Transcript
The B2B LinkedIn Playbook: Credibility, Content, and Clients
My name is Rich Brooks, and I am the president here of flyte new media, and I am a big fan of LinkedIn. It's one of the only social media platforms that I still enjoy using.
And so for the next hour or so, I want to share with you some of the ways that you can get more out of it. Today our presentation is the B2B LinkedIn Playbook: Credibility, Content, and Clients. The goal is to help you better understand how LinkedIn works and how you can make it work for you and your business.
I've broken down today's presentation into three main sections. The first part is we're going to talk about your profile, which is about your credibility. Even though LinkedIn is considered to be a B2B business to business platform, it's really a person-to-person platform. Whether someone is reaching out to you, responding to your request to connect, or just doing due diligence, your profile is where they go to better understand you. This is your tent pole for all things LinkedIn, and there's little point in doing the other work that we're going to talk about if you haven't yet optimized your profile.
The next section is the content or your visibility. We're going to be talking about how to determine what types of content you should be sharing, how to share it, and how to get the most eyes on it you can.
And lastly, we'll look at prospecting, how to find appropriate connections, whether they be employees, vendors, partners, or anything else. We'll talk about how to increase your chances of making a valuable connection and how to take things to the next level. So that's what we're going to be talking about today.
But there are a few things that I won't be covering today. This is our non-agenda. First up, is company pages. It's not that they don't have any value, it's just that their value compared to your own profile’s value is tiny company pages are important to have, but once you set them up, there's not currently a lot to do with them except to post from them.
And unless you're a huge company that everybody wants to hear from or everybody wants to work for, few people will care, will follow, or will even see your posts. I keep hoping that LinkedIn makes changes to company pages to make them more valuable, but I've been hoping for that for close to two decades, so I'm not going to hold my breath.
That's not to say that you shouldn't have a company page. I do think it's just one of those things like table stakes that you have to have, and you should post from maybe once a week or so, but it's not where we're going to spend our time today.
The next non-topic is LinkedIn ads. Not that they're not valuable, they're absolutely valuable. We love them here at flyte. LinkedIn's targeting tools are great for B2B sales, but it feels like LinkedIn ads is its own topic, and potentially a different audience. So stay tuned for another free webinar from me about LinkedIn ads.
And lastly, Sales Navigator, or really any paid level of LinkedIn. Again, powerful tool. I use it. I like it. But I wanted to focus today on what we could do for free. Perhaps we'll cover and do a deep dive on Sales Navigator at some webinar in the future.
So for those of you who don't know who I am, my name is Rich Brooks. I'm the president and founder of flyte new media, which I started back in 1997. I just saw something today about how AOL is finally shutting down their dial up services, which I didn't even know still existed, but I'm feeling all nostalgic because that really was the beginning of my interest in the internet. And in some ways, the beginning of my company.
We're a digital agency. We do branding, web design, and digital marketing. We're located here in Portland, Maine, and feel free to reach out to me afterwards if you have any of those needs. I'm also the founder of the Agents of Change, a weekly podcast, a usually annual conference, and sometimes we put on some other events as well all about digital marketing. I'm also the tech guru on 207, where I do news stories on technology, hard hitting news stories like how to take better pictures with your cell phones. And actually this morning I was over there talking about wearables.
And then finally, I wrote a book called, The Lead Machine- The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing. So in short, this is my playground. I love spending time thinking about entrepreneurship, small to medium sized businesses, digital marketing, and I focus a lot of my time on LinkedIn. So let's dive in.
And again, we're going to start with the profile. To stand out on LinkedIn, you really do need to start with your profile. You don't want to be doing anything else until it's been optimized. People are going to check out your profile for a number of different reasons, but especially after you reach out to connect with them. So if prospecting is part of your purpose, you're going to want to leverage your profile to build credibility and trust.
I want to kind of walk our way down through the profile to talk about how we can optimize it, because I see a lot of people set up a LinkedIn profile and then never touch it again.
Your profile pick and your cover image are the first thing people are going to see when they come to your profile. Since most people absorb visuals before words, it's important to set the stage correctly. Your profile picture should be a professional looking shot. That doesn't mean you have to hire professional photographer, although it's great if you can.
What you want to avoid is an image of your company logo, your favorite sports team, your dog, you and your spouse, or a party pic where someone's arm is around your shoulder, but they've been cropped out of the picture. Sure, there are a few exceptions to this rule, but there are very few and far between.
For most of us, just a nice photo of our face where people can recognize us is perfect. The worst sin, no photo at all. When a profile comes without a photo, I, and just about everybody else, will assume that it's a bot or a scammer. Most people get the profile picture right. I'm amazed at how many people ignore the even bigger image called the cover image or header image. Some people stick with the default cover image provided by LinkedIn, but that just communicates that you don't really understand the platform or you're not very active on the platform and maybe aren't worth talking to.
One step up from that is changing the cover image but making it something random that's not relevant to you or your business. Like a photo of the main coast or a bunch of colored pencils. If you're not sure what to put up there, maybe your company can provide a branded cover image, and then you can go with that. If you're in charge of your company, you should actually provide a branded cover image that any employee can use if they want to. You shouldn't force them to use that image. It's their profile, not yours, but many employees are happy to put up the company logo behind them.
If you're on your own, you're trying to establish yourself as an expert in your field. Just make sure that your cover image reflects that. Consider layering over text to get that message across. You should consider this to be a highway billboard. You want to use it to catch people's attention, but not to have to read so much text that they drive off the side of the road trying to understand what you offer.
As you can see, I use an image of me speaking on stage along with the tagline of speaker, author, and consultant, I also include my two brands, flyte new media, and The Agents of Change. You can edit your cover image by clicking on the edit icon when you're logged in. You only see this on your own account and when you're logged in. So if you click on that, you get this little pop-up menu.
Now it's interesting, when I was taking these screenshots was really in the last week I saw that LinkedIn has a new feature where you can create a slideshow. This is a premium only feature. I have not yet explored it yet, I didn't want to kind of mess things up right before my big presentation. But that is something that I'll be looking forward to using and seeing if that does help tell a better story.
To edit your profile picture, all you need to do is just click on the image itself, and then you get a little popup where you can add, edit, delete. There are a couple of different frames, such as looking for work or open to work, I think it is, or ready to hire. Something along those lines. So there's a few different messages that you can put up there as well.
As we look a little bit further down the header image, you can see that there's that block of text. And this is, there's a lot of information in here. I'll just point out a couple of keyword things. One is your headline. And before we dive into that, I want to say that one important thing to keep in mind with LinkedIn is the SEO, the search engine optimization of your page. You want to include appropriate keywords throughout the page, so when someone's searching for you or searching for someone with your skillset, LinkedIn can recommend you.
So you want it to be keyword rich. You want to craft a concise, keyword rich headline that clearly states who you are, what you do, and the value you bring, particularly highlighting your top skills and areas of expertise. So mine is “helping you generate more business online through SEO social media and digital ads and websites that convert. Let's chat.”
Below that, I strongly recommend that you put in a geographic area, whether it's a city, state. City or state is really what I would recommend. And then you can see below, everybody can see how many followers you have and then also how many connections you have until you hit over 500.
Once you get to 500, then they just start showing over 500. So one of my recommendations is that you really try and get to at least 500 connections so that it looks, again, more lived in, and it gives your profile a little bit more credibility.
Then you can also see that my company flyte new media appears, and you'll notice the flyte new media is logo is there. And then the college I attended, and again, Skidmore College. And again, the Skidmore logo is there as well. We'll talk about that in just a moment. So if you want to make any changes to this lower part or anything down below, what you're going to do is just click on this little edit icon over here in this section, and that's going to bring up the edit in information.
And you can see here that although some of the settings are premium, really most of this is available to everybody. You can update your name if you want to, if you have a difficult to pronounce names, something tougher than Rich Brooks. You can actually record that so people can understand how to pronounce your name. If that's an issue with you, you have to do that on a mobile device. If you want to include pronouns, you can do that here.
This is where you can change your headline, and you'll notice that on a lot of these fields you'll see with AI, I'm not a big fan of this. It's not that I don't love AI, I absolutely do. I just, if I'm going to use AI for something like this, which I wouldn't, but I would probably use ChatGPT or Claude, I wouldn't necessarily use the AI tool that's on LinkedIn.
One of the things about LinkedIn that you want to do is stand out, and I'm just concerned that the AI on LinkedIn is not as advanced and it's going to start making everything very vanilla for you. So that's not what I would use. I would really make it your own.
Rich, can I just jump in one sec?
Yes, of course.
Can somebody in the chat, are you guys able to see the presentation? Somebody commented. Sorry, but are you only sharing your camera? It says you are screen sharing. Okay.
Okay. I apologize to the person who can only see me. What a terrible fate. All right. Just wanted to confirm, but I'll make sure you get the slides afterwards if you want to look away from the screen. I would totally understand that. Or just try logging out and logging back in. Okay. All good, on with the show.
So you may have multiple current positions. Like for example, I work at flyte, but then I also have The Agents of Change. I'm also on 207. So there you may have multiple jobs that are currently current, or if you sit on a board or something like that, this is where you can choose what is the job that you want to show at the top of that page. So you choose your industry, you can choose your school. And this is an important thing both for your business and your school.
You saw earlier how I had the icons next to my current position and my school. That's because as I started typing out in this example, Skidmore College, I didn't type out Skidmore College and hit return. I started typing out Skidmore. And when a dropdown came and I saw Skidmore as one of my options, I clicked on that to choose it.
That's really important because that's going to put that icon next to your school or your business, depending on which one you're using. But the other thing it does is it actually connects you to the school. So LinkedIn doesn't think you just created a business called, flyte new media, or created a business called, Skidmore or whatever the right ones are for you. It helps you make the connections with other people who might work in that business or other people may have gone to the school. And so it's really important to choose from that pull down menu.
Then you can choose your location. Then there's also, if you have one of the premium versions like I have, Sales Navigator. You can create a custom button down at the bottom there, as you can see here. So you click on that and then you can choose from these options and then put in the URL that you want to drive traffic to. So on mine, visit my website. You click on that, and it takes you to takeflyte.com.
As you move down the page, there are some other things that you really want to pay attention to. One of the ones that people just almost ignore or pay a little attention to is the ‘about’ section. You can have up to about 2,000 plus characters in this area. And some of the big problems that I see out there is people either not using it or writing one to two sentences when they have so much room that they can put content into, or speaking in the third person.
This is your profile. Think about Facebook or Instagram. You would never talk about yourself in the third person. What a lot of people will recommend is put in all your skills and things like that. That's not bad advice at all. You should. This is another opportunity for you to optimize for those LinkedIn searches. So make sure anything that you want to be found for the keywords that you think somebody might search for gets into your ‘about’ section. This is a great place to put your keywords. There's no formatting at all. No bold, no italicized, no links in here.
However, as you can see from mine, you can include emojis, so you can make bulleted lists by using emojis and things like that. You may think I've overused emojis. That's your call. I think I've used just the right amount, but whatever you feel comfortable with, just feel free to really blow out this ‘about’ section. Use up all the characters you can and maybe have a call to action at the end. People can't click on that call to action, but you might invite them to make a connection or reach out to you or call you on your work number, whatever it may be.
As we scroll further down the page, another section that a lot of people don't even have enabled is your featured section. And I think this is a great section. You have a lot of opportunity here to put in some of your best materials. So think about this as a mini portfolio. When you have a newsletter, like I do, that becomes the first section over there. You can see it on your left, the news section. But everything else I've added manually, I've chosen to feature these.
And you can click on this little plus sign, and then you can see, you can add a post, a newsletter, an article, a link or media such as maybe a slide deck, a sales deck that you have, something like that. So this is a great way, again, just building out your portfolio on this page.
Below that is your activity. Now that's driven by what you're doing on LinkedIn, so you don't have a whole lot of control over that on the page. It just gets fed from your feed and your activity. When you visit other people's profiles, it gives you a good sense of who they are. So same thing, you really want to think about the stuff that you're posting and engaging with on LinkedIn so people see what you're all about as well.
The next section is experience. And again, this is another great place to be putting in your keywords, your skills, what you do, who you help. And you can see I've just run through some of the different jobs that I've had over the years. Get great opportunity to fill out your profile and get those keywords in there.
And then we scroll down to skills. There is an education system. I don't have a whole lot to say about that. But skills, you can choose what skills you want. And when I first got into this, LinkedIn had chosen some really obscure skills for me. So I went in and I deleted all the ones that weren't relevant to my business, and I added in the ones that I thought were relevant. And then people just tend to endorse you for your skills over time. I don't spend a whole lot of time here, but it is one of the signals that LinkedIn looks at to better understand who you are, who they should recommend you to, so on and so forth.
Speaking of recommendations, I do spend a little bit more time and energy down here. Most people will talk about how you should go out and get recommendations, and that's not a bad idea. If you're looking to get known for something, you might ask friends and colleagues to write little recommendations for your page, and they would appear here in your recommendations.
But I actually think the power of recommendations is in the giving, and not in the receiving. And the reason I say that is because if you are giving unsolicited recommendations to people, if they request it and you want to give one, yes, they're going to be happy with you. But I found that when I just am like, wow, that person did a really good job on that project and I recommend them. LinkedIn, of course, sends him a message. “Rich Brooks has recommended you. Would you like to put this recommendation on your page?” It's one of those unexpected things that happen and they're usually very grateful. Sometimes I get a recommendation in response. That's not necessarily what I'm looking for, but it does give them a good feeling, and that is usually just a positive thing in business anyway. So again, the power of the recommendations is in giving and not receiving.
And the last thing that I want to talk about as we finish up the optimization of your profile, is back up at the top of the page in the right-hand column, there are these two options. Profile language is pretty self-explanatory, but the public profile and URL is something that a lot of people don't know too much about. If you look at, you can see right here, my public profile is linkedin.com/therichbrooks. Originally it was Rich Brooks and then 12 or 13 random numbers in a row. That doesn't look good on a business card. No one's going to remember it. But if I just tell people I'm ‘The Rich Brooks’ on LinkedIn, that's very easy for people to find. They can just type that in or it'll come up.
So I recommend if you haven't yet, to go in and grab a vanity URL or a custom URL, make it your own, and then you can start using it other places. The only caveat to this is if you've been publishing or linking to your current LinkedIn URL and you update it to something more branded like I have, those links no longer work and there's no email, there's no link forwarding on this. Not that that's not a big problem for most people, but just something to keep in the back of your mind. So that's all about optimizing your profile.
Now let's shift gears and talk about your content strategy. What type of content should you be posting to LinkedIn? Posting on LinkedIn isn't brain surgery, but you should still have a strategy in place. In the same way that you don't post every photo you've ever taken onto Instagram, you want to present a curated version of your genius here on LinkedIn. So here's how we do this.
First of all, it's important to understand your ICP or your ideal customer or client persona, depending on how you look at them. Who are the people you want to be doing business with? What are they like? What are their pain points like? Understanding that can drive a lot of your content strategy.
The next thing is to do your research. Find the people who are speaking to your audience already. Take a look at the kind of content they're sharing and seeing what their engagement levels are like, what's working for them and what's not working for them. This is just good competitive research.
And then lastly, you want to identify content gaps. What are content gaps? This is something more of a search engine optimization phrase, but what are the questions, concerns, or issues that your ICPs are dealing with that aren't getting a lot of attention, aren't getting a lot of conversation? So let's dig a little deeper on this.
Alright, so if you've ever done any search engine optimization, any SEO, you should know a little bit about content gaps. What we're trying to do is just find those things that people aren't talking about enough that our ICPs care about. So some of the things you can do is as you're typing out searches in the search box at LinkedIn, is see what some related terms might be. So you might do some intel on the search results.
Once you've already done your research, you've found the kind of people who are speaking to your audience, what are some of the questions that are being raised in the comments by the people who follow them, especially if they're not being responded to. And then you can actually just do some basic SEO research yourself to find those gap ideas.
So you can use tools like Ahrefs or Moz to do this keyword research or Ubersuggest, which is free. And basically just going to ubersuggest.com, I believe it is. And typing in some of the keywords or key phrases that you think would be important. It will show you a lot of different content ideas that then you can just, that you can address.
And the last one I would just mention is personal experience. Chances are this isn't day one at your business. You've amassed a certain amount of experience and expertise over the years. The kind of questions that people are coming to you with, the kind of things that your current clients are struggling with, and so likely your future clients are also struggling with as well. And so knowing what these content gaps are means that these are great opportunities for you to create content that really is being underserved.
It is also important to know some of the different formats that are popular on LinkedIn. So there's the text post, which is basically just all text. There's image posts, which either could be a single image or a multi-image post, like the one in front of you that also has text on it as well. The one thing to keep in mind here is if you do want to do some boosting of posts after the fact, throw some money behind them, you can only do that with single image posts, not with posts with multiple images.
There's the native video post. And it's called a native video post because you're taking the video and you're posting it directly to LinkedIn. So most LinkedIn, like most social media platforms, want you to stay on the platform. They don't want to send you off different places, so they prefer you to use content that keeps people on the site. So if I had a video on my computer that I wanted to share on LinkedIn, I could upload it to YouTube and then link to the YouTube video. But LinkedIn's not really a fan of that. So to get better reach, better performance, get more eyeballs on it, what I would do is I take that video and I would upload it directly to LinkedIn and that's just going to perform better.
Carousels, which basically you’re probably familiar with them on Instagram, you can upload a PDF feature. And basically each page is a PDF. So you can see on this one, I've put some red arrows there to draw attention to them. But this is a 14-page carousel that you can click through to see each slide. And I found that these are very effective. It's a great way of repurposing content, sharing it on LinkedIn. And because people tend to click through at least some, if not all of these slides, it tends to get very good engagement.
A link post is another type of post where you're linking to an outside source there. Traditionally, people say these aren't a good idea, or to use them and to not overuse them because LinkedIn doesn't want to send people offsite. But there has been some recent research that shows these are really engaged posts and LinkedIn actually does like these posts. So take it with a grain of salt. Check out your own analytics, which we'll get to in a minute.
So this is from Hancock Lumber. They had a news item or a blog post on their website and they're linking to it. The Hancock Lumber account is linking to it, and you can see very small that there's an image there, and that would obviously link offsite. Then there are articles or newsletters you can also turn them into. And so this is an example of one of mine. I take a blog post that's recapping a recent interview I did on the Agents of Change. I upload that and then I publish it as a LinkedIn newsletter as well. And that's another form and that's actually been very successful. I've only started doing this recently.
And then the last one I want to talk about is the polls. Which basically, you can literally create a poll within LinkedIn and set it up for a set period of time, like a week, and then people can put in their vote. And this tends to be a well engaged style of post as well.
So those are some of the different formats that you can use. Some tend to perform better than others, but honestly, you need to decide which ones work best for you and also what kind of format works best with the content that you want to share.
So now that you know what you want to talk about and the different ways in which you can tell that story, let's talk about some tips to get your content in front of more people. The first thing is to provide value. And yes, I use the yawning emoji because that's super boring. It's critical. Like anything I say after this, if your content isn't valuable, no one's going to care about it anyways.
You do have to provide value in these posts. They should be original. And the LinkedIn algorithm looks at this. If you're saying the same things that everybody else is saying, you're probably not going to get a whole lot of engagement or traction. Generally, the way this works is like many other platforms, LinkedIn really pays close attention during the first couple hours that a post goes live. And that's a good indicator of how well the post is going to do.
So posting at the right time of day, and for me it's usually between 8:00 AM and 10:00 AM, but your mileage may vary. Those tend to do the best, so you want to keep some of these things in mind. But originality is certainly important. You want to be able to hook people's attention early within that first sentence or two, any content before you get to the dreaded more dot. So grab people's attention either by calling them out by name, position, what have you, or having something really intriguing that makes them want to click the ‘more’ button to see everything.
Encourage discussion. If you're sharing some information, maybe you can figure out how to turn it into a question. Have you had an experience like this? Or, what are some of your favorite X, Y, or Z? To get people to respond and start engaging and leaving comments, which then tells LinkedIn, this is a great engaging post, and you should show it to more people.
And then you want to tag appropriately. So just like on Facebook, you can tag people and businesses in your post. The thing you want to be careful of is, tagging people or businesses can show your post to more people, but if those people or companies don't engage with your post, then it actually hurts your post. And so sometimes you may see 20 or 30 people tagged in a post, and although that seems a great way to get in front of more people, the bottom line is if those people aren't engaging with the post, it actually really hurts that posts visibility. So you really want to be smart about who and what you tag in your posts.
And then you want to use hashtags. So the way you use hashtags on LinkedIn, the way that I recommend you use hashtags, is I tend to do three to five. Some people recommend more. Three to five is my sweet spot, and the first one or two are very broad keywords. So if I was going to do something promoting this particular webinar, I might have #LinkedIn or #LinkedInWebinar. And then if I want to, or I probably just do #LinkedIn if I want to get a little bit more narrow in that second group of keywords, it might be like #LinkedInWebinar, #LinkedInTips.
And then the third one is either super narrow or branded. So I might do #takeflyte, which is one of the ones that we use for all flyte-related things. So that's how I recommend you use it. Broad, narrow, branded.
One other thing that's really going to drive your reach and visibility on the platform is something called SSI, or the Social Selling Index. You can see your own score for the Social Selling Index if you go to linkedin.com/sales/ssi. And I should have mentioned this like three other times. All this is being recorded. I will share the slides with you. So don't worry if you didn't write this down or whatever the case may be, you're going to get all this information afterwards, too.
This is basically a visible index of how you're doing on the platform according to LinkedIn and how far your posts are going to go. All other things being equal. So there's four pillars to the SSI, and the first one is to establish your professional brand. A lot of what I discussed in optimizing your profile is exactly what we're talking about here, finding the right people. So many of the things that LinkedIn rewards here are easier to do with a paid Sales Navigator tool, but you can still do this manually on your own. So great if you have Sales Navigator, one of these other paid versions, but don't break a sweat, you can still succeed without it.
So you want to up your score here, you want to do advanced account searches. In other words, you want to use the advanced search in the LinkedIn toolbar. And that's probably the big tool. If you do have Sales Navigator, you can also do things a like save leads, use lead builder tool. Those are just different ways of LinkedIn measuring how committed you are to the platform.
The third thing is engage with insights. And this means following relevant hashtags, joining relevant groups, even though I don't think groups are really a thing much anymore. And then commenting and sharing on other people's posts.
And the last pillar is to build relationships. And this includes the total number of your connections. The vice president level and above number of connections that you have, your internal connections with coworkers and the acceptance rate for requests set. So I guess if you're trying to get everybody to connect with you and a fraction of people are, that's probably going to hurt the score. Again, this isn't rocket science. You don't have to break a sweat over this, but it is helpful to know what are the signals that LinkedIn's looking for your behavior on the platform that's going to encourage it to show your content to more people.
Another thing you want to do is take a look at your own analytics. Because I've given you some advice on what works in general, but your analytics tell the story of what happens to you. So when you're logged into your own account, you can go down and you'll see the analytics section. No one else sees this but you. It gives you a couple of quick hits off the top little dashboard action, but then you can click on show all analytics, which allows me to dig a little bit deeper.
And I can see here that this is for the past seven days. I can see the number of people who saw my posts, the number of followers I have, profile viewers, so on and so forth. What's nice is you can actually change this around a little bit. So you can go in and right now in this screenshot it's for the past seven days, which is the default, and I can see my content performance discovery, what my top performing posts were. But I can change that to the past 90 days and get maybe a bigger picture of what's been going on lately, what kind of posts are working for me and all that sort of stuff. The impressions that I've got, members reached, and basically what are some of the most popular posts over that time period instead. And also the default here is impressions, but you can also change that to engagement to see what kind of engagements you're getting. Those are all analytics about my individual posts, but you can also get some information about your audience as well.
So if I click over to the audience tab, I can see in the past 90 days that I've gotten, you can see how many new followers you've gotten. You can also see it's up 8% compared or 0.8% compared to the past 90 days. So pretty steady. And then the top demographics, senior level, who's from the main metropolitan area and most of the people who follow me or work for small businesses.
One question I get a lot is, “How frequently should I post?” And the good news is, you do not need to post all that frequently to be successful on LinkedIn. This isn't a situation where you need to be posting every day. I sometimes post every day, but that's because I like to overshare on LinkedIn. If you we're going to post one or two times a week, and they were good posts, I think you'd be fine. I think you can get away with five minutes, three times a week, and you'll be in the top 5% of everybody in your industry. That's how easy it is to become a power user on LinkedIn.
So I forgot to include this little GIF here, but yeah, so I don't think you need to go crazy with your posting. I think it's just a matter of create. What I do or what I've done sometimes in the past is create a calendar or a list of things that I need to talk about on LinkedIn. And I have a couple of things I like to talk about every week promoting my podcast and so forth. And then sometimes something will just pop up in the news, like an article today. But other than that, I try and have a few go-to things that I can post about. So I want to personally post about three times a week.
So with those two sections done, let's talk about prospecting. And prospecting really is just about finding those right connections on LinkedIn. I noticed after the fact that I actually typed in events planner rather than event planners. I don't know if that made a difference or not, but anyway.
So let's say that in your job you actually want to connect with event planners. Maybe you want to do that because you have something to sell them. Maybe you're looking to plan an event, what have you. But whatever the case is, you go into the search bar at LinkedIn and just type an event planner, and usually it will show you a breakdown of like jobs and people and companies and stuff like that. And then you just click on people and then you get to this page.
Previously it would literally tell you how many people were in your search results, and then you could winnow it down from there. It seems like they've gotten rid of that. Although down at the bottom of the page, I did notice they had a hundred pages of results for this, and I think there's 20 per page. A minimum of 20,000, 2,000. I don't know a lot of people there. And you probably want to filter that down to find the best event planners, the most relevant event planners for you.
And so you can use the filters, you can see at the top of the page. They have first degree, second degree, and third degree connections. So first degree are people you're already connected to on LinkedIn. Second degree is there's one person between you and them. And third is there's not even one person, there's at least two people between you and them.
So let's say that I had something to sell to event planners or I want to get in touch with event planners, for that reason, one's I'm not yet in touch with. So I might use some of the filters. I would select second. So I don't want any first party of any people I'm already connected to. This is a new offer and so I just want to get in front of people I haven't gotten in front of. I could also use the third plus, but I'm going to focus now on people who I'm probably more closely connected to. And I'm going to limit it just to the state of Maine.
Obviously, you can put in your location. You can also put in multiple locations. If you only care about getting in touch with people from California and Massachusetts, that's definitely a possibility. And there's a whole bunch of other filters as well. You can filter by the degree of separation, location, current company, past company, current position, past position, you can follow people who follow a certain creator, or where they went to school, what industry they're in, or just specific keywords, and a whole lot more. So very powerful tool.
And this is very similar to the tool that you would use for advertising, too. So you can really target down this audience to find the people that are right for you. Now finding them is only half the battle. Just having a list of people that you'd like to connect to is not everything. So what I recommend, and I know that there are people who would just say, no, just blast them all. That's not my style. What I would recommend is trying to get to know these people a little bit better so you can make a meaningful connection. And that comes down to researching.
So you might choose people. And when I have that list, what I usually do is right click and open each one up in a new tab, and then go to that tab. So I'm just going to use my coworker, John Paglio, as an example. If I was going in and trying to prospect somebody like John. So basically with John, I get to his page, and I always recommend going to a page, and I'll explain why in a second, rather than just hitting a connection request. So I come to his page, and I can learn a little bit more about him.
By the way, if you are following somebody already or you are connected with him and you want to stay in closer contact with him, you can just click this bell. So if you're following somebody and you want to be alerted to every single time that they post something new, click that bell and LinkedIn is going to prioritize their content above other people's content.
So I might come to John's page and then I scroll through. I look at all of his recent posts and these are his red arrow, so obviously we're using the same tool, just to see the kind of content he's talking about. And what I would generally do is I would start leaving comments on his posts. Not posts from six months ago, that just seems creepy. But posts in the last couple weeks or something like that. I want to become more visible to him so that when I do actually go and reach out and say, “Hey, I'd like to connect with you.” I'm a familiar face when you are ready to make that outreach.
Here's basically how I recommend doing it. This was somebody I saw a friend of mine share some of her content on LinkedIn, and I thought she'd be a great guest from my podcast. So I went to her profile page. And as you can see here, she actually doesn't have a ‘connect’ button. She's got a ‘follow’ button, and I really am not interested in following her as much as I am interested in connecting with her. You may notice that there's actually a ‘connect’ if you know each other. That doesn't always appear, and I'm not sure when LinkedIn decides to show it or not show it. I'm guessing it's because there's enough overlap in our networks that they think maybe I would know her, so I can just click on ‘connect’. But even if you don't see that bar there, what you can do is click on the ‘more’ bar and that'll open up this popup, and then you can find the ‘connect’ there instead.
And so then you can go ahead and connect as soon as you click ‘connect’. When you're on their profile page, you're going to get this popup. You're going to say, “add a note to your invitation”. Always add a note. Tell the person why you want to connect with them. I never understand people who send out an invitation with no reason why we should be connected. So I just let her know, “I found your content through my friend. I'd love to have you on the podcast. Plus, maybe we can connect here on LinkedIn.” And then I hit send. I did that a few days ago, I still don't know if she's accepted my connection. Take that with a grain of salt when you're connecting.
I've created the seven deadly sins of LinkedIn connections. The first one, is you don't have a profile picture. Again, I just think it looks like you're not trying or you're a scam artist.
Second one, is you don't have a message. And I would say that probably 75% of the people who reach out to me on LinkedIn don't send a message along. Now sometimes it's because they don't realize that's even an option or because they found me and didn't go to my profile page.
And then, LinkedIn doesn't even give you that option, but I think this is a real missed opportunity, to let people know why you should connect. Sometimes it's a lame message like, “Oh, I noticed we had a few mutual connections”, or “We're both in marketing”. That's not an interesting reason.
Next one is they didn't do their homework. Here's one. “I noticed your expertise and thought you might have connection interest in a free report on leveraging the Texas real estate market for mailbox money”. Strike one, I'm not in Texas. Strike two, I'm not in real estate. Strike three, I have no idea what mailbox money is. So, no. No follow up.
I have a habit of, if I don't know somebody and I'm not sure that they'd be a good connection, I just say, “Hey, thanks for reaching out. What's going on?” And if they don't respond within a month, I delete the invitation. And what's ironic is that this person actually describes themselves as a connector and a community builder, never responded after I asked a simple question of what's going on.
A bad headline. And I put “bad” in quotes. Because on some level, this is a good headline. It tells people exactly what they want to accomplish. I 100% guarantee to help you get more inquiries from your website visitors. But I'm tired of those kind of sleazy come on. So I basically just ignore it.
And the last, the seventh deadly sin is too quick to sell. Somebody recently on my podcast called it the “pitch slap”. I say, “Hey, thanks for reaching out, what's going on?” And they immediately try selling me without really getting to know me at all. So try to avoid those deadly sins.
Now, before I go any further and open this up for some questions, I did want to just mention something that for those of you who know The Agents of Change conference and have attended Agents of Change or want to, I have some bad news. We are not doing Agents of Change this year. However, we are putting on a smaller, more focused event called, Flyte School Live. It's the first time we've put it on. It takes place on, as you can see, September 30th this year. It's half a day. We got three presentations lined up. Tickets are only $99, but in the month of August, they're only $49. $49 for three presentations, live audience, very limited seating. There's actually only 36 seats. We're only selling 36 tickets. So very limited. This is not a lie. Literally only 36 tickets and about a third of them have already sold with one email.
The three sessions are, The Value of Yield: Content Marketing in the Age of AI, presented by Izzy Seidman. The Behavioral Triggers that Drive High Converting Websites, presented by me. And Metrics that Matter: How to Measure What Drives Growth, by John Paglio. So if you are into marketing, and I'm guessing you are, and you live in or can travel to Greater Portland on September 30th, I welcome you to take advantage of not just attending but also taking advantage of those discount tickets.
Now, before I wrap this up with some final notes, I did want to open this up to questions. Or if somebody is brave enough and wants me to look at their profile and provide some immediate feedback, I'm happy to do that as well.
And at this point, I'm going to look at some of these webinar notes that I have over here. One question that I see is..
Do you only get a certain number of notes when connecting? I thought those were limited. I think you have a certain limited number of notes.
If you do, that's news to me. But I do know that you sometimes are limited on the number of people that you can invite within a given period of time. And the reason I actually got the Sales Navigator level was because I do send out messages promoting our Agents of Change conference each year, one-on-one through direct messaging. And I started reaching the ceiling and they said, you can't send out anymore for another week or another month. And so I just paid the $79 a month or whatever it was at the time to get Sales Navigator and have unlimited things. But I don't think it's free if you don't leave a note. Like I don't think that's a differentiator. I think it's the number of invitations you send if you're not on a paid version.
All right, so I'm just going to quickly go through these, because we do have three. And then I just want a few minutes at the end to wrap everything up.
Debbie looks to be on point organized systems and productive habits that work. So we know what Debbie's all about. We can see that she's a presenter. Looks like she's got some kits and things that we can buy, so she's very organized. I know Debbie from my days of speaking at the National Association Professional Organizers. So yeah, she's a productivity consultant, trainer, coach, helping busy… Perfect. That's like exactly what you want because people are likely searching for productivity consultants. And then we're also seeing the ways that she helps these people do it. Simply Places, I happen to know, is the name of her company. And then we can click off here. She's got a lot of followers. She's broken the 500 connection limit. And she's properly connected her business and school to LinkedIn.
We couldn't find any recent activity. This is more about me than her, but I would say, Debbie, that you're using a lot of the text in here. I would recommend that you speak in the first person, just because it's easier to make a human connection with somebody that way. That is a personal choice.
And then I can see that she's using the featured section. I think she's just showing off, what do you guys think? And then we can see the last time she posted was two months ago. And so I'd love to see you be more active on the platform. But again, if your audience isn't here, then it makes less sense. But if you do think your audience is here on LinkedIn, or if you want to build that audience on LinkedIn, I'd look to posting once a week at least, to get started. And then the experience and everything else looks really good. And Debbie Rosemont Simply Places, so you have a custom URL as well. All in all, A+.
Alright. Nicholas Green, PhD, behavioral scientist. So we've got the AI enhanced version here, the real-life version here as well. Not too many words, and obviously very branded, so that's great. I empower others to get healthy and fit, help businesses make sense of their data. So yeah, great use of keywords getting in there.
First, you've connected everything over here properly. Lot of the 500 plus connections for sure. “I'm a problem solver. I value science and figuring out how things work.” I like that it's an immediate approach. I'm completely drawn in part because I love neuromarketing, neuropsychology, behavioral psychology, so all that stuff is super interesting to me.
And then you've got, look at this, a call to action at the bottom. “Please contact me.” So I think that is all great as well. We didn't really talk about services, but that is another feature that you can do on LinkedIn. You're using the featured section, which is great. You most recently posted five days ago and then six days ago. So a lot of good stuff in here as well. And it looks like you're posting things that are very relevant for you and your business. All in all, very good. And you got some recommendations in here, too. Another great one.
And then last we'll do Eric Kingsley here. And by the way, if I didn't get to you or if I didn't see your link or if you were just shy and you want me to take a look at it afterwards, I'm going to send an email out in the next day or two once we get the video all set, and I'm happy to take a look at it and provide some feedback as well.
Eric Kingsley here. So I know I said no photos of the coast of Maine. I should have said no photos of the coast of Maine, unless it's relevant to what you're doing. Innovative Natural Resource Solutions, LLC. So Eric is obviously involved in the great outdoors, and I would just say I understand why you would use this photo. You may want to use some text on top of it just to really nail down for people who are quickly coming to your profile why you're showing this picture of cut lumber. So, personal choice.
But you've connected properly here. You don't have a connection to your school, which is not the end of the world. But if you wanted to, sometimes that's just a way to make more connections, you could connect to your school. I know with John from my team, his school actually closed down. They broke the mold with John, they closed down the school, so there's nothing to link to. So he doesn't have anything there.
But you've got over the 500 connections and that's great. I don't see an ‘about’ section, so Eric, I'd love to see you build out an ‘about’ section with the tips that we talked about today. And then we've got posts. Oh, this is a featured section, so you've got a post and a link. That's great, too. You've been posting regularly and recently, so that's fantastic. And I don't know that it matters, see, this is when I talk about you didn't connect this to Innovative Natural Resource Solutions. I don't know if that company still exists or if it's on LinkedIn. If it is, you may want to connect this, because right now that's not the same thing so LinkedIn didn't make that connection for you. You've got skills, recommendations is something that you might want to add. Either ask some people to give you them or to give them yourself to other people. But all in all, pretty good example.
So just to wrap up today, what we talked about and maybe what some next steps are focus first on your profile. The three that we just looked at were great examples. You could definitely learn a lot from those as well as checking out my own. But this is really all about credibility, and we want to build out our profiles and optimize them to get found. But also, that once we are found that we show ourselves out to be the professionals that we know that we are.
Content is you don't have to be publishing every day, but I'd like to see you publish one to two times a week perhaps. And also be commenting on other people's posts as well. Five minutes a day or five minutes right after you post your own thing to also be posting on other people's stuff, just to show that you're engaged in the community. That increases your visibility. You reach more people, get in front of more of the right people.
And lastly, just using some of those prospecting tools and techniques that I mentioned. It is easier if you have Sales Navigator, but to be honest, I only use Sales Navigator one time out of 50 when I'm going online to connect with somebody. So it's not something you have to have, but it is nice if you do want to do a lot of outbound connections or if you want some additional tools that we didn't take a look at today. And again, maybe I'll come back and do one specifically about Sales Navigator in the future.
Rich, you have a question that says, “Tagging others, is this a good idea or bad? Also, if I am a product-based business owner, what kind of content can I share?”
Sure. Alright, so tagging is a great idea as long as the people you're tagging are likely to engage with your post. So you don't want to tag random strangers, and you don't want to just have one of those walls of tags that some people do. Because LinkedIn will reward you if they engage with your post, and they'll punish you if they don't. So you just really want to make sure that those people or businesses are likely to tag.
As far as a product-based company, assuming that it's a B2B product-based company, because I just don't think that there's a lot of benefit for B2C companies to invest too much in LinkedIn. I would say that photos of the product, obviously how people are using it. But if you wanted to tell me a little bit more about the product, I might be able to give you specific ideas, but I'd love to see how it's used or if it's used in a typical way.
Are there some power uses that I might not know about? Those are some of the things that I would look at in terms of creating content. Is there any user generated content that I could repurpose? Do you have any testimonials for your product that you could use? Are there any case studies that you could use where once they started using this product their ROI went up 172% or something like that? Those would be great ideas. Gifting companies. Yeah, absolutely. I would be showing all the thank you notes that you get because your gifts are so awesome. Those kind of things.
And then I see Susanna has said, “Is it important to be verified? I was reluctant to upload personal documents.”
I don't think you have to worry about uploading personal documents, but I don't even remember if I'm verified and I think I went through the same process. I'm like, I use LinkedIn every day, how come I'm not verified? And then it was like the process to get there was a little bit of a hassle, and I think I gave up halfway through. Maybe I'll go back and do it one day. Is it helpful? Yes, it's helpful. Is it the only thing that matters? No, I don't think so. That's my gut check answer. LinkedIn may have a different answer for you.
All right. Hey, it's two o'clock everybody. I want to thank you for your attention. I really enjoyed doing this presentation. It had been a while since I talked about LinkedIn in a webinar or seminar format. If you do have questions on LinkedIn that you want to ask me after the fact, just fire me off an email.
You can see my email on the screen as soon as we get this video prepped and ready. We'll send you a link so you can check it out, share it with friends, what have you. And I think that's everything. Thank you everybody. Enjoy the rest of your day and I look forward to talking with you soon. Take care.