4 ways to get connected in the biggest business community in the world.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and this is the podcast for you if you are a business owner and you know you've got value locked up in your business, but you're just finding ways to get it communicated. And we're going to do that with a combination of some tools and some technologies and some best practice that I'm going to share with my experience of over 25 years running my own businesses But also running an international public relations firm called EastWest PR. Today we're going to talk about LinkedIn because we're working for a client on helping them to improve their Social Selling Index. This is all content now that can be shared and measured and deliver a greater ROI for you on one of the world's greatest business-to-business social media platforms. You go to linkedin.com/sales/ssi, it will bring you to a social selling dashboard. And on that dashboard, it'll have your name on it. It'll give you the rank against the industry and also against your network. And it'll give you an index that actually is variable. It changes week to week and month to month depending on how much work that you're putting into it. The first metric is to establish your professional brand. The second is finding the right people. The third is engaging with insights, and the fourth is building relationships. Now the question is, why would you do this? Well, LinkedIn, as we know, now owned by Microsoft, has some 600 million people using the platform, and these are now a worldwide body that really eclipses the traditional Facebook or YouTube or any other place for sharing your business-to-business connections. Now, what I like about LinkedIn as well is the statistics about LinkedIn really are global. So they claim on their website some 575 million, just under 600 million registered members, but of that, 150 million are in America. But if we look at, for example, Asia, we've got over 42 million in China, 50 million in India, and even in Southeast Asia, we've got 10 million, for example, in Indonesia, 6 million in the Philippines, 2 million in Singapore, and there are only 6 million people in Singapore. The UK is over 25 million, France 16 million, the Netherlands 7+ million. You get the idea. LinkedIn really is the platform for business-to-business, regardless of where we are around the world. Now, I'm sharing about LinkedIn today because we're actively working for a client. I can't say who the client is. We're actively working on improving their SSI, and it's working. So I thought I would share that. Now, my own SSI for a Jim James is 80 out of 100, and I mentioned those 4 different metrics. That have between them a 25% weighting each. Now, with a ranking of 80 out of 100, I'm in the top 1% within my industry and 1% of my individual network. Now, interestingly enough, sales professionals and PR communications professionals have an average SSI of 28, and it takes it from the, the classification that I use for my own job And within my own network, the average is 47, which shows that my my network somehow is sort of on the on the higher end, almost double the average. So how do we get there? This is the this is the point of the story today. How do we get there? Well, when it comes to establish establishing a professional brand, I'm at 23%, and we do that through posting of and and completing. Profile. We've at EastWest created a profile which we're going to make available if you want to reach out after the podcast. But I'm going to give you just a list of some of the things that we need to have on our profiles in order to get to that close to 25. And really, if you're not getting close to 25, then you're wasting an opportunity. A bit like finishing all the exam questions. Even if you just fill in a couple of sentences you've got a greater chance of getting a higher mark than if you leave some questions blank. Name, job title, profile picture, banners, company name— most people include those. But where people then miss out is where they don't mention their client niche sector, for example, where they don't include their products and services. You can add those. You can add how long you've been in the industry. You can also add the problems that you're solving with your solution, and you can also look at how you are targeting a particular market specifically. Ideally, you get some testimonials from clients or former members of staff or partners, anybody to give you testimonials. And sometimes that's about just reaching out and asking people and even doing a You give me a testimonial, I'll give you one. Areas that sometimes people are not putting in are things about their experience. What could you put in about your experience? What about your education? And many people leave education blank, but it's worth putting all of those different dates in because then you get matched sometimes with people that, for example, you're at university with that could now be of interest. So for me, for example, I went to Manchester University. From 1986 to 1990, with a year in North Carolina Chapel Hill. And by putting that in, I'm being introduced to people that are my alumnus. We can also, of course, put skills and endorsements and recommendations. So it's about starting to get some completeness to our LinkedIn profile, and this is going to help you boost that SSI. Now, finding the right people, it can be a function then of connecting to industry leaders, thought leaders, joining groups. Now, I personally have only got a 15.6% on find the right people because I, I don't spend so much time proactively reaching out to people. But for our clients that we're doing this with, we've upgraded to the Sales Navigator program. And that is yielding a much higher score because we're proactively finding people that might want the services, and they're in manufacturing. So it's very specific what they're looking for. They're looking for people in procurement in manufacturing, whereas with public relations, yes, we're looking for other entrepreneurs, we're looking for sales directors, marketing directors, public relations directors, and our services may be a little bit broader. But I personally don't spend enough time going out and finding people. What I do quite a lot of though is engaging with insights, and this is really about sharing articles and posts, and they don't have to be all of our own articles and posts. I personally have started to take transcripts from this podcast and make them into articles. On LinkedIn. I have to say the articles don't get massive readership, you know, 10, 15, 20 readers at a time, but we do then post those out onto my feed. And the other thing to do is to join groups and to add those groups into your membership and to post the articles into these particular groups. And that's something we're doing for this client. So in my case, I'm posting my articles to groups on entrepreneurship, for example, posting this podcast to public relations. So looking for people with common interest and sharing thoughts and insights that might be interesting to them, not sales information, but information that might help them with their businesses. I've also taken up a couple of mentorship where we can offer to give guidance to people. Who have got questions about their careers. Sometimes that's a little bit random because people ask you questions like, what should I do next? And that's a little bit hard to reply. But sometimes people have got specific questions about a specific job they should have. And on the building relationships, I've got the perfect score of 25 out of 25. And this one here really is all about building and finding trust with decision makers. So I work to connect to CEOs, to managing directors, to entrepreneurs, and people working for big companies that are thought leaders. So if you can find those people, and you can on LinkedIn, find those people who are established thought leaders and become part of their sphere of influence, then you help your own reputation. So this is the SSI. Now, what we've been doing for a client, uh, just recently in the last 3 months is we started to work for them on building up a combination of work for them where we're looking at increasing their total connections by reaching out proactively by doing job title searches, and then we're doing that by geography. And what we're also trying to do is to get these clients, followers. Because it's one thing to go out and follow people, but also what we're trying to do is to get people to follow us back because that improves our authority index. I have about 7,500 followers myself on LinkedIn, and I'd like to think that's a function of, you know, the content that I'm sharing. We want to be sharing content that then people want to follow to see in their feed. We're looking at certain kinds of job descriptions that we want to be pursuing because their networks impact our networks. Now we're getting about a 40 to 50% connection request acceptance level, and that can, that can obviously be improved by issuing, as we're doing now, personalized emails to people rather than One-on-one, but also the other thing is that we have to be careful, as I'm sure as everyone's getting now on LinkedIn more and more of these sort of frankly irrelevant introductions to business services that are quite frankly not something that I'm going to be needing. Profile views is something that we like to track, and for our client, we've increased their profile views significantly. Really by posting on a frequency. So quite often people post once a week or once every 2 or 3 weeks to their LinkedIn, but now LinkedIn really can be seen as a stream of posting, and that's why people then outsource that to an agency like us, because really we're taking content that might be, for example, and is on the client's website in the news area, and we're altering the format slightly from being a press release or maybe a testimonial or a sales product piece of information. And then we're writing it as an article, writing that as a post. And then people find that interesting. So people are then checking out the client's profile. And when those people have checked out the profile, that is when then we ask those people if they would like to then follow and connect because they've already expressed an interest in our client. Now, in terms of the, the articles, some of the articles are getting a good reach and some are getting a bad reach. But interestingly enough, we posted one about one of the client's daughters going to America to study athletics. And as I've done with my own, where I've taken, for example, a group of girls, my dad and daughter days, These posts actually have had often greater traction than the generic, uh, sort of my business is about posts. So there seems to be an interest, a growing interest in LinkedIn on what people are doing with their home lives. Not pictures and films of kittens and so on, but about the different dimensions that we all have with our life. Because I suppose we're on social indexes. We're on Facebook and LinkedIn, but most of us don't want to be bombarded as as the Facebook does with with things that are not relevant. So the idea of posting content that is professional but also personal, that might be about you or your your interests, seems to be both accepted and even getting some uplift. And there was a poll. Recently by one person on LinkedIn who was showing that women are getting— women in the legal profession are getting more views on their posts than men are. And the question was whether this is because women are being more authentic and more genuine than men are. And maybe that's true. The other question was whether women just approve of other women's posts more. Either way, we can't prove either way, but what's for sure is showing a little bit of one's personality and not making this a direct mailhouse is certainly working. So we're finding then that this combination of frequency of good content, the reaching out to relevant people, finding people that are looking at us and following them back, and sharing useful information that's not strictly speaking selling but is sharing is working to improve the Social Index. Why does this matter? Why would we want to do it? I think because now we're in a position where we're not meeting people, and our social life, our professional social life of going to, for example, functions, has been replaced now with what people are doing online. I've noticed that for my own LinkedIn that a large number of people are finding me through the, through the main home page. In other words, they're not people that have been introduced to me or that I've met personally, but have somehow heard about me, but in a digital fashion. So we have to then think about what are we saying about ourselves, or what are other people saying about us in a digital fashion. And LinkedIn gives us some tools in the Social Selling Index, which has your professional brand the right people, the right insights, and the connection of those with relationships are 4 of the metrics that you can use. And as we talk about in East West PR with our Speak PR methodology of storify, personalize, engage, amplify, and know, plainly LinkedIn is in the amplification part, but there is a room for engagement, there is room for personalization. And there's also room for storification. The SSI is giving us our index so that we can know how we're doing. We're measuring this for a client every month, and we're getting a good increase in the SSI through this formula of getting good content, sending it consistently, and then also getting across the organization different members of the organization to like and to share. This is giving us a multiplier effect because often people are posting on their own, but they're part of an organization, which seems a terrible waste. So the final part of what we're trying to do is we're trying to make sure that everyone across the organization starts to look and feel the same, just as they would if they were being seen, for example, at an event. But also that they're supporting one another online. As we know, really, social media is about being seen as much as anything else, to be part of a trend or a community. So if you're not using the community that's within your own company, in your own partnership network, then we're missing a trick. There's an organization which I'm working with, the Progress Shed, and it's putting together a pod where people are starting to share and everyone's agreeing to promote posts mutually. I know this is being done very successfully by a photography enthusiasts group where one person will post photographs and other people will comment on them directly. And this is helping to drive traffic because the, the algorithms are looking for information that other people have found interesting. So if we can find other people to express an interest then the algorithms will pick that up and boost it. LinkedIn seems to have become the number one global platform. I saw some other platforms in China trying, but it's the network effect of LinkedIn that makes it fairly unassailable, I think. So regardless of where we're at in our careers or where we're at in the organization, as an entrepreneur or a salesperson or someone looking for work or someone in HR, whatever our role, LinkedIn is, I think, probably going to be with us for quite some time, and learning how to improve our social selling indexes is a formula, it's a discipline, but it's also something that could be accomplished. And you can also find companies like us, people like us, that can help you to leverage your skill sets and your knowledge. You can get on with your work while companies like us will help you to make sure people know what you're doing. So with that, I want to share with you some of the work we're doing for clients now with LinkedIn and hope that's useful to you. All of this can be done for free, of course. You can upgrade to LinkedIn from £35 up to £55 a month for the Professional and the Sales Navigator. It's not cheap, but it's getting a lot of access. So thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. And if we can help you in any way, please do reach out. In the meantime, we wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on communicating and making LinkedIn connections. Thank you.