#H2HChat Shareology Edition: Viveka von Rosen, LinkedIn Expert and Author

Hey everybody, how are you doing? We are back. You know it's Monday when there's an H2H Chat, or do you know there's an H2H Chat when it's Monday? But either way, I wanted to, uh, welcome you all back to another H2H Chat, one that we have been super excited for. Um, very, very cool to talk about something that I don't think we have talked about before, which is LinkedIn. And so we're gonna be talking about that with Vivica von Rosen, and I'm very excited to introduce her. Before I introduce her and go through the formalities of introducing my friend and awesomeness Vivica, that is Vivica, I wanted to say a quick hello to Susie, who is live from— live from New York!

It's Monday morning! Afternoon!

Afternoon where you are, yeah.

I

just got back from celebrating in New York with you, I understand your plight of 3 hours later.

I know. It's nice in the morning because I feel like I look like I'm super together even though maybe I rolled out at like 10 AM. I'm still ahead of the game. And then at night, it's just like, oh my God, let it end. But yeah, it was super fun. We had an amazing— your Shareology event was just so much fun. That was fun. It was just awesome. Thanks.

Thanks for making it fun. Oh yeah. You did an awesome job.

Oh no, it was great. And the weather cooled down, so I guess you had to leave for us to finally get into fall.

No, I came back just in time for it to be 100 degrees and have my air conditioner break. But I'm excited to be back. And it was interesting because we're always on Twitter, and we're always on Facebook, and we're always talking about events. And this is why I'm personally interested in what we're talking about today because I'd love to learn how to use LinkedIn better. And so personally, I'm interested, not just for you guys, everyone out there watching. I care about you, trust me, I do. But I really am curious myself. So without further ado, Viveka started using LinkedIn in 2005 when she saw a presentation on the opportunities of business networking with LinkedIn. So she doubled down her business with F2F networking. We like to call it H2H.

H2H.

She saw the immense potential of a business online networking site, which I can't blame her for because it is pretty incredible. She's internationally known as the LinkedIn expert, and I can attest to that. She is the go-to and speaks to business owners, corporate corporations, firms, legal firms, associations, so you can rest medicine. On the benefits of marketing with social media, in particular LinkedIn. No, her bio does not say, so you can reach her on LinkedIn.

I'm going to change that though. I like that.

She's the author of LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day from Wiley. She's also a regular source on LinkedIn for Forbes, Money Magazine, Mashable, Reagan.com, Social Media Examiner, CNN, and the Miami Herald. I didn't know that President Reagan had his own website.

Yes, yes.

She's a Forbes 20 Most Influential Women, Forbes 50 Most Influential People top ranks 25 women, and the list goes on and on. This is fantastic. We have a rock star with us today. Welcome, Vivica. How are you doing?

Thank you so much. I'm realizing now my bio is so freaking boring, I need to change it. So if anyone out there like writes bios for a living, Contact me, DM me on Twitter.

And

when

you're done with her, please call me. Call me. So topic for today is how to work remote from private islands. No, I'm kidding. Awesome. The topic is LinkedIn and the secrets to using LinkedIn. And obviously we only have an hour or so, so I doubt we're going to get to the thousand million billion secrets that are of LinkedIn because it is a pretty big site.

Yeah.

But I'd love to just kick off with just your general idea behind why you're so excited about LinkedIn. Just why— what got you excited and why are you so

You know, I think, and I might be a little honest with you all today about my feelings about LinkedIn right now.

Please don't. We'd rather you not be honest.

It's awesome all the time. Really, when I started, like you said in my bio, when I started on LinkedIn, it had 7 million members, which to me was Enormous and explosive. Like, I had doubled our business in a year doing human to human. Isn't there supposed to be— yeah.

Didn't know you'd go there so quickly, sorry.

Oh baby, you know it. I like the applause. You know, we doubled the business doing like H2H connecting in my small community of like 100,000 people, Fort Collins, Colorado. $7 million, yes, 7 million people was enormous. I mean, because this was before Facebook, this was before Twitter. Numbers like that were like crazy. Like, I can reach out and touch 7 million people? Like, oh my God, that's amazing. And so the ability to use LinkedIn back then really meant that depending on who I could find, I could reach out and touch those individuals and I could grow my business by reaching out and touching those individuals as long as there was a virtual aspect to it. You know, LinkedIn has changed enormously in the past 10 years, enormously, but I think it still remains that. Now you might have to have a premium account, but pretty much depending on how you act and how you are on LinkedIn, you can find, reach out and engage with practically anyone that you need to. That is still possible. It's a little bit more difficult than it was 10 years ago, but it is still absolutely possible. And that's really what excites me about LinkedIn. And also, you know, I came at it first as a business tool because it came— it was pre-social media. So social media came later and all the social aspects of LinkedIn and timelines and groups. That all came after, and so it's always been to me a business tool, and a business tool that's incredibly effective too.

Okay, so let's talk about past and present. We'll get to the future. Yes. But past versus present, you started it and then you tempted us by saying that you were actually going to be Honest. So now we— now you have to be.

Now I have to be.

And so, um, so anyway, I'm curious what, um, past, you know, LinkedIn did start in a certain direction, present they're in a different place. And so where, where, um, where do you see some big of the— some big changes? And, and what, what's, what's, what is, what is the secret to using LinkedIn today?

Sure, so I'll start with the positive. So I love that LinkedIn is more than just a job seeker's tool because I mean literally for like what the first 5 years or more that LinkedIn was around, people thought it was just a job seeker tool. So I think by now folks realize it's way beyond that. I love the direction it's going with its content marketing, with with LinkedIn Publisher. I love the fact that it is trying to create engagement through the changes it's making through groups. I love the fact that there are certain tools that LinkedIn is giving us with some of their new ad options that allow us to reach out and connect to more people. That part I like. What the problem is, as LinkedIn grows and grows and grows, and especially since it became public, there's a little bit, in my opinion, and I'm just saying this, this might not be true, but there's a little bit of kowtowing, I think, to the shareholders. And so I feel like they're ignoring, limiting, and they're almost even— I mean, it's It's almost like they're punishing the free users, which is 80+% of the network. So if they keep pissing off the free users, there's not going to be a network there for the paid users to use. That's probably my issue right now. I'm all for an attractive UI. I'm all for an attractive user interface and a clean user interface. We all— Apple products, 3 buttons and you can do everything. That doesn't work on LinkedIn. It feels like to me every time they make a change on LinkedIn, they make it prettier but less usable. There's a couple of changes there I'm not the hugest fan of. But things that they've introduced like Publisher, I think for some people who do it right, has been an absolute game changer. I'm a big fan of that. As I begin to use the LinkedIn ads more effectively, That's been a little bit of a game changer to me. So there's pros and cons.

Okay, I'm going to take you through areas of LinkedIn.

Yeah, great.

So I'm going to ask you specific questions around different things on LinkedIn that I know about, and then you're going to tell me after we're done the things I didn't ask you that I should have because I didn't know about.

Okay.

Okay, so we'll go through the, the what I know about, and, and, and trust me, it's all I know about it. So the first thing, let's just, let's start just with the interface on the whole. Your bio, your profile, the epicenter of LinkedIn, right? The reason it was created for everything Everything that it does, your bio, your profile. So how do you optimize, how do you get your profile to the best place that it's going to work for LinkedIn?

And this is where LinkedIn has done a fabulous job. I mean, okay, so truth time. I started LinkedIn because I'm graphically challenged. Ask Peg Fitzpatrick or Sue Zimmerman. My graphics are so bad and I just, I I'm just really, really bad at it. LinkedIn was text-based. They didn't even have graphics. All they had was your picture for the longest time. Now though, there are all these opportunities to create an incredibly dynamic profile, not just with copy but with images. They have this new hero or header image, 1400 by 425 pixels, which Which is like the YouTube or like the Facebook hero image. It's a little funky because your profile pops up into the middle of it, so you kind of have to play with the edges. But what a great branding tool, what a great visual tool to attract people to your profile. Love, love, love that, and that's free to everybody now. They made your picture bigger, so I can tell when someone hasn't been on LinkedIn for a while because they So they've made your image bigger. By the way, your image should be like say a Google Hangout. It should be about this far up and smiling and attractive and it should be this century so that when I go to a conference and I run into— we go to Inbound and I run into Bryan, well I recognize him because this is what he looks like on his LinkedIn profile and he looks like that in real life too. So make sure you do that. You know, you can add media now. So it's all well and good, we all say, oh, I'm— I was not an expert when I got the Twitter handle @LinkedInExpert, but, you know, I am now. And so, and I have lots of proof on my LinkedIn profile. So say what you want about yourself, but then use media to give yourself that credibility and those credentials. And then we come to the copy. You've got your little hero image which is essentially your bio, what would be a bio on Twitter. It's 120 characters. But it's your ability to say who you are, what you do, and who you serve. It doesn't have to say CEO of Pure Matter. What's that? I don't know, what's that? Human-to-human connection. I didn't actually mean to do it that time. I encourage human-to-human connection amongst social marketers. Whatever it is that you want to do as your professional headline, it should tell people who you are and what you do because that's what most people see. They see your picture, your name, and your professional headline. It's your half-a-second elevator speech. You want to attract them. With those 3 things. You've got your summary section which is a little bit above the fold. If you can engage them enough to read that 2,000-character summary section, put calls to action in there. You can put links because those are visible when people are viewing your profile from a tablet or smartphone. Tell them what's in it for them. Who cares about the laundry list of services you offer? No one is even going to read it. How can you help them? How can you serve them? What's in it for them if they engage you on LinkedIn and in your business? So just things like that. And then LinkedIn is literally giving you building blocks now, right? So if you go to your profile, it's going to ask you what organizations you're a member of, what volunteer work you do, what projects you're working on. As many of those building blocks as you can add to your profile, it differentiates you from everyone else out there. And additionally, you can add your keywords in. LinkedIn is also— LinkedIn's search algorithm relies like everything else does, at least in part, on keywords. So you need to make sure that your keywords are in there, in your interests section, in your skills, as well as in the content.

Wow. So all you have to do is all that.

All you have to do is all that, you're good. So here's the thing, we always talk about ROI, what's the return on your investment, your time investment, your monetary investment, but with LinkedIn Because of the special relationship, and I have no idea what that special relationship is, but because of the special relationship between Google and LinkedIn, if someone is searching on your name, it's as likely that your LinkedIn profile shows up first as your website that you spent $10,000 optimizing. Wow. So if then someone goes to your LinkedIn profile rather than your website, which you paid all this money for and it looks fabulous. They go to your LinkedIn profile and it sucks. What's the COI? What's the cost of inaction? How much credibility are you losing? How much business are you losing because your profile looks horrible? And so just taking an hour, just take an hour, use the assets you've already created. Just repurpose if you need to your Facebook header. Repurpose your About Us section on your website. You want to make it better later, but at least Repurpose content you already have to make your LinkedIn profile look good. And honestly, it shouldn't take more than an hour, at least initially, to make it look better than most of the other profiles out there.

So it's interesting because there are— you can see for the most part, unless they blocked you, who viewed your profile.

Yeah.

And when people view my profile and it's somebody I want to do business with, I just connect with them right then and there. Is that creepy?

I know a lot of people think it's creepy, but I'm glad they don't do it on Facebook. I know there are third-party apps that will show you that on Twitter, but I'm glad they don't do it on Facebook because that could be creepy. Plus you are checking out your ex-boyfriends and stuff. You're probably not necessarily doing that on LinkedIn. It's a fabulous business practice because it gives you an opening. It gives you the opportunity to start a conversation with that individual. Hey, I noticed you viewed my profile. That's awesome. It's been ages since we talked. Hey, I noticed you viewed my profile. It was so great seeing you at that conference. Hey, I noticed you viewed my profile. We're not connected. I don't know much about you yet, but please let me know how I can be of service. Hey, I noticed you viewed my profile. You know, we have John, Jane, and Brian in common. Do you want to connect on LinkedIn? It gives you opportunity to start engaging with these individuals, and yeah, if they're a hot prospect for you, why wouldn't you?

Great. Okay, yeah, so I just need to actually say something next time instead of just connecting.

This is, by the way, a good thing to have an assistant do for you. You want to look for— because I used to just have my assistant Which kind of goes against LinkedIn's end-user agreement, but shh, between you and I. Go in and just like blanket, like everyone who endorsed me, blanket thank them. Everyone who invited me to connect, blanket thank them. Everyone who viewed my profile, blanket thank them. Well, then it got really awkward because like some of my best friends, it's like, hi. So I make the practice first of going in and seeing who's viewed my profile and responding personally to the people I actually know. But then yeah, she goes through and handles that. Now, the average person who's not Bryan is probably only going to get 5 to 10 people viewing their profile a week. So it is something you can easily manage in 15 minutes a week. I guarantee you, I guarantee if you do it for a month, it will lead to some sort of business relationship, possibly a new client. It will. It just plain and simple will. If you do have hundreds of people viewing your profile every day, Personally go through and respond to the ones that you— people you actually know, but yeah, have an assistant manage that part for you because that is a huge opportunity that people lose out on for sure.

Great, that's a good tip. So okay, there certainly is a lot of work that people can do on their profile and especially when people view your profile, but now let's travel over to the feed. the main feed. Yeah. It's barren most of the time. Why is that? I get— I mean, when I have really cool news, then it skyrockets. When I have sort of okay news, it's, you know, and I'd like to think of myself as a person who knows how to share the, you know, at least sometimes the right things. But LinkedIn feed, for some reason, is like You know, sometimes just not engaging. Why and how do you change that, or can you? Is it just me or is it them?

No, it's them. Yeah, only because it's you, right? So you have such huge super fans, right? So if you're not getting that kind of interaction, I thought it was me. LinkedIn, like Facebook and Twitter, live on the feed. They live and die by the feed. You know, there are obviously other aspects, private messaging, that kind of thing, but But LinkedIn and— I'm sorry, Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat and every other social media site out there lives on the— which is why I said LinkedIn is a business tool first and a social media site second.

Wow.

We haven't trained, and LinkedIn is trying, right? But we haven't trained other LinkedIn users to go to their homepage every day. Plus there's a bunch of boring crap out there. I mean, there just is. So the good news is there's not a lot of competition on the newsfeed. You don't have to pay necessarily to get your content promoted and visible. Not that you want to update 10 times a day, but once or twice a day, especially if your network has big networks. It is absolutely spaghetti on the wall. The feed is shorter. You just see less. The LinkedIn feed on the iPhone is bulky. It's useless. I mean, I think that's the biggest issue is that the Twitter app and the Facebook app and the Instagram app and every other app out there, the whole feed process is seamless pretty much. I mean, it's again built on that. Facebook's feed— I mean, LinkedIn's feed is like— I'm trying to remember if there actually even is one because that's how bad it is. So I think those are some issues. If LinkedIn focused a little bit more on the feed and training people how to use the feed. And here's, you know, and the other thing is LinkedIn got rid of signals. Like LinkedIn tries to monetize everything that's useful on it. And I'm sure Signal will come back in some form as a paid feature in Sales Navigator. Yeah, what a bummer that we can't search updates. How can we not search updates? I know they say, we don't have the capacity, the servers don't have the capacity. I mean, hello, please, whatever. You're the only social media site making money, please. I think you can buy a few more thousand, hundred thousand servers. It's always about monetization, I think. If they gave us some better tools. in which to manage our feeds, if they opened up an API or 2 so we could use third-party tools to manage our feeds. But we can't, so all you get is like 4 or 5 that post on your timeline, and if you don't see it, you don't get the engagement. Obviously things like visuals, you know, you put some pretty big-ass visuals on there. Right. Sponsored updates will get you more visibility. But yeah, I don't think ever the LinkedIn feed is going to be what Twitter or Facebook is, ever.

Unfortunately, you can't see unless you use something like Buffer what your click rate is on LinkedIn. I don't think it's very

high. You used to be able to. You used to be able to. They had, and that's why I think it's going to become part again of some kind of premium package. They used to have great update analytics. They took them away. be able to search within updates. Took it away.

Let's travel again over to groups.

We have to.

We don't.

No, no, no, we should.

Let's start talking about islands.

Let's start talking about islands.

That's a better comment. Actually, it's funny, but groups are islands.

They are. I was literally just going to say that. I thought it was too corny, so I didn't.

And then I did. That explains to you who I am. So here we go. So let's talk about groups. So I use groups differently, I think, than maybe you're supposed to. The way that I use them is really as— and I should engage more, I know I should.

We all should.

I just don't have time to engage in— I think they, at least before, they let you be in like 51 groups or 50 groups max. So I put all my groups into HootSuite and then I blast out my blogs to the groups and I get more traction there than I get on anything else on LinkedIn that I do. Now that's just one way, it's not very human.

And then you probably got swammed and then—

Yeah, and then I quit the group and I started a different group. So yeah, so it's not very human to human, but it's like, it's the most traction that I can get on—

So here's what I would say. You're Bryan Kramer, so you can get away with that. On LinkedIn, there's something called SWAM, right? It's Site-Wide Auto-Moderation. And here's what's freaking scary. If one person in one group— no, I'm sorry, it's more than that. I think it's if 3 or 5, I have never been able to get a solid answer. Somewhere between 3 and 5 people in one group of the 50 groups I'm a member of, I share one webinar that I've got coming up. For some reason, 3 to 5 people, they might be strangers, they might be my competitors who don't like me. 3 to 5 people say, oh, that's spammy. They flag it as spam. I go into what's known as site-wide auto-moderation. And so sitewide auto-moderation means not only in that one group do all my posts now go into moderation before they go live, and moderators are lazy and they never look at the moderation queue. So essentially my voice has been stifled, not just in that one group but in all 51 groups. Oh wow. So you can get away with that, Bryan. I would never ever teach anyone else to do that for that very reason. I mean, it's scary because now your voice is muffled. Now one of the places that LinkedIn actually works for you becomes muffled. Fortunately, there are good tools like HootSuite and I use Octopost where you can post to groups and you can change those posts up a little bit if you are going to do that. It's not a bad idea because You're not saying buy my book, buy my this, buy my that. You're just literally sharing helpful, useful, valuable information. That's number one. Make sure you always send helpful, useful, valuable information. Also, if you can somehow engage the group in the post itself, one of the little ninja tricks that I recommend, and it's a good way to get content too, is go into a group. group that's big, that gets a lot of activity, a lot of visibility, a lot of influencers are in it. And then you say, hey, I want to write an article on the best human-to-human ways to interact— In a human-to-human way on LinkedIn. What are some of your best examples? And by the way, put in comments below and I will compile my favorite. I'll compile pile my favorite answers into a blog post which I'll reshare and I hope you'll share as well. And my top 5 favorite blog posts will get a copy of my new ebook or whatever. So, oh, I want a copy of your ebook. Oh, okay, if you have to. But what you're doing is you're engaging, right? And so with all of LinkedIn's algorithms, chances are it gets popped up into Moderator's Choice, which isn't called Moderator's Choice now, I forget what it's called, but it gets popped up. It gets more visibility, it gets interaction, you get content, you get other people willing to share and amplify your stuff. You do still have the ability to share the link then, and you might sell a few ebooks or you might get a few more people into your funnel as well. Now this is a little bit time-consuming, but it's a good and very effective way of using groups. I love LinkedIn Groups. There are some people using LinkedIn Groups magnificently. The 2 things I'd say be aware of, time commitment. Most good LinkedIn Groups, the moderator either has several co-moderators, the manager usually has several co-moderators. They're spending between 5 and 10 hours a week moderating that group, which I don't have that kind of time. Wow. One guy for the— is it the Leads Group? One of the groups on LinkedIn, he spends 8 hours a day moderating his group. I'm like, and what do you do for a living? Right, so that's— just know that if you create a group, it's a time commitment and it's yet another product you have to promote. So people aren't just going to magically appear. You're going to have to promote it. You're going to have to promote it on social. You might have to pay for ads. It's another product that you're going to have to promote. Is it something that's really going to help you? There are cases where creating a group is a great idea. If you want a user group, like I wish LinkedIn had more user groups. It's a great idea for a user group. You could create private groups like people do on Facebook where people can interact. Groups are changing. I think the chat feature that they just introduced We'll soon be introduced to LinkedIn Groups. I think, I'm totally guessing here, but I think the interaction will start to increase. But just know it is probably the most time-consuming thing you can do on LinkedIn. And if you're not getting a return on your time investment, it might not be worth all that efforting.

So we're going to have to do another one of these, you know. Okay. Because there's so much information.

It's a half hour. How did that happen? I was like 5 minutes in.

Sorry, Suzie, I'm going to steal just a little under 5 more minutes. I know there's tons of questions coming in.

Tons. We're going to do rapid fire basically.

I don't know if I can answer rapid fire. This is going to be a challenge for me.

The quick thing, because I told you we were going to do the past and the present. Now I want to do the future because they've bought things like Lynda. They have apps out called Sales Navigator. They have apps out there connecting people inside of companies so that you can actually finally have connections to all the employees and meet the people within your own companies, which I'm sure works better for large enterprises.

Larger companies, yeah. But it's free. LinkedIn Lookup is free, so.

Yeah, and then there's apps. I mean, they have so many—

they

have their fingers into so many different things. Which makes your job endless and priceless.

Keeps

me

in business, that is true.

So future, where is all this heading? Where do you see it heading? What's your opinion?

Yeah, you know, I always look at what LinkedIn is buying to figure out where they're going in the future, just like you were saying. So they just shut down the API to Salesforce, which was shocking. Which must mean that Sales Navigator is going to become even more of a CRM, customer relationship management tool than it is. So I have a strong feeling that pretty much they're trying to get everyone on LinkedIn into Sales Nav, which is about $79 a month. But that's going to be maybe even a solo CRM system embedded within LinkedIn. So be looking for that. What's going to happen with Sales Navigator? How is that going to become a more inclusive CRM? They're looking at wrapping all of this together. So they bought Bizo, which was a really cool ads management, content marketing management tool. So they've integrated that into something called LinkedIn Leads Accelerator, which by the way, you have to have like $25,000 a quarter to get access to. It's not that you have to spend $25,000 a quarter, but You have to have a heck of an advertising budget even to get access to it. But it is really cool. So I was talking to Chris Nan over there and he said they are going to be doing something so that the small people can access it as well. Yeah, Elevate is again part of the 25K Club, but Elevate is a really cool tool that allows companies to amplify Amplify the message within LinkedIn with their employees. Now there are always ways you can do this without paying $25,000 or even without paying $29 a month, but these are tools to make it easier. And Lookup, which is cool, which you just mentioned, LinkedIn Lookup, which is a free tool for companies. So they're definitely working even more so into the monetization aspect of LinkedIn. But I think they are really trying to make it not just a social media site but a more active business tool that small business owners will engage in holistically. So we'll see, we'll see what happens. I just think they're going to piss everyone

off. Well, you know, you did promise honesty and I love honesty. Love, love that. So, okay, so I have thousands of questions, but I have to pass the baton to Susie because everyone in the community and Susie, I'm sure, has— well, I know because I've been seeing the questions come through. We're gonna get everyone's questions, try to get them answered here. So I will chime in a little bit here and there, but otherwise you are all Susie's. Here we go.

All right.

All right.

She's like, hahaha.

We seriously have a huge amount of questions. Bryan, I'm actually saying right now, I'm going to look to you to start sending additional ones my way. You got it. Because there's just a huge amount. So we're going to try rapid fire here.

OK.

Right? OK, so first of all, I have to start with a I'm going to share a quote from one of my favorite H2H chatters, Jim Carter, who joins us from the UK. He says, LinkedIn feels like a members-only club. Twitter is like a pub. Facebook is like someone's front room. I want this on a t-shirt.

I do too.

Just letting people know. Love it.

Send one to me

too. Seriously. I think that as we move through, one reason I wanted to use it, and then we'll jump into questions, I'm noticing a common sentiment as we go through, and I know I felt it myself, where it does feel like a members-only club.

It does.

Right. So then the challenge of building community and engagement is a different mindset. So, you know, let's— and I'm definitely seeing that as we go through. So moving in, I have— I'm just going to start at the top. So from Adam, he wants to know, bottom line, are groups Are groups worth spending time on using LinkedIn? Maybe I'll rephrase it and say, when are groups worth spending time on?

Spending time on LinkedIn. So one thing about groups is, and I'm going to try to give you short answers, but it's not in my nature.

Don't worry about it. It's okay. I get it.

It's not in my nature. Groups are a really good place to increase your visibility. You can join up to 50 groups, actually a little bit more than that, but let's just leave it at 50. But you're probably going to want to turn off You're probably going to want to turn off— you are going to want to turn off the notifications. You'll probably only be active in about 10% or maybe even like 5% of those groups. I'm actually only active in 3 or 4 groups that I find benefit with. There are definitely good groups out there. If you find benefit, keep active in them. My friend Jill Konrath's Fresh Sales Strategies group, I cannot believe I'm spacing it. Fresh Sales Strategies is a phenomenal group. Citibank's Connect for Women group is a great group and it shows you how to do sponsored groups. Then I guess my groups. But actually those 2 groups I like more than my groups. The truth. Jill or Jill's people spend a lot of time encouraging that interaction. They get a lot of influencers sharing content. Now there are a couple private groups that I am a member of that I absolutely love because there's like 10 of us. It is like a private club, but it's like a mastermind almost. There's 10 amazing women and we share our content with each other's networks and it's just a hub for us. Wow. There are different ways to use groups. The short answer, it depends on how you're going to use groups if you should use groups.

Right, right. No, I love that because I think with LinkedIn we tend to think of it just as a big networking party. You go in there, cheese and crackers, exchange stuff and go. That's not actually what a group is about. I like that. I like that a lot. Okay, so from— we're going to jump into Jeremy Murphy, a hard one. What benefits are there in having a paid LinkedIn membership? Is it really worth the money for a small business entrepreneur? I love your books.

It is. Again, short answer, it is. Long answer is the premium account is going to save you time. So if you have more money than time, then it's probably worth doing. Don't forget, 10 years ago we would have paid $100, $200, $500, $1,000 a month for a tool like this. And then social media came out and we're like, I don't want to pay for my social media.

Yep.

Stop thinking of LinkedIn as social media. We've already concluded it sucks as a social media site. So think of it as a business tool. And yes, it is worth it for numerous reasons. Almost anymore, especially if you're new to LinkedIn, There's not much of a point in being on LinkedIn if you have a free account because LinkedIn is limiting the search results. It's limiting your ability to see people's first names and last names. It's way limiting your ability to engage. They just limited your ability to share content or to direct message people in groups from no limit to 15 people a month. Total. Unless you have a paid account, your hands are pretty much tied. I'm so split on this because part of me is like, damn you, LinkedIn! And the other part is, seriously, it's less than $100 a month for one of the best business tools out there. It just depends on the day you get me.

Right, right. Absolutely, absolutely. That actually jumps into a personal question. So is LinkedIn less of a platform for job searchers?

No, it's still— it's not my area of expertise anymore. No, I get that. It's not what I focus on, but it's phenomenal. It is actually still excellent for job seekers, and you should buy the Job Seeker Premium, which is $29 a month. And I know if you're a job seeker, you're tight on money, but seriously, don't watch the game. Shut down your cable and just use Hulu or Netflix and stop smoking and don't drink coffee and you can afford, you know, JobSeeker and you'll be healthier for it anyway.

Right, right.

Yeah, right? It's a phenom— oh my, it drives me insane that there are people who are looking for a job and are not actively using LinkedIn. Absolutely one of the best tools out there for job seekers, bar none. Yeah.

Awesome, awesome. Are

you looking for a job? Is that why that was a personal message, Susie? No, no.

And thank you, everybody, for coming today to HTH Chat. We will be concluding now, right now.

No, it's on behalf of a friend. No, it legit is, actually.

I have a friend who needs a job.

Whose name is— She's a boss man.

And she has bright purple hair.

No, it's more a shout out to all my millennial friends out there. It sucks out there, and you do have to make that cost-benefit analysis. So that's good to hear.

All the more reason to keep your job.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, moving quickly on. Alright, so we have a question on here, and I'm so sorry I didn't get someone's name on this, but publishing your content on LinkedIn when you're not an influencer. Maybe tied into that, what does an influencer look like on LinkedIn? Obviously it's not just that badge.

Right, right. So there's the official influencers, the 500-ish lucky few that LinkedIn deemed important enough, and some of them are cool. guy and our friend Dave Kerpin. Some of them are here like, really? Anyway, that aside. The thing about LinkedIn Publisher that maybe people don't realize, it's sticky. It lives forever on your personal profile and it makes your profile prettier anyway. Yeah. Above and beyond that, the content is sticky. I was talking about earlier how we lost the ability to search updates. for particular keywords or phrases. But only SlideShare and Publisher, those are the only 2 pieces where you upload content that's actually searchable. So it's sticky. Never mind being an influencer, you know who has the best success on LinkedIn are people who've got super niche markets. It might be that only 100 people looked at your post, but they were 100 people that were genuinely interested in what you were working on. Right. 5 ways to knit socks. Okay, no, let's not use that, that's Facebook. 5 ways to use limiters in valve pipes. I don't know what that is, I totally made that up. But anyway, super niche market, but if you get those people looking at that profile, all of a sudden you are now the influencer and the authority on that particular bizarro, very niche market. Those people who are listening who have extremely niche markets, Do a happy dance and start getting some of your content out there. And by the way, if you're not a writer, I wrote my book, my entire book on Siri. Like, I suck at typing. So there's always ways that you can create content without being a writer. Do a Blab and transcribe it. Do a Periscope and transcribe it. Interview a bunch of people, get a bunch of quotes. You can create content that will help position you as a thought leader or subject matter expert, and it really can drive Now my friend John White, he's not an influencer, but he got, I think it's up to 700,000 or 800,000 views on one of his posts. It was actually his MBA thesis that he repurposed. Really? Yeah.

Wow.

700,000 views. Needless to say, he had a job before he graduated. He had 3 jobs actually before he graduated just from one post.

That's amazing.

Yeah, I've never gotten more than 10,000 views on any post. Wow. Yeah, I know Bryan does a lot better than I do. If you're niche, don't worry about it. If you're super niche or super small market, you can absolutely use Publisher effectively.

I love that. I actually have to say I had no idea that content was searchable. I think that's phenomenal. That's awesome to know. That makes a lot of sense. I like that. So I have someone, let's see, I have, let me try and see, okay, I have a lot of questions about engagement here. So here's one from JS Gilbert, which I think is great because that is kind of, you want to get that conversation going, right?

Right, of course.

So he says, I have found that LinkedIn really seems to be becoming a look at what I did sort of platform.

Yes, it is.

What are strategies for engagement? Yeah,

that's true. I think it's because it's so heavily weighted on the profile. The profile does need to be not only who am I or how can I serve you, but it is a little bit this is who I am and I'm credible. People get on LinkedIn and they just don't do anything there.

Yeah, right.

One thing that you can do that I think is extremely effective, although LinkedIn with its new messenger I hate it. Anyway, one thing that you can do is you can segment your audience like a Facebook list or a Twitter list. So you can segment your audience according to who they are to you, and that will allow you to communicate more effectively with them. So whether they are a vendor, an employee, a current client, past client, influencer, post promoter, someone in PR, someone in promotion, someone in Prospect, obviously. Hot prospect, cold prospect, prospect in Colorado, prospect media prospect. However, I have one that's called zombie and one that's called biatch. Nice. They don't see the tags that you create but it's a way for you to segment your audience. It's a little bit manual but you can always look through and see what the activity is and private message those individuals. You used to be able to private message them all at once. Up to 50 people at a time. With the new LinkedIn Messenger, it turns into a group chat, which is annoying, and don't do it unless you have buy-in, unless you have everybody's permission. But it does allow you to have more meaningful conversations with individual groupings or segments of your population. It's funny because it's just like Bryan said, we just haven't trained the membership to interact with updates by liking and sharing and commenting. For sure, if you're trying to create a relationship and engagement with a prospect, go to their profile, view their recent activity, comment on it. See if they're in a group, see what they're sharing in the group, comment on it. More importantly, we want to go for that human-to-human interaction. As long as you are connecting with people, Why not ask for the phone number, the email address, meet for coffee? One of my favorite ninja tricks is if I'm going to be in Chicago, I was just in Chicago, my time was full from morning until midnight. Right. But if I had an extra, like in the Caymans, I'm staying an extra day, I'm going to see who in my network is in the Caymans and see if I can't get some either coffees with some of the business owners in the Caymans or maybe do some private training while I'm there, make a little extra money. Certainly write the whole trip off. You can certainly do that. That's a great point. And that is where LinkedIn has been a huge fail, is just not taking that extra step. And you know, it might mean getting out of our comfort zone and actually picking up the phone. But here's another ninja trick. The more you research someone, the more comfortable you'll feel with them. It's not even about them. It's the more comfortable you'll feel about them. So it doesn't feel like a cold call. I have been a fangirl of Bryan for ages. When we met each other at Social Media Marketing World 2 years ago, 3 years ago with Joel Comm, I felt like I knew him. So I actually, even though I was a huge fangirl, I wasn't— Me? Bryan? I wasn't scared and squeaky about meeting him. I was like, I know this dude. I know his wife. I know his office. I know who he is. So I was very comfortable meeting and talking to him for the first time. Whether it's someone like Bryan or whether it's a prospective client, it takes away that edge of discomfort if you do your deep research on them.

Ironically, I was a massive fan of yours, so it's very mutual.

Fans coming together.

I love it.

I love it. I didn't know that.

I'm just glad I was such a fan. We randomly sat next to each other at lunch and I turned over and I go, holy shit, I'm sitting next to the LinkedIn expert.

That's so cool. I love it. Oh my God. See, if we didn't have this conversation, we wouldn't know that about each other.

Nah. Yeah, there is that balance and I love the idea of, you know, just got to pick up the phone at times.

Yeah, you really do.

That's so important. Okay, so I have a great question from the awesome Tamara. Yay!

Hey, Tamara!

She says, when it comes to Facebook versus Twitter versus LinkedIn, what percent of your social time would you develop— well, I guess not you, right? But one, the average person, the person who doesn't say LinkedIn expert, right? Where's

your audience? Well, first of all, the powerful thing about LinkedIn is it's not fun. You're going to go in there, you're going to do your work, you're going to get out.

That makes me feel so much better. I'm trying to make it be fun and I'm like, I can't.

I try to make LinkedIn fun, but LinkedIn is not fun. Oh my God, you should have totally— when we're off screen, I'll tell you what I The biggest faux pas at Social Boom. Anyway, I try to make LinkedIn fun.

Of course everybody is going to tweet you and ask you now.

I know, I totally will. It's about email funnels but not. I have totally distracted myself. LinkedIn is kind of boring, so you make a checklist, you schedule your time, 15-20 minutes a day for the average person is all you need to spend on LinkedIn. If you start generating a lot of business there, of of course you'll increase your time. My assistant spends 3 to 4 hours a day on LinkedIn for me. I spend an hour or more a day on LinkedIn. But my average client, we spend 15 to 20 minutes a day for them and then I doubt they spend any time at all, though they should spend at least 15 to 20 minutes a day. Checklists are key for all your social media sites. On LinkedIn, so you actually go in and get it done, but on things like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest, Pinterest are bottomless sucking holes of information. Oh yeah. Right? 5 hours later, they can't crawl out of the cat video.

Yes.

And

it depends where your audience is. I'm B2B. My audience is on LinkedIn. I suck at Facebook other than I have fun there with my friends. I'm really not good at Facebook. I haven't looked at my page in a million years. I don't spend as much time there for business. That's really, again, not a long answer. It depends where your audience is. It depends where you're making your money. Spend more time there.

I love that. I love the concept of a checklist. I think I'm going to use it. That's what I tell people. Save time, get off Facebook. I can't.

I know you can't.

How do you develop checklists between you and your assistant with the steps involved of what you're expecting to happen for somebody? And it's not— I'm not even asking this question between just you and an assistant, because I think Suzy has a point there. Like, how do you develop the process of putting a USB between your brain and someone else's? Right. How do you develop that process?

Yeah, well, part of it is definitely— oops— part of it is definitely Do what only you can do and have everybody else do the rest. I cannot remember who told me that. It's like the best, best piece of advice I've ever, ever received in my life. So I do what only I can do on LinkedIn. I make sure that I look at my messages coming through and respond personally to the people I actually know or that I personally engaged with. I look at my endorsements and see who's endorsed me who I personally know and respond to those. I look at the people who viewed my profile. That's something only I can do and if she tries to do it, it ends up looking really canned and gross. There are a lot of things that she can do that I don't have to do. Anyone who invites me to connect who's not a personal connection necessarily gets a handy, helpful, useful informational letter that has like 16 useful links and 1 link to my book. Which by the way, don't buy it, it's so out of date. I'll have better resources for everyone soon. Soon. I bought Confusionsoft, so soon I will have excellent funnels with lots of excellent information on them for everybody. Only do what only you can do. When creating a checklist for LinkedIn, for Twitter, for Facebook, for life, take one day and track everything you do, or take one week and track everything you do, and the things that you do in a repetitive manner, make that A task to complete and whether you use Asana or whether you use Slack or whether, no matter what tool you use and then you make a little box. What can only I do? What can anybody else do? Right. And only do what only you can do. Hiring an assistant changed my company in a night. It changed my business overnight. Yeah, invest in yourself by investing in other people. Again, I went totally off

topic. I love that. And I saw Bryan and I are both like this.

Yeah.

Looking like, oh yes. Okay, I have one last question, and this is what I like. I always try to end with a, you know, okay, what can I do right after this chat? Yeah. What happens next? So, okay, so from Ailee Nielsen, She says, how important is your bio and summary? I'd like to focus on the second part here where she says,

do

you have any suggestions on what info to include there, length, tone, etc.? This is after H2H Chat, everyone go do what we're about to hear.

Okay, so you have 2,000 characters, I recommend using as much as possible. Do it in a Word document first, do not try to do this right on LinkedIn. In Word documents you can get bullets, you can get special characters, you can't get bold, italics, change font, get colors, but you can get bullets and special characters. Use spacing, bite-sized pieces. So that's just formatting. Now let's talk about content. You already know and you'll have in your experience section what you do and what you offer. If you can give people case studies, give them numbers, give them percentages, people like that. The eye is absolutely attracted to numbers. I increase this person, you know, I increase on average, I increase my clients engagement on LinkedIn. I need to go do this by the way, so don't look at my summary right now. I increased my clients' engagement by 628%. Here's what one client has to say, testimonial. Here's what I've learned and how I can help you. You might start, you might even start the whole thing with a point of pain. Does it keep you up at night wondering where your next client is going to come from? Does it keep you up at night knowing that your website is a horrendous disaster? Does it keep you up at night knowing you have to write a book but not knowing where to get started? Does it keep you up at night knowing that there are people dying in Africa and you can help but you just don't know where to get started? If this is you, I can help. Here's how, here's how we've done it, here's examples of how we've done it, and here's a testimonial. If you just use that template, you're going to create a really powerful, engaging, moving profile. Oh yeah, and add your links in there because even though they're not They're not clickable on the browser, they are clickable on a smartphone or on a tablet. Oh, interesting. I think it just switched over, more people are using the tablet and the smartphone app on LinkedIn than the browser, which is a shame because they still are not fabulous. Do that, 2,000 characters, do it in a Word document, format, focus on what's in it for your client. Know who your client base is. And then add media. The other thing you can do to your summary is add 5 pieces of media will be immediately visible, so get your 5 best pieces of media, whatever that is.

Love it, love it. Seriously fantastic. And we have— that was potentially maybe 50% of the questions. So if you have some time at all through the day, take a look at the screen.

Yeah, for sure I will.

Amazing, amazing.

Awesome. Vivica, where can everybody find you? Not that it's not in your lower thirds.

They're not clickable. LinkedInToBusiness.com, LinkedInToBusiness.com is my main website. Obviously all my sites are findable on there. If you Google LinkedIn expert, my LinkedIn profile is the first one that shows up. I've hit my 30,000 limit, but my assistant gets rid of people to add new people in. Just say you heard me on H2H Chat, and I would absolutely love to connect with you there. Plus, I'll tag you as H2H Chat, and that way I can keep you informed of the latest things that are happening. If you're comfortable with being in a group chat, I'll have to get your permission first. I'm @LinkedInExpert on Twitter. I'm @LinkedInExpert on Instagram. Let's connect on Facebook too, even though I suck at it. I'm Viveka von Rosen on Facebook. I'm sure I'm on other— youtube.com/linkedinexpert, although Steve Dotto says my YouTube channel sucks, so I'm going to have to improve that.

It's all a work in progress.

It's all a work in progress all the time.

Well, thank you so much. It was great to see you at Inbound. It was even better to have you— well, it was totally awesome to have you here today. I look forward to seeing you again in the future, and we'll have to have you back again Soon because there's so much information about LinkedIn.

And LinkedIn is making so many changes. You know it, I'll be there.

Awesome, awesome. Thank you so much. And a quick thank you to our sponsors: New Star, MasterCard, Cisco, IBM, Little Bird, HootSuite, Freshdesk, Speakeasy, Influitive, Mutual Mind, and Cox Communications. We love you, we appreciate you, thank you so much for supporting H2H chat. And finally, to everyone out there, the community that helps to make this fun and engaging and throwing out lots and lots of great questions, we really appreciate you for being here. We'll be back again next Monday. Suzy, our guest is from Formula One.

Formula One.

Whoa, that's cool.

Yes, we're going to be talking about Formula One. So the CMO from Formula One will be talking about How to Race Your Marketing from a Race Car Company, which is Formula 1. So we can't, can't wait for that. So hopefully you'll all join back in for that. And Susie, thank you. Cheers again.

Thank you.

Vivica, we'll see you soon. Have a great week.

Thank you.

And thank you again, everybody out there.

Great.

Alright, bye everybody.

Bye guys, have a good week.