Behind the Post Oktopost

With no experience in design, Sam Tyrrell rose to the title of King of Canva at AlixPartners and went Behind the Post to tell you everything you need to know to master Canva yourself. 

Sam walks us through the process they have in place when creating content on Canva, including how he trains his wider marketing team to create designs, what the approval process looks like, and how he ensures all designs stay on-brand.

Being part of a company big on employee advocacy and personal branding, Sam is passionate about translating this company value through visuals as well. He walks us through how he encourages his colleagues to use design to help their employees showcase their personalities online. 

Sam also entered fire-round questions to share his best practices, go-to features, design pet peeves, and the biggest lessons he’s learned along the way to taking the throne.

If you use Canva, you won’t want to miss this episode. 



Hot Topics:


Go-to features on Canva that everyone should know about


Design best practices that will take your final designs from mediocre to masterpiece


Which design tools he uses besides Canva and what for


How AlixPartners’ designs differ for their corporate social media pages versus their employee advocacy program



Subscribe to our newsletter: The B2B Social Compass.

In this episode, Joanna Braunold goes Behind the Post to share how social intent data helps both the sales and marketing departments at TytoCare achieve their goals.

Tune in for a conversation about why sales and marketing teams need to be best friends, the structure in place to keep the teams on the same page at TytoCare, and how social media marketing brings the two departments together. Yes – you read that right. 

Joanna dives into the marketing initiatives set to equip their sales teams with the tools they need to engage with more leads and turn prospects into customers. She explains how she implemented these strategies, from getting their sales teams actively involved in social selling to understanding how they can use social intent data to strike up relevant, meaningful conversations with prospects.

Beyond empowering her sales team, Joanna shares how social intent data helps her create marketing content that resonates with their audience. With a B2C presence on social media as well as B2B, they discovered that many of their B2B leads were interacting with their B2C accounts. Learning from this, Joanna experimented with posting B2C content on their B2B channels, and the results did not disappoint!



Hot Topics:


The importance of aligning marketing and sales teams, and how they do it at TytoCare


Using social intent data to create content that aligns with audience interests


How to pass along social intent data to the sales team, and how sales use it to boost their closed-won rates

NXP Semiconductors has recently been experimenting and refining its LinkedIn Live strategy, with incredible results. In this episode of Behind the Post, Vanessa Lowe, the Head of Social Media at NXP, offers an in-depth look into the entire process – from beginning to end – of launching a LinkedIn Live strategy. 

Vanessa shares her insights on the key elements of a successful LinkedIn Live strategy, covering the highs and lows, along with invaluable tips to guide you through your own launch. She discusses the promotion techniques they use to build anticipation for their LinkedIn Live sessions, shares a behind-the-scenes look at the recording process, and reveals the third-party streaming tool they rely on to broadcast to LinkedIn.

While it may seem like a challenging undertaking, some parts of the process have turned out to be surprisingly straightforward. Vanessa was (rightfully) impressed by the level of success they achieved, indicating that the benefits of their LinkedIn Live strategy significantly outweighed the hurdles. In fact, their LinkedIn Live sessions generate an average of over 50,000 impressions, while their regular posts yield approximately 8,000—an astonishing difference. 

This episode serves as a comprehensive roadmap for anyone looking to master LinkedIn Live, with Vanessa Lowe providing a glimpse into what makes their approach so successful.



Hot Topics:


What does recording day look like and how do they handle live real-time engagement


The equipment needed and the third-party tool they use for streaming


How LinkedIn Live helps them achieve their overall marketing goals

On this episode of Behind the Post, Alina sat down with not one, but two, brilliant marketing experts from Similarweb – Senior Social Media Manager, Itay Gross, and Content Marketing Manager, Faith Preminger. With double the guests, you bet you’ll walk away with double the expertise. 

They delved into how their content and social media teams work together for success and how marketing processes work at Similarweb.

With a passion for B2B social in common, the trio discussed why social media is so valuable for B2B brands today and the importance of using B2C tactics to create an engaging, fun, and memorable B2B strategy. 

Armed with unique insights their Similarweb product offers, Itay shares how he incorporates data-driven storytelling about trending topics into their strategy to harness the attention of B2B professionals scrolling through LinkedIn. *Spoiler alert* – their audience loved their data insights on Taylor Swift’s impact on the Kansas City Chiefs’ website traffic during the Super Bowl! 

As big enthusiasts of the power of employee advocacy on their wider social media strategy, they unpacked everything a social media manager would want to know when implementing an advocacy program and keeping up its momentum. The duo got candid about the challenges they encountered along the way, and the tips and tricks they learned that resulted in a successful strategy. 

Whether you're a marketer, a social media enthusiast, or simply curious about what goes on behind the post, there's much to learn from the experiences of these two experts.

Sarah Hankins takes the hot seat on this episode of Behind the Post with host Alina Dallal to talk all things employee advocacy at CBIZ. With an impressive cohort of 2,700 advocates, Sarah dives into how she runs their successful advocacy program and how she plans to keep their momentum going throughout 2024.

From finding the right balance of content to the types she creates, Sarah dives all in with the best practices you should implement for any advocacy program. She also shares her top tips for keeping advocates engaged, including quarterly training and gamification ideas to hold their interest in the long-term – she even created her own spin on Spotify Wrapped to create an “Oktopost Wrapped” campaign at the end of 2023 to showcase their results to her team and shoutout there top performing advocates.

Communication is the foreground of any successful employee advocacy program. Sarah candidly shares how she supports her team while also learning from her advocates on ways she can better her program and continue to create more relevant content.

Running the employee advocacy program led Sarah to trade Zoom calls for an incredible tour of CBIZ’s offices across the U.S., which they called the “Oktopost Roadshow”. With pitstops to 12 offices across the country, Sarah met her advocates in person to further encourage participation and provide them with the guidance they needed to become champion advocates.

Even if we aren’t all lucky enough to tour the States on a company budget, Sarah leaves a multitude of practical tips that we can still use to train, support, and coach our advocates for success. 



Hot Topics:


How to write for different personas in your organization


Why communication and support is so integral for a successful program


How you can learn from your advocates to improve your strategy


Tips and tricks that help her keep her advocates engaged

In this episode of Behind the Post, host Alina welcomes Etien Yanev, the Senior Social Media Manager at Payhawk. As the author of the book “Digital Marketing Compass” (currently only available in Bulgarian), and with 12 years of marketing experience under his belt, Etien shares all the expertise he’s picked up along the way. 

From content creation to video creation, Etien dives into all the use cases AI can provide to help scale social media content as well as help us serve our audiences better. He reveals his favorite tools to use and best practices for using them effectively. 

As well as showing his passion for AI, Etien also shines a light on the importance of leveraging your employees and executives as brand ambassadors to humanize your brand and maximize your impact. 



Hot topics:


Best practices for using AI to its full potential


His top AI tools for content creation


The significance of personal brands to build relationships with your audience