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8 Ways To Promote Your Facebook Page Successfully

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8 Ways To Promote Your Facebook Page Successfully

​​Whether or not you believe that Facebook is still the leader of the social media pack, there’s no arguing that it remains an incredibly powerful tool for businesses aiming to enhance their online presence.

However, creating a Facebook Page for your business is only the first step in your Facebook marketing journey.

The real power of the platform lies in nailing effective Facebook Page promotion so that you can reach users and generate awareness and trust for your business.

This article is tailored for those ready to elevate their Facebook Page’s visibility and effectiveness.

Whether you’re a startup just entering the world of social media or an established brand aiming to boost interaction, we’ll explore the essentials of promoting your Facebook Page to capitalize on the vast potential of the platform.

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Should I Still Be Using Facebook For My Business?

The short answer is yes, you should still be using Facebook for your business.

Let’s look at a few reasons why.

With its staggering 3.049 billion monthly active users, Facebook remains the world’s most widely used social media platform.

Yes, newer platforms are on the rise, but none offer the extensive reach that Facebook does – which is why it’s such a critical platform for businesses that want to connect with a vast and diverse audience.

Secondly, Facebook’s engagement has remained fairly robust.

The average Android user spends over 18 hours per month using the app, and according to SimilarWeb, Facebook.com is the third most visited website in the U.S.

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This is nothing to sneeze at – and it signifies that businesses have ample opportunity to capture the attention of potential customers on the platform.

If you need more convincing, consider that 54.3% of Facebook users aged 16 to 64 report using the platform to follow or research brands and products. So, Facebook doesn’t just play a role in brand discovery but in the pre-purchase phase.

Now that we’ve convinced you that you should be on Facebook, let’s look at how to make the most of your Facebook Page.

Top 8 Ways To Promote Your Facebook Page

So, whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been active on Facebook for a while, one thing is always true: getting your content in front of new audiences – and convincing those people to follow you – is key to leveraging Facebook effectively.

The good news is that there is more than one way to do that.

You could spend money on Facebook ads, which can work well, but there are also plenty of other easy, free ways to boost your Facebook following.

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1. Give Your Page A Personal Touch

Creating a Facebook Page for your business is an excellent way to give your brand a more human feel.

While a “fan Page” is slightly different from the personal profiles assigned to individuals, it still allows people to follow your posts and engage with your content.

By creating a Page for your company, you’re putting a face to the name – and that’s powerful.

These days, the emphasis on authenticity and personal connection in social media is more critical than ever – yes, for brands, too. Users seek to interact with businesses that feel genuine and relatable, not just like corporate entities.

So remember that, while your Page serves professional purposes, the content should resonate on a personal level. Share stories that reflect your brand’s values, highlight customer experiences, or provide behind-the-scenes glimpses into your operations.

Consider this example from Patagonia, which leverages Facebook to showcase its commitment to environmental sustainability and the values that drive the brand.

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In this post below, the company highlights a partner and community organizer who is working to make strides in sustainability.

Screenshot from Facebook.com, March 2024

Here, Patagonia isn’t just selling a product; it’s sharing values and stories, engaging millions of people worldwide.

When promoting your products or services, try to frame them in a way that addresses your audience’s needs or interests.

Explain the value and relevance to your followers, and encourage them to see your offerings as solutions to their problems or ways to enhance their lives.

2. Use High-Quality Visual Content

The power of visual storytelling continues to dominate social media – after all, who doesn’t love visuals that are easy on the eyes?

And in a world where even common modern smartphones can capture beautiful imagery – and there is a proliferation of simple editing tools and apps available to us – users don’t just prefer high-quality photos and videos; they expect them.

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Your Facebook Page should reflect this shift towards visual excellence if you want to captivate your audience effectively.

Facebook has preferred dimensions for its images, which we’ll go over below, but beware that it will compress photos to their desired size.

This can stretch images, so to achieve the best results, start with the best possible quality and maintain control over the final presentation.

Prioritize crisp, clear, and engaging visuals that embody your brand’s essence and messaging. For uploading, PNG and JPEG formats are typically the best formats.

Focus on two main visual elements:

  • Your Profile: This encompasses your profile picture and cover photo. For the best Facebook cover photo quality, set the size to 851 pixels by 315 pixels. For your profile photo, make the size 196 by 196 pixels.
  • Your Posts: The content you share significantly impacts your brand’s perception. For post images, we recommend you aim for 1200 pixels by 630 pixels to ensure your visuals appear perfectly on both mobile and desktop feeds. You can also experiment with other dimensions, such as 1080 pixels by 1080 pixels (square), or 1080 pixels x 1350 pixels (portrait). For Facebook Stories, the recommended image size is 1080 pixels x 1920 pixels – a vertical format, just like Instagram Stories.

Using high-quality visuals not only enhances your Facebook Page’s aesthetic, but also significantly increases the likelihood of engagement and follower growth.

However, substance is as critical as style. Pair your visuals with valuable content tailored to your audience’s interests and needs.

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GoPro is an example of a brand that uses beautiful, high-quality visual content on Facebook to engage its followers. See this example below, which, impressively, leverages user-generated content.

1717214162 967 8 Ways To Promote Your Facebook Page SuccessfullyScreenshot from Facebook.com, March 2024

3. Enable The “Call To Action” Button

As a business, you want your Facebook Page to enhance awareness of your brand and drive followers – but ultimately, you also want to turn those followers into active consumers.

You can do so by utilizing the call-to-action (CTA) button on your Facebook Page.

By adding a CTA button to your Page, you can direct your audience to where they should go next, including key business goals like shopping, booking appointments, or contacting your company.

Select a CTA that aligns with your primary objectives and consider integrating them with Facebook’s features, such as Groups or Messenger, to keep interactions within the platform.

For example, National Geographic uses its CTA to encourage users to sign up for a subscription to the magazine.

National Geographic on FBScreenshot from Facebook.com, March 2024

4. Join Or Create A Facebook Group

As we just discussed, creating and joining Facebook Groups is a phenomenal way to interact with others, let people come to you, and increase visibility and authority for your brand.

To get started, identify groups that align with your business’s industry, values, or target market. Search for fitting keywords on Facebook and discover some groups to join.

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After that, make sure to engage by leaving comments and reactions to posts. By participating actively and making valuable contributions to the Group, you can foster recognition and trust within these communities.

It’s worth noting that only some Groups allow businesses to join. For Groups that only allow individuals, you must join from your personal Facebook account and promote your brand and Page via comments.

Alternatively, you can create your own Facebook Group. This has become an increasingly popular trend among brands, as it allows you to nurture your own community of like-minded people and start conversations.

When creating a Facebook Group, be sure to provide value first. Rather than building a Group around your brand, build a community around something related to your brand – and structure it as a resource hub where members can find support and tips and network with others.

This way, you’re putting genuine support, engagement, and community-building before sales efforts.

A great example of this is Canva’s Canva Design Community Facebook Group. This official Group from Canva is a place for users to discuss not only the product and get tips and insights, but also anything design-related.

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By keeping the Group broad and welcoming all kinds of design-focused discussions, Canva has built a community of over 394,000 members.

Canva Community on FBScreenshot from Facebook.com, March 2024

5. Expand Your Facebook Page’s Reach

Let’s revisit your current network: a.k.a., the people you already know.

Leveraging your existing network is a fundamental strategy for promoting your Facebook Page.

Whether it’s your friends, peers, or followers across other different social platforms, it’s time to utilize them. These people are already connected to your business and are often willing to support your endeavors.

So, what should you do? Promote, promote, promote.

Start by integrating your Facebook Page promotion across all of your communication channels. Post it to your Instagram and put it in your Instagram bio.

Share updates with personal contacts, embed a link to it on your website, and include its link in your email signature.

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If you’ve created any Facebook Groups, make sure you’re directing members back to your main Page for additional content.

Wherever you can, make sure the road leads back to you and your Facebook Page. This will help enhance your visibility and follower count.

In this example, you can see how the Australian meal delivery brand The Dinner Ladies includes a link directly to its Facebook Page in its email newsletter.

GmailScreenshot from Gmail, March 2024

6. Use Facebook Stories And Facebook Live

Both Facebook Stories and Facebook Live can help you establish a sincere connection with your audience.

The cousin of Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories are ideal for sharing short, engaging snippets of your day or quick business updates. This allows for a more casual interaction with your followers.

These fleeting posts can be a mix of personal insights, time-sensitive promotions, or behind-the-scenes looks at your brand.

Facebook Live, on the other hand, offers an intimate, real-time connection that makes viewers feel as though they’re right there with you and part of the moment.

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Try leveraging Live to broadcast important events, share updates, or host Q&A sessions. This direct engagement creates a sense of transparency and community between your company and your audience.

The Wall Street Journal is one example of a brand that utilizes Facebook Stories to offer quick updates to its followers. It posts snapshots of the stories of the day, encouraging readers to learn more.

Dune sequel Facebook StoriesScreenshot from Facebook, March 2024

7. Maintain A Regular Schedule: Consistency Is The Secret Sauce

The key to success in any endeavor – whether it’s becoming debt-free, building meaningful relationships, or improving your personal fitness – lies in consistency.

This is true on Facebook, too.

Something essential to remember if you want to gain and retain followers is to make sure you stick to a regular schedule.

Not only will this keep your brand fresh in the minds of your audience – but an active and up-to-date Page signals to new visitors that they can expect regular, valuable content, encouraging them to follow.

Try to post about one to two times a day, or at least a few times per week, to maintain a steady stream of content without overwhelming your followers.

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If you’re too busy to stick to a tight posting schedule, which you very well might be, there’s no reason to fear.

There are many ways to automate posts to your Facebook Page, from plugins on WordPress to software made specifically for the task.

8. Engage Your Audience And Peers

Doesn’t getting all those reactions and comments on your content feel good? You’re not the only one who feels that way; nearly everybody does – including your audience.

Active participation on Facebook, beyond just updating your own Page, can significantly enhance your visibility and credibility. Make an effort to connect with individuals and other businesses that align with your brand’s values and interests.

Do not be self-promotional; instead, post real, thoughtful comments. People appreciate authenticity and are more likely to check out your Page to see what you’re all about.

Don’t be afraid to message peers or influencers within your industry, too. Most, if not all, have been in your shoes before and might be open to connecting and sharing insights with others just getting started – especially those who show genuine interest and respect for their work.

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Try finding a successful account you admire and send them a quick message. You never know what could happen if you hear back.

It Is Still Possible To Increase Your Facebook Page’s Following

Time to stop worrying about promoting your Page on Facebook.

Deliver consistent, high-quality content, interact with others, and use the existing Facebook tools at your disposal, and you’ll go far.

With a new set of tools under your belt, it’s time to step out into the not-so-scary world of Facebook and run a Page.

Keep at it, and soon, you’ll start to see the results you’ve been craving!

More resources:

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Featured Image: JUVART/Shutterstock

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How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

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Compression can be used by search engines to detect low-quality pages. Although not widely known, it's useful foundational knowledge for SEO.

The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.

Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.

What Is Compressibility?

In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.

TL/DR Of Compression

Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

  • Identify Patterns:
    A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases
  • Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
    The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size.
  • Shorter References Use Less Bits:
    The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.

A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.

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Marc Najork

One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.

Dennis Fetterly

Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.

Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.

Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

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“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”

The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.

They write:

“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.

…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.

Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.

The researchers concluded:

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“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”

But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:

“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.

Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:

95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.

More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”

The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.

Insight Into Quality Rankings

The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.

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The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.

The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.

This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:

“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.

For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”

So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.

Combining Multiple Signals

The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.

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The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:

“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”

Key Insight:

Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.

What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.

Takeaways

We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.

Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:

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  • Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
  • Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
  • Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
  • In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
  • When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
  • Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
  • Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.

Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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Google publishes new documentation for how to use Google Trends for search marketing

Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.

The new guide has six sections:

  1. About Google Trends
  2. Tutorial on monitoring trends
  3. How to do keyword research with the tool
  4. How to prioritize content with Trends data
  5. How to use Google Trends for competitor research
  6. How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment

The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.

Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.

To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.

The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.

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Google explains:

“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.

What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?” 

Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.

Let’s go!

OUR HUGE SCREEN

CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF

It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.

 

OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!

 

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GREAT MUSIC

 

AMAZING GOODIES

 

SELFIE BATTLE

Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!

 

THAT BELL

Everybody’s just waiting for this one.

 

STICKER WALL

AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!

 

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There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!



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