How to Engage and Interact on Facebook and LinkedIn

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, May 15th, 2019 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook with WSI Digital Marketing, where we work with businesses and organizations in helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. Learn more about WSI and all the fun stuff we get to do online at www.poweredbywsi.com. Today, apologize for the late start. GoToWebinar was giving me some fits. Apparently there was an update, so I, I'm a couple minutes late, but I'm excited to see we've got some live visitors attending today. And as a reminder, the show is recorded, assuming that GoToMeeting doesn't make it difficult for me to pull the recording down, and posted online at freewebinarwednesdays.com. If you've got questions and you are attending live, or comment, feedback, thoughts, anything that you'd like to share, or just want to say hello, go ahead and use the chat function in your control panel and say hi and let me know. Love to, love to hear from you. So today's conversation, and in keeping with past shows, I think we're gonna still kind of Keep this at the half an hour range, but I wanted to share a little discovery with you. I've been listening to a podcast from a gentleman over in the UK called Linked Informed. That's Linked Informed. And I've been picking up some really cool ideas and thoughts off of that podcast and would suggest maybe plugging that into your ear and checking it out because it's got some really good stuff. But one of the things, I guess a couple of things that have rolled out to LinkedIn recently that some of you may have caught, and I think some of you that are on the show listening, maybe even connections with me on LinkedIn might've picked up some posts that I've done. First off, LinkedIn kind of is going down the Facebook-y avenue of changing the different sorts of reactions that are available to people when they interact with your posts. And so I actually did a post talking about this that got some pretty good visibility that I'll use as an example here in just a second to kind of draw attention to the next part of this. But a couple of things that are interesting on this is one, you've always got the like, but now they've added some color. And if you're using a mobile device, just like on Facebook, if you want to do something other than the like, you just touch and hold and that will allow For that to give you a little pop-over and you get some, some options and then you can select it from there. But if you've not been on LinkedIn recently, you may have missed this. A lot of people were talking about it, but you've got the ability always to like, which is just going to be the big old blue, but then they've got 4 new ones that are And I don't know whether they'll add more. I saw some people joking about, you know, why isn't there a negative one for like seriously with a big question mark or angry, you know, kind of like what Facebook has done, or sad. But LinkedIn is trying to keep positive. So you got celebrate, which obviously if somebody has, you know, some sort of a recognition or an announcement or a promotion. You've got love, and unlike Facebook, this is in 3rd position where Facebook puts that number 2. But certainly you can always love something if you want. If you have a feeling that something is particularly insightful or thought-provoking, you can go ahead and click on the light bulb, like, didn't know that. And then you've also got the curious option. Where maybe that's a little bit more along the lines of Either, and this is where I think some of the nuances of these icons are going to be a little difficult to really ascertain, but somebody could post something like curious, like, hmm, this makes me think, or they could post a curious and say, hmm, why did you even post that? Why is this relevant? Why are you sharing this on LinkedIn? As opposed to, you know, curious that this made me think a little bit. So it'll be interesting to see how this rolls out. I can tell you based off of Social Media Marketing World when I was there earlier this year, Mari Smith shared some statistics and maybe I'll do a little poll. I will throw that out there to anybody that's actually attending today's session live. What would you suspect in Facebook the number one Reaction is. Is it like? Is it love? Is it sad? Is it happy? Laughter? Angry? Just curious if you've got any thoughts. I'll give it a minute. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. So we've got like. Anybody else want to play along? I won't keep it open for too long. I know I don't have a formal poll. This has been one of those. It would have been nice to have a formal poll with all the different options that you could have selected from it, but I didn't think that far ahead. Actually, the most popular emotion or reaction, according to Marty Smith, was the love, and second was the haha or the laughter response. And so I'm suspecting like's probably third, certainly before all of the other emotional responses were available, like was the only thing you got. So there's really no way that you could get around that. Um, so it'll be interesting to see whether LinkedIn releases any of that data as to which one of those reactions provides the most type of engagement. A couple of other things to make a note of as it relates to the reactions. One is they only work on the native post. So If somebody— if you post something and somebody posts a comment, as you scroll down in the list and you look at the comment, you don't have the ability to actually love somebody's comment or congratulate them with applause or give them, you know, hey, that was a really insightful comment, thank you very much. At this point, any of the comments that are in the stream really only have the ability To give you, to be able to just do the, the, the likes. I'm going to pull one up here real quick. So here's one. This one actually generated some pretty interesting discussion as well. And if you haven't, this is probably going to be familiar to all my banker buddies out there because it kind of took over the banking world for a while. But the, uh, the folks at Chase did a tweet a couple of weeks ago, and they thought they were being somewhat tongue-in-cheek with a quote-unquote conversation between a bank customer and the bank itself. And there was some dialogue back and forth, and the internet basically thought that it was very insensitive. And even though it was framed under the Motivational Monday hashtag, and Chase was trying to demonstrate that maybe there's other creative ways that you can save money beyond buying your coffee at Starbucks or taking an Uber. Maybe it's not so bad to go for a walk every once in a while. The message that actually came across really wasn't seen that well. So, um, I want to add, Bill Streeter is a connection of mine who wrote the article. He's one of the editors over there as well. And so I posted the link, talked about it. You can see I've got 7 comments. All 9 of the comments received so far, all 9 of the interactions were thumbs up. There was really no other. So I don't know if it's just because people just aren't familiar with it. I've seen a couple of posts that I've done that have gotten a little bit more variety in interaction, but a lot of people, I think, on LinkedIn are still defaulting back to just the thumbs up. Hey, I like this. But as you scroll down, you can see, you know, John made a comment that I thought was really good and I appreciated it. So I just click on this and there's really no option for me to do something other than just like. But one of the things that I thought was rather interesting is, and this is one of the things that I pulled out of that LinkedIn forum, is Every once in a while, you're going to get somebody that's going to be a second-tier connection to you that might see your post and might engage with your post as a result of somebody else engaging with it first that you're connected to. So if I lose you on this, like, verbal adventure, rope me back in and post. But in this example, John is a first-tier connection of mine, and you can see that he posted a comment. By posting a comment, this then showed up in John's feed, and Eric is a 2nd-tier connection. I believe also works at the same institution, but Eric and I are not connected, but we do have John as a common connection. Now, let's say I wanted to reach out to Eric directly and go, you know, I think that the comment you posted here was really good. I liked it. But somehow I wanted to give him some feedback. I could always make a comment. I could always click on the like if I wanted to. So there's ways that I could interact there. But one of the things that I found out on this podcast that I was listening to, and I would have never really discovered this on my own, is— I'm going to just hold down the Control button on my computer so I open this in a new tab. But you can see when I hover over Eric, it says, hey, I can connect with him because we're not connected now. And if I click on his profile and I open it up now, I'm going to open it in a new tab. If I go over here and I let his profile load, what's going to happen now is you can see I can connect with him. I can view him in Sales Navigator. I could maybe send him, uh, an InMail, which would give me the ability to maybe burn one of my InMails because I'm using the Sales Navigator feature. But if I do the exact same— and it's not possible for me, unfortunately, to share my mobile device on the screen— but if I pull that exact same conversation up on my mobile device and I go to the exact same thread, to the exact same comment, and on my mobile device I touch Eric's name and I open up his profile, even though he's a second-tier connection to me, I have the ability to send him a message through my mobile device. So when I heard that on the, on the podcast while I was on my bike ride last week, I kind of questioned as to whether that was really the case, whether maybe LinkedIn was testing something and maybe something got broken. But when I tested it this morning on a couple of different instances where I have, I've got a couple of comments that have come in from second-tier connections, I can validate and confirm that when I open up that profile on my mobile device, I have the ability to send Eric a direct message without using InMail, without having to spend money or run the risk of it going into his filter where somebody has sent an InMail. But because he has commented on a post, LinkedIn apparently is sharing what allowing for his information to be shared with me in this one instance because he's indicated some interest in what it is that I've produced. And LinkedIn is going to make it possible for me to have some dialogue with him. Now, that dialogue, we want to be careful that we don't turn it into spammy salesy crap because that's the last thing that anybody wants to receive on their end. But it gives me now the ability to send him a note. And if Eric was somebody that I wanted to connect with, I like your first name, happen to share the same one. Hey, let's get connected. I see, you know, John, whatever the case is. If he and I wanted to have a conversation, or if I wanted to have a conversation with him, it's a lot easier for me to do that now based off of the fact that he's shown some engagement. I don't know as if I ever would get a 3rd-tier connection because that would then be somebody that Eric knows, seeing it on his page. That would then make a comment that would then show up as a comment under his. But the, the thought around it is that if anybody engages with one of your posts, LinkedIn is now, at least for the time being, providing you with the ability on your mobile device to be able to interact with that person and have some dialogue. If he never made a comment on the post, there wouldn't be the option. I would still have to come up here and I would still have to You know, view them in Sales Navigator, send an in-mail message or something along those lines. But it's not going to give me the ability to just boom, there's a big old message that's there and I can just go ahead and click on message. So I thought that was kind of cool. I'm gonna hit the pause button on the mouse for a quick second and make sure any of the folks that are attending live that that made total sense. If you need me to re-explain that, or maybe what the business value there is. By all means, let me know. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. Looks like that makes total sense. Cool. And then the other thing, let me go back in and I'm gonna find another post that I have done. And let's find the one that actually has. The so we've got where's the one that I did? There's probably a I know there's an easier way to do this, but I'm gonna a lot of conversation on the on the Chase Bank. They kind of blew something up pretty good there, and the internet wasn't too happy with them. So they took the post down. I'm not so sure they should have taken the post down, and that article from the Financial Brand really talks about all the different nuances. Around, you know, well, what should you have done? Should Chase have actually taken that down? Should have they taken their lumps and determined that, you know what, yeah, we made a goof, but we're going to leave it up there as a lesson? You know, I guess it really kind of depends on the philosophy of the organization, but, you know, I don't know as if they necessarily should have taken the post down. So I'm going to go in a different way. I'm going to pop in here and I'm going to go down and take a look at my activities. And I'm going to find the post that I believe has got some additional activity on it related to some, some hand claps and some other elements. So you can kind of get an idea. So let's go to posts. And this works for other individuals that you might be sniffing around on when you're on LinkedIn. You can go to their profile. You can scroll down to their activity. If there's not any activity there, then obviously it's somebody that's not really posting and doing a whole lot. Here's an example of one. So not as many views, 336, which isn't too shabby. Still not like over 1,000 like the other one did. But if you go in and you take a look, This gives you the ability where you can now start seeing you've got individuals that 3 likes, you've got one of insightful, so you've got the light bulb there. And as you start scrolling through, here's another one where this one actually generated, and this was about the actual items themselves. So you could go through, you can see I got 40 interactions. This was a real powerful one. So you can see I got some inquisitives, like curious. Looks like every one of these, one person gave me the heart. And if you click on the actual hearts, it doesn't surprise me. Amber's a friend of mine that also does a lot of work in the banking space on social media. And I follow a bunch of what she does as well. But now you can go through, and if you're curious, you can start doing a little bit of data mining on your end to see, well, what type of reaction are you eliciting from people? And most everybody here has a first-tier connection. So the little trick of being able to find an individual, go on your phone and open it up, and to be able to communicate directly with them is not relevant. But this is giving you access and it segments all of these out. So I don't know if any of the posts that you all are actually doing, have started seeing this type of activity. But it's going to be interesting over time to see as you go back and you look historically at, you know, what posts you do generate mixed combinations. Because you can see I pulled up a couple of other examples and all I got were thumbs ups, whereas this one generated, and it could have been because I was specifically talking about, you know, hey, LinkedIn is rolling out different options. So it really just kind of depends, but you can see kind of the reactions and the comments and everything that are rolling through. So something to keep an eye on. As we think about, I guess, content creation and sharing stuff, it's been a while since I've talked About some of the newer elements and not as new as the reactions. But just as a reminder for those of you that maybe you're posting an article, it's a good idea to make sure that you've got some sort of a preamble. I oftentimes still see individuals that will find a really great article and then they'll just share that link, but they won't put any reason as to why they're sharing the link. So it's important for you to make sure when you're sharing content on LinkedIn, you put a little bit of reasoning behind why you're sharing it. You also have the ability, and if you go in and you maybe want to write an article, that is, as a reminder, if you've never been in that area before, this is the ability. You can see we've opened up in a brand new area into their actual publishing. And this is going to give you the ability to create an article that's very similar to a blog post. Very powerful way of sharing additional content. One of my banker education series webinars, I featured Chris Nichols from Center State Bank. He absolutely crushes it when it comes to writing articles and sharing content. If you go over to Chris Nichols, Center State Bank, and you look at his profile and you look at his articles, in the, I think, hundreds of articles that he's created, and you'll find He's built a really good branding strategy around his articles where he's kind of developed a consistent header image layout and format. So all of them have an image with a little bit of a filter opacity over it and then bold white letters that just signify the purpose or the topic that he's writing on. And then really good information that he shares. You can organize things with headlines and subheadlines. And the other, I guess, lesson to be learned from Chris is in addition to providing rich text in the sense of bullet points, italics, bold fonts, hyperlinks, he also does a really good job of putting like a footer or wrapper. I'm sure there's some formal name for it in the publishing world, but some sort of a base footer that always is consistent, that talks about, you know, Chris Nichols is Chief Innovation Officer for CenterState Bank, and it gives a link back to his blog posts and the bank's website. So when somebody happens to stumble upon his information, even if it's directly within a LinkedIn article, you've got the ability to always get back to the website, which is ultimately the mothership that you want to drive people to and learn a little bit more about either you or your business. You've got some newer options here, images and video, probably not so much. And I just caught in my feed Goldie Chan, which If you've not heard me talk about Goldie before, I'll circle back around to her before I wrap up for the day. But you've now got the ability to actually post a document. So if there's something that you have, and probably not a product brochure, but if you've created a really great manual or a helpful guide or a how-to resource, or you published a white paper or a presentation, and you want to upload that file directly to LinkedIn to make it easy for people to go ahead and grab that content. So you're sharing some stuff that you've created or that you've found, building some subject matter expertise, you can certainly do that. One of the curious things that I found, however, is if you click on you want to do a post, you have the ability, once you get into the post area, you can, you can change it. So I always make sure before I post that I send it to anyone on LinkedIn so that it's public, and I make sure that I use my Twitter handle.

Now You have the ability to choose. You can only do one at a time. Business banking network or the free webinar on LinkedIn right now. I've got to remember that. I can go through and actually just say, well, I'm going to post some nice If there were ways where you could do like a multiple choice selector and preview what I wanted to save and maybe go over to the drives, but that unfortunately is not the case. So I always make sure just so I'm getting maximum exposure and my information is— and it's not making a selection. So I'm just gonna go ahead and— the joys of live streaming decides to not work. You all get to see it.

All right, so let's go back into the post area. The other thing that I want to draw your attention to, because it's not part of the main area there, Is down at the bottom, you've got 2 other options, and I've personally never used the share that you're hiring option. I think if you're part of a much larger organization— we're very much more of a boutique consultancy, so if we're going to do any sort of hiring, it's usually going to be, you know, contract-based work, or we're going to go back into our WSI network and find some folks to help. But you may want to use that. The thing that I want to draw your attention to, however, is this kudos. Now, this is a a feature that I don't know why they don't put it here. They used to have like a little megaphone, then they changed it, they moved it around. The kudos is one that I think— And I can tell you, um, I've got a colleague out of South Africa, and if you've heard this story before, because I think when I first discovered this when it was released, I shared this story, but a friend of mine out of South Africa was a WSI consultant and our master trainer really within the, the network for social selling, uh, in LinkedIn, Francois. I actually got in and I gave him a kudos because I was on a phone conversation. He shared a ton of great information, a couple of cool resources. So I just went out and I actually typed in his name and I gave him a kudos. So if I type in his name, you can see here's Francois. I can click on this, then I go next. Now I went through and I think I selected going above and beyond where, you know, he spent extra time with me. I certainly appreciate. So you can see when you click on that, the background changes. And I went through and just kind of bragged about the fact that, you know, a lot of what I've learned through LinkedIn has been inspired by you and just really said some nice stuff about it. Didn't have any expectation of anything in return. I just thought that it was really cool that, you know, he spent time with me and got some good info. So sidebar, anytime you want to give somebody praise, the only reason you're giving them praise is because you expect or hope something in return. It's probably not going to be seen that well. It's probably going to be able to be discovered. So you just kind of have to have confidence that as you give those things out, Hopefully it will come back to you. But one of the things Francois shared with me a couple weeks later, we were on a conversation, and he says, you remember that kudos that you gave to me? Well, that kudos showed up on my wall or on my feed. He had a couple of connections that he had connected with a couple of years ago that he's kept in touch with, tried to do some business with them. Wasn't right, timing wasn't good, whatever the case was. They saw my kudos in his feed. They reached out to Francois and saw that I had given him kudos and mentioned some of the capabilities and the skills that I had learned with regards to LinkedIn and said that he had 2 connections, start dialogue, and there was a high likelihood that if not one, both of those were going to actually turn into paid training opportunities because they had indicated that, you know, this came up, didn't realize how much more he had been doing in the world of LinkedIn and social training. They spent some more time on his LinkedIn profile and read some of his other articles, but it was that kudos that I posted that caught their eye and caused them to go back to Francois's page or profile, I should say. And dig around and discover that, you know, he's come a long way and there's actually quite a bit of information that he has and they should bring him into their organization to help their staff. So as you think about how can you benefit those that you want to serve, and, you know, in the banking world, we're always careful about privacy and, you know, making sure that we're not divulging customer confidentiality. So if you're a financial service professional, you definitely don't want to give somebody a thank you for doing business with you because your compliance officer is going to have a connection. But you can always come back and say, you know, whatever the reason is, the interaction that you had at the local chamber, they helped out at the Rotary fish fry, you know, they shared something with you that you thought was very insightful. You know, it's something that you can do that puts something out there. You're the creator of it, but it goes on somebody else's profile. You can see up at the top, you've got the ability to send 3 of these per week. So, and I know that because I haven't given a kudos this week. So that number is set at 3. But this gives you the ability to go through and just put something nice out there. for other people and see what happens. You know, just spend a week being a nice person and thinking of the 3 people that have inspired you, that have done a great job, that have demonstrated team player. You know, kind of an outside-of-the-box thinker, if you will. But any of these are ones that you might be able to go through and send a message out just to try to get some notification, maybe get some feedback back from individuals. I can tell you Francois was, was very happy that I did this for him and it generated some new business. And, you know, at the end of the day, it was just a pretty cool thing that, that worked for him. So, so give kudos a try. It's a little bit of a hidden gem. You don't have the ability to get to the kudos from the 3 main calls to action. And even when you start the It doesn't show up. You got to go down here to the bottom and click on the little plus to reveal it, and then it gets you the ability to go over and find the kudos. So hopefully that'll give you a quick little option to be able to play around with that. So anyway, so those are a few of the little nuggets and tidbits that I want to share with you today as it relates to just some new and cool things that you might be able to play around with on LinkedIn. I hope you enjoy it. We're right at the half-hour mark, so I'm going to go ahead And keep it short. I will tell you, next week it's probably going to be difficult for me to host a live show. Those of you that are going to be— again, banker primarily— but if you're going to be at the Barrett Graduate School of Banking in Memphis, I'm going to be flying down to Memphis. Hopefully going to enjoy me some nice barbecue and get me some Johnny Cash music. But I will be in Memphis next week, and I do a session on digital and social strategies for today's community banker. And if you're gonna be at Barrett, would love to see you down there. So come up and say hi, and maybe you'll be taking my class, and who knows, you might learn a thing or two. So with that, I'm gonna wrap the show for today. Thanks to those of you that were able to join live, and if you listen to this on the recording, I appreciate you spending some time with me. I'll look forward to seeing you on an upcoming episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. And until then, have a great week, everybody. Take care. Bye.