activating your employees or activating a local executive or activating a regional account." So I'd say have everything in writing, know your criteria, and get good at saying no, but.

I think I'm gonna get you a T-shirt that says that on it. I might sell some merch about, you know, great quotes that come out of podcasts, and I think that would be the key to success for many social media managers out there because it's hard. Like, it's… You know, and I did a whole podcast on this because, yeah, sure, you wanna say no, but then you're like, "Oh, I wanna be liked. I've gotta work with this person tomorrow or the next day," or, "They're more senior than me," or, you know, for a whole bunch of reasons, saying no is actually really tricky.

So I love the "No, but." Mm-hmm. I, I think that's gonna go into the merch store for sure. You recently shared on one of your posts, which I thoroughly enjoy, and I'll be making sure that the listeners have a link to go and connect or follow with you over on LinkedIn, but you shared a post that basically said you think that every brand should be, you know, kinda considering the play between organic, paid, executive, and employee content.

Can you talk us through what that looks like for CBRE? Like, how do you get those to work together? Yeah. I think this ties perfectly well into your last question of what piece of advice do I have for social media managers, and I touched on this a little bit in my intro, but, um, I think social media really needs to be thought of as an ecosystem.

I think it's a really common misconception for people to think, " I'll just post something on the corporate account, and that's the only thing that needs to happen," but really, that's leaving so much left on the table. Um, so I think really these three, or I guess four, segments need to be thought of as completely different functions. So how I see it is the corporate channel is kind of for company news and broad positioning. Again, from my perspective, it's a global audience.

Um, it's talking about things that are true for CBRE as an institution. For paid, there's a little bit more of a targeted, intentional purpose. You are able to reach an audience that you can't organically. So I can set the audience that I wanna reach, and I know it's gonna get in front of them, whereas organic content, that's not a guarantee.

So definitely more targeted, more niche, more intentional. For executives and I think employees all kind of clump together for the sake of it, but that's kind of where that point of view and expertise lies. I think, as mentioned earlier, there's a growing trend where people are trusting people more on social media. It's the way that- unfortunately and fortunately people are connecting these days.

And so I think that people are getting sick of hearing from brands. You know, again, there's still a purpose to brand content, but the people behind the brand are the ones who are going to share the perspectives, share the approaches, share the services, and share the products in a unique way that a brand often doesn't and can't. So really three different approaches there. And if the mistake I'm seeing the most often is when brands are kind of running these all in parallel, a little bit of a copy and paste approach the bigger opportunity is really sequencing them intentionally.

Do you like, put the leadership team versus your employees, do you literally treat them the same, or is there any differences? Like, obviously one may need more support than the other, but do you lead with the executives or lead with employees? Like, is there any kind of insights into what you've found works best from that perspective? Because- … on one hand I can see it if the leaders do it, then it makes it okay for employees, but they're also busy and running a business and maybe not necessarily jumping at the bit to try and get onto social.

Like, how do you negotiate between those two things? I think you hit the nail on the head, is that being realistic about workloads. Obviously I would love to treat everyone equally and kind of give my all to general employees as much as I do to my executives, but the reality is there's more visibility, there's less time on their hands. So the approach that I take, and I think it's nuanced for every organisation, but for mine, I take a tiered approach, and I segmented my employee activation into three tiers.

The top tier would be C-suite and executives, so that's really that, like, upper level has a lot of visibility, is really recognisable on social media. My second tier is what I call thought leaders. So these are people that are kind of in that middle ground. They're an expert on the subject matter at hand.

And then tier three is what I call general employees. So that could be anyone from brokers to property marketing teams. I treat each one differently. For tier one, it's the most hands-on, so I'm helping them develop copy.

I'm oftentimes publishing for them, and then I'm reporting on the performance to help show them. Like, "Hey, last week you shared our global data centres report on your LinkedIn, and it performed super well. Here's what I've learned from it and how we can emulate it moving forward." For thought leaders, what I tell them is, " You're an expert in your space, and I'm not gonna write social media copy for you because that seems silly.

I'm not an expert on this topic. You are. So instead, I'm gonna give you some prompts to consider. That way you're publishing a post that isn't just, 'Hey, CBRE shared a report.

Here's a link to it. You should go read it.' It's more intentional. It's more unique.

It's, 'I'm an expert. Here was my input on the report. Here are my takeaways. Here's what you can do next.'"

And then for general employees, just because I am a bit resource constrained, that's where I'm taking a more generalised approach. Depending on the priority of the activation at hand, I'll usually provide three to five different copy options for them. But one thing I really intentionally do is I put, I will physically put in little brackets and highlight where they should change information, because the last thing I want to see is 50 employees sharing the exact same copy across social media.

So that's kind of the tiered approach I take. It's not a perfect At the end of the day, I can email as many people as I want asking them to post, and it really is up to them, unless I have their login information. So it's a lot of effort, maybe not a ton of reward, but luckily the desire is growing, and so I hope that this tiered approach can only scale with that. I think you hit something on the head that it's not as easy as people make out on LinkedIn when you're scrolling the feed, you see a post that says, "People wanna do business with people.

People don't trust brands. It's all about people, people, people. Get all of your employees active" And apparently there must be some magic switch inside your companies that I've never found just yet where- Mm … those same employees and people are not jumping up and down going, "Please pick me to be a part of your program." So, I, I have a question for you around that.

Like, so obviously in the beginning, you may have had a whole bunch of people that were already active, and you were supporting them, and maybe some people that were willing volunteers. But I'd imagine at some point it gets to a, okay, that's done. How are we gonna grow this thing? Do you have any tips for, and keeping it realistic, about how you can actually make or invite other employees to become a part of this program and get them started?

Because I think if they're invisible right now, getting them started is the hardest piece of this puzzle. Like, what have you found in your experience? I think at the end of the day, you can't force someone to show up on social media. To be honest, I've been on so many calls where I'm, like, being told, 'You need to go support this person.'

And then I'll meet with this person, and they'll word for word tell me, I don't like social media,' or, 'I don't believe in social media.' And I'm like, 'Okay, great. I'm gonna move on to the next person on my list. I am not gonna force you.'

And so I think being realistic you can't… as they say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Same thing goes with social media. But one thing that I like to do is lead by example, um, whether that's me publishing content myself or supporting a very visible executive within my organisation and getting them more active if they're bought in. Um, I think the biggest hesitation that people say about posting more on social media, especially LinkedIn, is that it's cringey or it's embarrassing.

I'm like, so what? Like, that's what social media is at the end of the day across every platform. It's like, it's a little bit cringey, and it's a little bit embarrassing, but here we all are. And so I think once you kind of get over that hump, giving them a good example helps, whether that's yourself as the guinea pig or picking an executive that's bought in.

Um, and then also just being sustainable. You know, I work with some people who wanna post 10 times a month, and I work with some people who can only post four times a month, and the biggest advice I give to other people that ask, I'm like, "Do what's sustainable." Don't think that there's, like, a special number you need to hit. Test, learn.

Your audience is unique to you. What works for the broker sitting next to you might not work for the broker to your right. So- All of the above. Yeah, look, and I find that when I'm working with, you know, in my specific case, they're LinkedIn Company Page admins who are super active behind the scenes creating corporate content, but not necessarily out there creating their own personal brands or doing it on their own accounts.

What would you say to those people that would say, "Look, I don't have to be a good practitioner to be good at what I do"? Is there an element of your role that is lead by example that maybe they're missing out on? Because there's for and against in both camps. Like, I can see the people that say, "You don't have to do it," and then on the other hand I'm like actually, if you're not doing it, why should someone else do it?"

Like, You don't have the empathy for what it's like. Where do you sit in that, and what would you share with people who are the social media directors, managers, or page admins who aren't doing anything on their personal accounts? I don't know if I have any concrete advice for them, because as I said, I'm not gonna force anyone to be active on social. That is a complete personal decision.

Social media is one of those weird things where we do it personally, we do it professionally. If you don't wanna do it at all, that's fine. Like, I always make the joke, my husband's a broker at a competitor firm. It's like my fun little tidbit.

All my employees or all my teammates are probably like, "Oh, my God, Molly is saying that joke again." He does not post on social media, and he's in a business development role. I'm like, " the leads that you're missing out on," but I, I can't force him. That is his MO.

It was funny, I was speaking on a panel the other day and someone compared social media to, like, computers. And they were like, if someone's hesitant to use it, that's fine. Um- Yeah … they're gonna miss out on an opportunity and probably have to pa- play catch-up later, but, like, that is totally up to them. I think for me, funneling up to the larger conversation that- People-generated content is becoming so much more popular.

It helps me speak to what works. I'm testing and learning myself. I am posting on social media and again, husband joke, he always is like, "You're on social media a lot." And I'm like, "It's for work."

Um, But that's what I'm doing, I'm seeing, like, what are people posting, what's working on my account, what's not working, I'm testing different formats. That's how I'm learning because I have all the data for the corporate account, I don't have the data for a personal account unless it's coming from my own. So I see it as a growth opportunity, um, but if other people are finding different ways to grow, that's on them. Yeah, you do you, boo.

That's, you know, kind of what it comes down to. I, I think there's an element of there's the work approach to it and how it can help you in work, but I think right now for many of the listeners here, I think there's a reason to get out there and it- part of that is to build your own personal brand so if something, God forbid, happens and you lose your job, at least you have some visibility and a network to fall back on. So I, I get it from the corporate side and why you don't necessarily need to do it and no one's forcing anyone, but I also think as marketers out there now I get that you're so good at shining a spotlight on everything else but yourself, but I think in today's environment it's not so bad just every now and then to, turn that spotlight around.

But you and I crossed paths, I, I think it was, like, one of your posts that drew me to, uh, you know, reaching out and connecting with you because we're both part of the Company Pages aren't dying crew. And it's a pretty limited crew some days out there on LinkedIn land, so hence I was drawn like a moth to a flame, uh, to come and connect because you and I and my listeners are not gonna be surprised by this. Like, of course I'm on team Company Pages, have been for a long time, and I can see some of that shifting right now.

But can you share, like, what role does the Company Page play in your overall LinkedIn strategy? And I know you've got, like 150 pages or something out there, so you, you know, it's a big part of what you do. But I'm just curious, how do you see it working in your business? Yeah, it's a great question, and I'm fully in team Company Pages aren't dying.

Yes. I think when I see that opinion I'm like, "Are you just joining that opinion because it's popular right now, or do you actually believe it?" But that's a different conversation. I view the Company Page as the anchor.

I think it is and always will be. It's what is kind of establishing the legitimacy for the brand. It's where people, in my instance, go to understand what CBRE is, what we do. It's sort of that foundation that makes everything else credible.

So when a broker tags CBRE or an executive references our brand, the Company Page is what a new audience finds when they click through, um, which is probably what they're gonna be doing. So what I push back on usually is this idea that the Company Page should be doing everything. Its job isn't to generate leads or build relationships. That's what personal profiles do, and that's what they do better.

The Company Page is really about quality over volume, focused on educating the audience on what the brand is, um, that's not coming from a personal page. So I think, again, it's the anchor. It also helps to give employees something to talk about. A lot of times I'm told, "I don't know what to talk about.

I don't know what to share." Um, and employee advocacy is becoming a really growing need and like execution in 2026. And our employee advocacy program is completely fed by corporate content. So everything that goes out on our corporate channels is fed to our advocacy library.

People can peruse it, browse it. It's basically like a curated newsfeed just for CBRE content. So again, without a Company Page, we would have nothing to feed our advocacy sites, um, unless someone wants to volunteer to do it manually. Not me.

No, so I think it's always gonna… I call it… It's like the front porch. Figuratively you wanna use, the anchor, the front porch, it's really where people are gonna go to establish legitimacy around your brand Yeah, it's kind of funny, and shout-out to Ty Heath, who was the analogy queen that was like, "Yes, this is your front door with the page, and then the, you want them to come into the living room and have conversations with the people inside the house." So, uh, I love her, and shout-out to the B2B Institute because there's always so much cool stuff coming out from that team about how we can do this all better and how it all works together and, you know, it's something that I really enjoy.

But let's come back to that, you know, small, fun job that you have, which is there's around 150 Company Pages or related pages in your business. You mentioned that previous there was, like, 350. I'm rocking in a corner at the thought of that. But I know what it's like that somewhere in the world in a region, there's a team out there that's getting super excited and have just identified that everybody's hanging out on LinkedIn, and they should be there.

So they go to set up a new page full of enthusiasm, full of excitement, and on your side, you're trying to wrangle these things in and keep the brand in alignment. How do you manage that? And I- I've got a feeling it might be back to the T-shirt of no but. but yeah- Oh … just curious.

It is back to the T-shirt of no but. I do need that in a small, medium, large, and extra large for every day of the week. I think you hit the nail on the head in the sense that it is a symptom of people caring and getting excited about LinkedIn and seeing the opportunity there, which I love. So the intent and the instinct is right what I do is I say, "No, but."

So what I've done is very simple. I've laid out a four-slide deck where it's like, here's what it takes to manage a corporate account, and here's what it takes to manage a personal account. And the corporate account has, like, 10 different line items that you need to check off. Do you have someone that's able to publish every day, every single day in order to be active?

That's a LinkedIn recommendation, not a Molly Hopkins recommendation. Um, do you have someone that's able to review all comments and direct messages and can escalate if needed? If you have someone that's upset with customer service and is coming to your Instagram DMs, do you have someone that's there that's connected to corp comms to escalate and knows how to respond with a canned response that's already approved? Do you have a graphic designer?

Do you have a copywriter? Do you have someone that can create UTM links so you can do the reporting? Speaking of reporting, do you have a reporting dashboard? Do you know what an engagement rate is?

Do you know what a click-through rate is? So I try to educate them that publishing on social media is so much more than just publishing. I also have done a lot of A/B testing. I'm going back to being a little bit of a data nerd, and I think that's really helpful in social media.

We've done a lot of A/B testing where we will take the same post, we will publish it on the corporate account, we will publish it on a broker's profile. The corporate account will always get way more impressions. We've got 2 million followers. It's just, it's a huge audience, but we have 2 million followers because we've had a team deck- stacked against the account for four years.

And before that we had a free-for-all. It's been regularly active for years and years and years. We'll post the same message on the broker's account, and we have found that on average the broker's post gets 300% more clicks Um, so I use that data point to show them, like, what is your goal in posting in more social media? You want more team visibility, you want more lead generation, you want people to click on your profile, you want people to click on your website.

They're more likely to do that if it's coming from a person. And so having those data points ready has been super helpful because people can't argue against data. It's laid out for them. Every goal that you wanna achieve by creating a team page is going to be more easily achievable on your own account.

Yeah. So that's kind of how I've been approaching it lately, but we'll see. Look, it's interesting because I've worked on projects with clients, global teams, where, the advice was, yes, we should be consolidating these pages. For some clients, it's down into one.

Others, it might be, you know, half a dozen or so, depending how big the client is. And the fear from those regional teams is, "But what about us?" Because they do see that in your case there's 2 million followers, and of course we feel like if we put a post on there, all 2 million people are gonna see the post, all 2 million of the right people, of those local people, and trying to explain to people exactly in our dream worlds, every social media manager in the world wakes up to know that, oh, imagine if you did a post and all 2 million followers saw it.

Like, oh, wouldn't that be like a lovely land that we live in? Or that it got immediately sent directly to the target audience organically. Like, yes, we can wake up now because that day just does not exist. But I find if people don't work in the field, that's how they think that it works, is literally you post and it goes to everyone, and it's magic.

And then, you know, the worst posts of all are when somebody's got an event and I don't wanna bang on about this, but your posts say, "Come and see us at a stand at a, a show" never work, no matter how many followers are on the page. Like, honestly, like, they just don't work, and they are far better off somebody on their personal account going, "Hey, I'm going to this event," and I'm sure you've got so many examples of particular content that speak to that. Like, the data's there, right?

It's there, and I think you raise a really important point, and this has been my largest soapbox as of the past couple weeks. Yes, the global account has two million followers, so we will always have that kind of leverage. But one thing that we're noticing is that followers don't actually count when it comes to reach and impressions, it's the content. So like for instance, you and I were joking about how I just published something on my LinkedIn account, and I have about 3,500 followers, and I got 101,000 impressions.

Crazy. Our average impressions for our corporate account in April, I believe, was like 50,000. Yeah. So it just goes to show, like you can reach just as many, if not more people from a personal profile, and that's the beauty of LinkedIn specifically because it's a little bit different than Instagram, sort of like TikTok, but someone doesn't need to follow you to see your LinkedIn content.

It's being shown based on activity and engagement. Like there is a way, there's a spider web that your content can get caught in that that's what you want. And it can be really impactful despite how many followers you have. Hopefully people will test and learn and listen.

I think that's the best advice that we could give anyone to wrap up the episode, is that test and learn and be open. I call it the power of two. Get your employees and the brand working together. Have a conversation around where does this content belong?

Is it better suited on a profile? Is it better suited on the page? Should it be on both in different ways at different times at the same time? These are conversations that need to be had and I appreciate everything that you've shared today from the practical perspective.

Now I'm just gonna throw in one last question because I can 'cause it's, you know, my podcast, so that's the beauty of it. My question for you is this: Imagine that I'm the LinkedIn fairies and I've got my magic wand ready and I can grant you one new feature on LinkedIn that you wish existed and you can't have, uh, organic impressions 'cause not even this fairy's wand is ever gonna bring that back to a way, but what would you choose and why? So I'm actually so excited because the rumor is that this is gonna happen in the fall.

I think LinkedIn needs to start offering collaborative posts, so it's something that you can do on Instagram, it's something that you can do on TikTok where someone publishes a post and it, they invite a collaborator and it's shown on both feeds. I am being told from a close source at LinkedIn that this is a feature that they're rolling out in fall. Everyone knock on wood. That excites me the most because we're investing so heavily in our people and getting them to be more active, and I think a really easy way to sustain activity and get more visibility for them is to tap into everything that they want from the corporate account, so those two million global followers, those activity levels, that person that's there to monitor comments and monitor direct messages, but it's showing up on their account.

So I'm really excited. That shows to me that LinkedIn is investing in the employee advocacy piece that we're all working so hard to support with third-party tools, um, and making it a little bit easier right on the platform. So I think the fairy's listening. I've heard it's coming.

I'm excited to see it come to fruition. I hope that you're right because we've seen it with thought leader ads that they take off, they work, so, there's a big push by LinkedIn around B2B creators specifically, and that is your employees. It doesn't have to be someone random. It can be from people within your team.

So I like the direction that things are heading. I hope that more and more tools come that way, uh, and I can't wait to see if this prediction is right. Sounds like it's going to be, and that makes me even more excited, so thank you for sharing. What a conversation.

Thank you. Our T-shirts are on their way, no buts. And to my listeners don't forget, I'm gonna put the details on how you can follow the pages and follow Molly as well because I enjoy your content. Thank you so much for all the perspectives that you share about what it's like, a day in the life of a social media director.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me. This was great. And listeners, until next week, cheers.