10 - Ask me anything! About LinkedIn...

Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching Podcast. Today is the first time that I am actually recording the podcast in video form so that I can post the video to a few places as well as the podcast. So I'm not sure yet where that's going to go, but you may be watching this on video. If so, hello. That's me waving for those listening on the podcast. So, before I dive in to today's topic, I just wanted to let you know that I am going to be running a free masterclass, a webinar on the eight foundations of a thriving executive coaching business. Now, I've run this one once before for a particular community and the feedback was great. So I wanted it to. I wanted to offer it to everyone in my community. What I do in this masterclass is I really dive into the details of what I know are the key elements that you need to have in place as an executive coach and a few tips for each of those. This masterclass also includes a self assessment that you'll get us a copy of if you sign up. And this lets you go through each of the foundations as we work through the masterclass and score yourself against a certain, a number of criteria. And that allows you to sort of to say, you know, here are my priorities here, you know, a bit of a triage process, if you like, on where should I focus my attention next? Because sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming and we can think, yeah, okay, well, I need to do a lot of things in my business, but I want to help you figure out where to start. And so that is the purpose of the assessment. It sits in the masterclass, it does cover all of the foundations. So there's a lot of tips, a lot of advice for coaching businesses. It is targeted at, you know, people who are in the early phases of their coaching career, so maybe the first three to four years, but it's not limited to those people. So if you want to do a bit of a self assessment, a bit of an audit on how things are going, there's value in it, I think, for all coaches. So the master class is being run on Thursday, 9th of May, there will be a recording. So if you can't make it, you're welcome to sign up anyway and you'll automatically get sent the recording. And for the first time, I'm running the webinar twice in one day because I wanted to make sure that I caught times when any time zone, anyone in any time zone could come along. So we're running it at two different time zones. In Singapore time, that is 8am and 7pm Singapore time. So hopefully for most of you, there will be a suitable time for you to come live because it's always much more fun when we can answer questions and interact live. You can sign up for the masterclass at www.elliscarf.com eight foundations. And that's a number eight, not a letter eight. But I will put that link in the show notes as well. So I would love to see you there. Now onto today's topic. So a lot of the questions that people ask me when it comes to marketing particularly are about LinkedIn and I am a pretty heavy user of LinkedIn. So I have, you know, I've got things to say and I've got opinions and I've done a lot of training and learning that has helped me to develop a bit of a, a sense of what, what does and doesn't work. So today I'm answering some more, some of the more frequently asked questions. And you know, I really love it when people get in to. So if you're one of the people who've reached out to me on LinkedIn or email, hello, I love it. Please keep talking to me. Let me know if any of this is helpful. And if you have any other questions that pop up as a result of either this, this podcast or anything else that you see, if you have any other topics you'd like me to talk about, do drop me a line and I would absolutely love to hear from you. Okay, so LinkedIn. LinkedIn is, I was going to say a necessary evil, but I actually really like LinkedIn. When you compare LinkedIn to some of the other social platforms, so Facebook or Instagram, LinkedIn is still what I think of as the land of opportunity. And I think that the stats show that of all of the people who are members on LinkedIn, only 5% of those people are posting any content of their own. So that means that if you are someone who is developing and putting content out there, it's highly likely that you will be noticed and it's highly likely that people will engage with you. So, you know, hopefully a few tweaks and tips and some consistency will LinkedIn can represent a really big opportunity for you. So the first question, this is one I'm asked all the time, and this is one that I myself asked not that long ago, is should I be posting from my business page or my personal page? So as you know, you have your personal page, which is you and your name, and then you have a business page, or you may or may not have a business page. Now, firstly, you don't have to have a business page, but many people who have a business that is either a different brand or has a slightly different slant on what they post personally, lots of people do, right? So you may have a business page as well. So the answer is, and the answer is pretty clear, that you should be posting from your personal page. Especially for coaches, there are a few reasons for this. Firstly, people want to work with people that they know and that they like and that they trust. And posting as yourself is generally considered best practice in order to do that. There are also limitations to business pages. So you can't DM from a business page. And as we know, most of the action when it comes to actual engagements and sales and conversation and relationship building, that's happening in the messages, that's not happening on the posts. So there are limitations in business pages. That said, business pages can still be helpful. So if you have a business page, there are some things you can do from there that you can't do from a personal page. Things like certain types of advertising require you to have a business page to be able to do that. So what I recommend is that the personal page is where you are making most of your posts. It's where you're engaging with people. That is sort of the center of where things happen. But use your business page to share your posts, right? Or to promote your content and to like your posts, because that is going to help you build up traction on your personal page. And it is also then going to build a history within your business page. That means that when someone is looking at your business, if they've heard about your business rather than you as a person, they can validate that it's. It's legitimate. So that is what I would recommend for business pages. Overall. I would say focus on your personal page. Don't worry too much about your business page. But I think it is a good practice to eventually get into the process of having a business page that shares or reposts your personal posts with the business label on it. Now, it gives your personal posts extra ammunition if you actually literally share or repost. But you can also actually post it as original content coming from the business if you want that business to be getting the cred for the posts. And that might happen down the track. Do be aware though that you shouldn't do that from your personal page. And when we go, one of the other questions I'm going to answer is about what not to do. And sharing and reposting is Very sadly, one of those things. So the next question I wanted to touch on is do I need Sales Navigator or should I buy LinkedIn Premium upgrade? So the answer is you don't need it. You can do most of what you want to do without it. But let's treat the two of those things separately. So Sales Navigator is a good tool for volume and it is a good tool if you want extra search capability, but it's not a magic bullet. So it will allow you to search for your target audience a little more easily. But you can do a lot of that natively within LinkedIn anyway. So I would say for the cost of Sales Navigator, not a priority in the, in the early days, but once you start wanting to take sort of volume based actions around DMs and things like that, that's when you might look at sales navigator LinkedIn Premium. I would say that's a maybe. So LinkedIn Premium allows you to do a volume of messaging and it gives you more access to data and analytics? I think so. And I'm not an expert, this is just my experience. So when you are building a warm outreach strategy, right? So when you are going through a process of DMing your first and actually you can't DM your second degree connections, but you are DMing your connections, I think you have more capacity to do that if you are a premium member. Now I have both. So I have both sales Navigator and LinkedIn Premium, but I am what I would probably call a heavy ish LinkedIn user. So, you know, what do you need starting out? You. I think premium is probably a good investment in terms of, you know, allowing you to do the volume of outreach that you would like to do early on and allowing you to send out more invitations with personalized messages. But that's sort of the main reason why I would do Premium. And on that note, sometimes people aren't thinking about it, but you should be sending out, you know, sort of 15 or more invitations per day if you can, if you have the capacity with personalized messages. So that should be your sort of your baseline. I do this every day process. Don't send out hundreds because you'll get flagged. You need to build up to how many you can send and you need to do it on a daily basis rather than doing it all at once over a weekend. Okay. The third question, how often should I post? So this is a great question and this is really, you know, how long is a piece of string? Answer. So you know, good coaching answer. It depends. There is no magic number but the number I believe that you should focus on is what is the number that you can consistently sustain and feel good about what you're posting. So if you are using LinkedIn as a marketing tool, I think that the minimum is that you should be posting at least weekly. Ideally, I think coaches could post three to five times a week. Now that might be overwhelming. So what I would say is the posts that you, the things that you post and we cover in, in my, in my program, we cover what to post in in a lot of detail. But you know, just remember they don't all need to be deep researched, thoughtful posts. Now some them do, but all of that research that you do should be broken down, right? And, and you should be not posting it all as one brain dump of all of the, the thinking that you've had, but as short snippets of, you know, present people what they have the capacity to absorb when they're scrolling through LinkedIn. So, you know, it's okay to do some fun posts, it's okay to do short posts, it's okay to keep it varied, it's okay to do polls, which really don't require much. It's actually okay to do image only posts. All of those things are fine. So you don't have to write elaborate captions if you've got an image that speaks for itself, like a quote or something like that. So yeah, I would say if you're serious about it, three to five times a week and you know, a variety of content should, is what you should put up. Okay. Is there a best time of the day to post on LinkedIn? Again, a very good question and a very common question. And I've got to say I'm a bit flaky about this. I tend to be a bit random in my posting. But the, the, you know, the general wisdom is that you're best being consistent with the time of day that you post. So you know, if you know that your people are, you know, on having breakfast at 8am and that's when they're scrolling, that's when you should post. That's when you should do it consistently because you want to create a habit and sort of a bit of training around expecting to see your face on their feed at this time of day. The other thing you can do is just look at your responses. So do a bit of an experiment. Does something Posted at 8:00am Work better than something posted at midday or does something posted in the evening work best? What gets you the most response from the people that you want to get a response from. And that might mean if you're coming from a professional job, you've obviously got a significant professional network, but they're not necessarily your target audience for your coaching business. So you want to be watching. When are you getting the response from the people that are your target audience rather than from your friends or, you know, your, your network that may be less relevant, not that I think anyone is less relevant when it comes to coaching. I think most of your network can be relevant, but you'll know, you'll know the difference. And send then. And then just, finally just know your audience when you're thinking about when to post, when are they online, when are they likely to be checking LinkedIn? Some people. You know, actually I saw some interesting research this week that showed that posts on Saturday often do the best, which was really interesting because I've been sort of. And I probably won't post on weekends, but I might be, can. I might consider scheduling a post for a Saturday just because that research was pretty compelling. So look, I do want to touch quickly on one of the questions is what the heck should I be posting about? And I'm just going to share a few, a few things to think about when you think about what to post. So the first is that what you posting in any social media context, including LinkedIn, although possibly less in LinkedIn, is that you're trying to stop the scroll. You're trying, people are, you know, hang on, they've got their, they've got their device and they are scrolling through it. And your goal with your images, with captions, with the way you structure what you're sending is to stop them and get them to look at you, engage with you and notice your face, right? That's really what we're aiming at. We also want to be signaling our people, right? So we want people who are our target audience. So the people. And we would do that through things like talking about their common challenges, talking about things that they are interested in, sharing work of people that they follow. Right? So signal the people, people that you want to be working with. We want content that builds trust. And one of the ways to do that is through solving problems. And that means posting our thought leadership. So we can often think this is the only type of content, right? The how to content, the detailed content, but this is just one type of content that we might post. So, you know, it's good to talk about theory and research, but make sure you put it in the context of the people that you're talking to. Unless of course, you're appealing to an academic audience, then share research purely. They'll love that you should post things that are shorter and more simple than what you think they need to be. Now, this doesn't mean that it's meaningless or that it just needs to be fluff. It needs to be real. But really be very clear on, you know, make one point, right? You don't need to make a series of points because frankly people won't read it. And what we want to do is catch them, have a hook and then share an idea, something that they might want to share with someone else, something that they'll go, oh, yeah, I never thought about it like that. Next thing in terms of what you should post and don't come for me people is photos of yourself. I said what I said, yes, photos of you will consistently perform better than posts without photos of you or without photos of anything. Dog photos also do quite well. But what we want is, we want photos of your face because we want people to identify your face, to know you and to trust you and to associate you with an important message that you repeat again and again. And so that is what we're after. But you should. So all of this you also need to. You do you right, you need to be authentic. So the things you post need to feel good. It shouldn't feel like you're being said spammy or just talking crap. It should be something that feels good for you. It can help if we want to, you know, sort of, sort of go down the LinkedIn hacking path. It can help to add keywords and talk about things that LinkedIn cares about. And what LinkedIn cares about are careers, hiring, promotions, recruitment. Think about how LinkedIn makes its money. So if you can adapt some of those concepts to the work that you do and how you post about it, your posts will do well because they actually are human beings. And I learned this this week that there's a really interesting flow that your posts go through. First, it's assessed for whether it is spam and that's done by, by bots that have got certain triggers. Then it is assessed for whether it is low quality or high quality. And then there is a human being that looks at your post and says, yes, this is something we want to promote or this is something we don't care about. So assuming you get to that stage, if you're talking about things that are LinkedIn's editorial agenda, they will do better. So keywords you know, can, can be very powerful. I think for coaches, it is quite easy for us to Tie our content into those, those concepts. So careers, promotions, recruitment, hiring, you know, all of those things. Advancement, you know, and so, you know, if you want to, you know, be quite sophisticated, you could consider that. The last question I want to talk about today is what should you avoid doing on LinkedIn? And the truth is, the LinkedIn algorithm and this process is pretty specific and things change. And, you know, I am, I am not the expert, but I do pay attention to the people who are the experts. So here's a few things that I've learned you should avoid. The first is sharing. Sharing and reposting other people's content is a no, no if you want your content to be posted. Now, this sucks, to be honest, because I really like promoting other people's work and I really like promoting great training. But you will be penalized for it in terms not just of that post, although that post will be demoted, although it will promote the person that you're posting it about. So that post will be demoted. And your any new post, they refer back to the previous two weeks or so or 14 or 15 posts to decide, you know, how many people to show your post to. So it will then have an impact on your subsequent posts. So don't share a repost. Now, the way to get around it, I think, is by posting it as you. But obviously you want to be making sure it's clear that it's a share. So there's a couple of things you can do. You can save an image and then actually post that image. That is someone else's image. Of course it will have all of that person's details in it. And you would tag them and say, hey, I'm so proud to share the work from, you know, my colleague abc. So you're not sharing it, you're actually posting it as original, not original content, but you know what I mean. You're posting it to your post. You're posting an image and a caption. So that is probably how to get around it. Or just create a post that is really just saying, you know, I want to recognize the amazing work of this person or this training or this program. It was, you know, I had this experience of it. I highly recommend it. Here's a link. Now, it used to be that putting links in posts would get you demoted, and that still happens a little bit, but apparently it is no longer a big problem. So, yeah, you can post links, but just see how it goes. Don't do too many hashtags and don't tag too many people that used to be the way that you would get a lot of traction on LinkedIn is you would tag, you know, like 50, 50 people. 20 people. And the more people you tagged, the better you posted. Sorry, that was my phone just telling me that I have an appointment. Thank you very much. Phone. Great podcast and not putting phone on silent. But yeah, don't tag too many people anymore. It will get you like I mentioned in that process. The spam filter will, will filter you out and so then people won't see your, your posts. Don't post too often, you know, in case. That's not a problem for many of us, but it could be. Daily is best, but leave at least four hours in between posts. Now I have, I have fallen down this trap and posted more frequently because I've realized something or there was something that I needed to share. And it's true, no one will see your posts and it's a waste of time. Also, don't edit your posts within the first, you know, five or six hours. Ideally, don't edit your post at all. As soon as you go, if you have a post that's doing okay, if you go in and edit it, it then starts that review cycle again and, you know, it sort of confuses things and it will get demoted. People ask a lot about whether scheduling tools, you know, posts, and the truth is it's mixed, but it's probably, yes, your posts probably get demoted when you use a scheduling tool. Now, I only learned this recently, although I suspected, and I do use a scheduling tool, so I'm going to stop doing that and I'm going to start posting every day rather than scheduling my posts. It is likely that using the LinkedIn native scheduling tool is probably better. So, you know, you may find that the reduced amount of response is much less with the native tool. But the reason that you probably don't do as well with scheduled posts is also that LinkedIn wants you on the platform. And when you're putting things through a scheduling tool, it knows you're not actually on the platform, so it's going to penalize you for that. So, you know, by posting every day, you're actually physically on the platform. So, you know, that might be what's going on. There are probably, well, there are a lot more things to avoid, a lot more things to do. But I'm hopeful that this has just been, you know, a few little snippets to help you as you are building your LinkedIn habit or as you are building your consistency and your strategy. But that's it for today. Thanks so much for joining me again. Again, as I said, come along to my masterclass, the eight Foundations of a Thriving Executive Coaching Business, which is absolutely my goal is to help people to build sustainable and profitable coaching businesses that help them to live the life that they, they want to live right, not just do the work. So come along. It's at ww.elliscarf.com 8foundations. And I will look forward to seeing you there.