LinkedIn Safari: Session 7 of 12

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed LinkedIn Safari with me here, Jim James in the UK, and Simon Chaperson in South Africa. Say hi, Simon.

Hi, Jim.

Well, we've managed to get to session 7. Uh, tell us today, what are we going to do to help us progress the use of LinkedIn to promote my book, The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, and my profile and basically get LinkedIn to be a useful platform.

Yeah. So today we're going to circle back to your posts and the content you have been publishing. And today is an interesting day because I think we are now at a stage where we can start building what I call the content library. And the content library is a great thing because it allows you to Recycle content and have a body of work that you can use with a consistency and a clarity of message. And we're going to look into this. You did 2 slideshows over the past 2 weeks. So we're going to review these. We're going to look into a framework, how you do these slideshows, and we take a quick look at the numbers that we have achieved over the past 4 weeks to put what you've done into a perspective, into perspective with your reach.

Okay, that sounds great. And I see today you're back in your studio, so we're going to not have the, uh, the problems that we had last time. So Simon, I think we're making some progress, so why don't you take over then and share with us what you'd like us to learn?

Absolutely. So let me share my screen with you, and, um, let's start with a really quick recap of what we've done over the past 7 weeks. And so this is what we've achieved. I think we can be proud of that. So we have rewritten your profile. You've written a new About text that I think is much clearer. And we have— and this is important— we have reduced the time you spend writing posts because we have reduced the total number of posts. Remember, you published like 3 or 4 posts a day. We've cut this down to 1 post, giving you more reach. And we've stopped you posting groups, saving you again time. I think you mentioned you spent about an hour a day cross-posting in the various groups. And so we saved a lot of time here. And the big news is we've done all of that while maintaining the impression numbers. So instead of having a lot of posts across many channels, we have few posts in one channel and we get basically the same number of impressions. And I've pulled the overview for the past 4 weeks and you can see it's a steady line. What we see here, and that's a thing that you find, you always find in these numbers, you have a couple of strong posts. that generate a lot of impressions. So we have one here 4 weeks back. Here's a strong post and here's a strong post. So that is a typical, totally normal phenomenon. And let's take a quick look at some of these posts so we can also give a bit of context. What are high-performance posts and what are low-performance posts?

Great. I mean, I think just for those people watching, listening, I have reduced the amount of time I spend on LinkedIn from nearly 2 hours a day down to 30 minutes. So we called it content dumping before, where I was just sort of sharing 5 or 6 posts, reposting other people's posts and so on, and really getting it down to— Simon had summarized— either entertaining, you're informing, you're educating, or you're inspiring, if I'm not mistaken. Simon, those are the 4.

Exactly.

So now I approach every post with one of those 4 goals. So that's terrific.

And I think the other thing that we've achieved, or I assume that it's the case for you, now with less time and less things to do, you have more clarity and more focus. So going forward, it should be easier to focus on these 5 qualities that you've just outlined, giving value to readers instead of spending time across different groups and channels and cross-posting, so you can really hone in, tune into what your readers want.

Yep.

So here are— I want to look at 6 posts from the past 4 weeks just to give a bit of context or to illustrate some things I think are interesting. So the first 2 posts that I'm going to show you are Video posts, and the interesting thing here—we're not gonna watch the thing—but the interesting thing is you have only two reactions, two people that like that. But you have two thousand seven hundred seventy-two impressions, which is a lot. And we have the same phenomenon with with this post. It's also a video post. Even worse, one like, but also. 2,120 impressions. And the reason why I'm showing that and why I think this is interesting is it's not only about the number of impressions we get, but we are interested in getting people to engage with content. And what we can assume here is like that the people didn't really like what— or were not really interested, even though LinkedIn showed it to a lot of people. So What I'm going to show you now is a post that you did exactly a month ago, passing a little over. And this post is beautiful because it should— it did what it should do. It reached a lot of people. We have 3,800 impressions and we have 42 people who engaged with a like or 16 people who commented and one person who posted. So that is what we really So it's not pure quantity in terms of impressions, but we want people to engage. And I think the engagement that you got here was really nice. People congratulating, giving you feedback on what you shared here, which is the learnings that you had from selling your agency.

Yeah, exactly.

And I'm going to get back to this post in a second when we talk about building a content library. So, great example for a very effective post. It's professional. It's about your work. You've reached a high number of people, but you've also had a lot of people engage on the post. The other post is the post that you did 2 weeks ago to celebrate your sister.

Yes. Dr. Shelley James. Yep. There she is, my beautiful, amazing, talented sister.

You could read the love that you have for her from the post. So beautiful post, did also really well. Let's see the numbers. You have 2,397 likes, sorry, impressions, and almost 70, no, 70 likes and 28 comments, which is also an example for a good post that worked well because you not only have a lot of impressions, but you have people Engaged with it.

Okay. So I need more sisters. I have 3 sisters in total, so I gotta get out the next, write about the next sister.

Sisters. But also, I think the interesting thing with this post about your sister and the other post about you selling your agency is that they are in a certain way different but similar. This one is you talking about your business. Selling the agency, and this one is talking about your sister. In a certain way, you could argue that both are personal because you share something of yourself. Selling the agency is a personal thing. Parting ways after a long time is a— I think it's a touching experience. So I think that is a thing that a lot of people resonated with. And the The things that you shared for your sister is also something more personal that people usually resonate with. And that is relevant for the content library that we are now planning to develop, because you should not talk only about professional stuff, but you should also have a mix of personal experiences thrown in. Because it allows people to To get a sense of who you are and because it makes you more human. And so it's always a good idea to have this mix. And as we can see, it also helps with the impressions. What we see usually, personal posts always get more likes than professional posts. So I don't know why that is, but it's something to definitely keep in mind.

And in a way that shows that LinkedIn has a heart, you know, that it's not just a trade show, right?

Absolutely.

It's a community. And I think that's one of the takeaways that I've had from doing this with Simon is that just, you're not just going into a room and shouting, you know, you need to go in and participate and listen and engage.

And it's, uh, it's one of the learnings. It's exactly the same when you go to, to a meeting, Chamber of Commerce or some business meeting. I mean, you don't come into the room and sort of with a megaphone shout out what you do, but you sort of mingle with people. Maybe you have a glass of water in your hand, and the first thing you ask is probably, what do you do? What's your name? Where are you from? And only after a while, so it becomes maybe more businesslike. But first, the first thing is always like checking out the person. Do you like that person? Do they have kids? Are they married? So it is, it is what we like as humans.

Yeah, yeah, no, so it's a good lesson to learn.

So back to the other presentation. So now that we have saved a lot of time, minimized the work that you do, and we have— we've had some learnings in terms of the content performance, we can move to the next stage, which is honing in on your one post style, post type that really works nicely. And, um, maybe it just— I found it, maybe I'm a bit of a nerd, but the interesting thing what I saw with your sister's post was that, um, it had an amazing number of impressions and, uh, likes. And it was published, I think, this day or this day here. But the interesting thing is that it was not a fast-burning post that sort of gets all the impressions in one day. And those are usually the posts that are more engaging for people or more interesting. So, it's sort of a post that is being shared from person to person and sort of like handed forward, which explains that you have a rather shallow curve here. So, it's not a strong spike.

Yeah.

Because this post gained impressions and likes over days and days.

Yes, it was interesting, that actually.

And I once had a post about my African wife and her parents staying with us. This post didn't take off for a couple of days. Then after 3, 4 days, it slowly grew and grew, and for 2 weeks it sort of became what some people would call a viral post, but it took a long time. It was sort of more of a flat curve, but it was very, very, yeah, very successful if you count the numbers of impressions and likes.

Yeah.

So that is one interesting thing that I saw with your post. And the other thing, what we can see here, that is the first slideshow that you did about last week.

Yes.

And again, you can see with a slideshow, usually you have a spike in impressions. It's strong one day and then it usually dies out. And you can see the same phenomenon here that it went down quite fast. So there's a bit, yeah, experience share on LinkedIn. So as we said, so we've saved time. And we've settled on a high-reach post type, which is slideshows. And you've done a slideshow last week. We're going to look at that in a second. And we're going to analyze that in terms of what you've done there and why that has worked so nicely. So—

Great.

As I said, going forward, our focus is to build a content library. Maybe you want to say a couple of things about your book so readers, listeners have an idea because you wrote a book. You've interviewed 50 entrepreneurs. Maybe you want to show that again.

Yeah, there you go. This is the Wiley-published Unnoticed Entrepreneur. The camera's struggling to— there we go. Yeah, Unnoticed Entrepreneur published by Wiley, available on all stores. It's 50 entrepreneurs that have been on my Unnoticed Entrepreneur podcast that are now compiled as articles. Actually, this is the first volume and another volume's going into print soon. So that's right, Simon. Thank you. That's really why we're doing this is to try and help share what's in the book with people on LinkedIn so that they can know that this resource is available for them.

Yeah. And I think in the book you have 50 different chapters. 50 different entrepreneurs and all of them share one thing that's helped them getting noticed. So you have a rich body of work here, you have a lot of information on your hands and you basically have a content library at your fingertips.

Yeah.

And what you've started doing last week with the first slideshow is you've taken the first author, the first guest from the book and you've turned that What he said, what he shared in this chapter into a slideshow.

So yeah, this is Oscar Trimboli and the, uh, the 4 Villains of Listening, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, um, so what, what is happening now is we are basically leveraging your book to create more slideshows from the book, um, recycling the content. And we're gonna do this in a way also thinking about saving time and energy, doing it in a way that you can repost the same slideshow maybe in 3, 4, or 5 months' time, which is a thing that not a lot of people feel comfortable about. So, a lot of people think they have to constantly write new content. And we've analyzed a lot of high-performance authors, and what you find is they don't do this. They are too smart. They've realized it's too much time writing a post every day or 7 posts a week or something. So they've essentially built a library. And I'm just thinking of just one.

And start—

He's recycling. So I've been following him for a year.

Recycling, yeah, makes a lot of sense.

And I keep seeing the same posts.

Okay.

So let's get back.

Yeah, and so I went into Canva and I created a template. Uh, Simon originally said that the template I had where I had the red, the gray, and the white, which is the sort of colors for the unnoticed, was too many colors, so too much of a distraction. So I made it just a white text on black background, just one standard, uh, using, uh, Bebas Neue as the font and Elrond as the secondary font. So it's worth just thinking about the corporate identity of it so that you don't try and recreate slides that look different every time.

Exactly. You want to have a corporate identity. And I think in your case, the great thing is you have a book, so the slideshows you create can tap into the visual look and feel of the book, which sort of elevates the value of the slideshows. So coming back, so we are now on the way of building your content library. Leveraging everything that you have in your book. We do this with high-reach slideshows. And the one thing that is always the question, when should you do a slideshow? Because it happens now that you see more and more people doing slideshows, and very often you feel like, why was that a slideshow? I mean, it's sort of nothing you could have not said in a post. So I put together the simple rule when to do a slideshow. And the first rule is if you have a post and it doesn't fit on a phone screen, it's too long. You want to keep it short.

Right.

And so—

So it's not very long, is it?

Yeah. Try to shorten it. If you have to swipe down to read it, it's too long. And only if you can't make the post any shorter than it is, You should think about turning that into a slideshow. So it's really something that you want to use when you have enough content to really entertain and engage people. If people feel that you do this just to make them swipe through your slideshow, they're not gonna like it. Yep.

I just did a quick look. It says that it looks like 5 lines of text is about all you can get onto the phone before people have to start to scroll down. So if you've got more than 5 lines, then you need to think about your— I just did a quick look online, Simon. So there we go.

It's a hard stop. Yeah. Yeah. So, and yeah, it's I think brevity is the key on LinkedIn. So what we see, a lot of people have long posts, which is hard to read. Again, imagine you're in the subway in London. You don't want to read like a whole wall of text. If it's 5 lines or 10 lines, okay, but anything longer than that, people are probably going to just skip and drop off. Yeah, exactly.

So 5 lines. After that. Now, speaking of 5 lines, Simon, we've got to keep an eye on the time because you and I only have half an hour. We've got— we're at 19 minutes now. So, you know, this is great, but I've got to keep us moving. I'll stop interrupting.

Now let's look at your 2 slideshows so people know what you're talking about. And once we've analyzed these, we can then come back. So This is the first slideshow you did back last week. Some viewers might remember that from seeing, and as we can see, great numbers, 3,300 impressions. That's phenomenal. You have 12 people who liked it, 6 people left a comment. So that's really good considering also that that is your first slideshow ever. And then we have the second slideshow that you did this week, which is still quite fresh. So we don't have quite the numbers, but also we have 583 views, impressions, which is compared to what you had before we started working together. I think you on average had like 50 to 100 impressions per post. So—

Yeah.

One post, more reach, which is great. So, um, the, the—

yeah, well, I think it, it's also making my profile look a little bit more interesting. I think just cosmetically, you know, it's all looking a little bit more interesting than, than what I had before and a little bit more structured.

And also you've chosen a style where you crop the images, you have one color as a background. So that already signifies that, that sort of like, so an eye-catcher, but it also signifies that there's more probably that you want to check out. And then you see it's a slideshow.

Yeah.

So let's quickly go through this, um, just so we get an idea for the, for the structure. Um, so here's the opening statement. Um, 74.9% of people think we are above average listeners, which is a contradiction in itself. And you have sort of a good catching image here, and then you basically walk through the individual aspects. The problem, people have not taught how to listen. And here you jump back to Osmundson-Bowley as the interview guest in the book for the chapter. And you make the statement that there is a price to pay at work if we are bad listeners. And now you leverage what Oskar has given you, the 3 essential questions that you can use to become a better listener, which is that you ask people to tell— to say more. The second one is to Ask, what else? And the third one is to just listen. So, you've given 3 actionable things here that I as a reader can take away if I want to improve my listening skills and if I want to give other people the feeling that I'm really tuning into them. So, you've listed the takeaways of this chapter in the slideshow and you've wrapped up the whole slideshow with a call to action. with a book, an image of yourself, which is a very good thing to do because I don't know what the numbers are. I think if you have an image of yourself on the last slide of the slideshow, it increases reach by 50% or something crazy.

Wow. Okay. That's amazing. So get a good headshot. And all I've done is use Canva to remove the background of the picture. Very easy to do. Lots of software will do that as well.

Absolutely. How long did it take you to do that?

Like remove the background or to make the slide?

The slideshow. Yeah.

Yeah, the first one took me a while because— and here's something I'm going to do next time— what took time was thinking about the content and the treatment, the creative treatment. So now what I'm doing is I've got a spreadsheet and I worked out the, like, the hero's journey of each deck. And we can share this, can't we, Simon?

Yes.

We've considered what slide 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, 8 should do. And then I'm putting them into a spreadsheet and then I'm going to write the text for each slide into a spreadsheet. And then I'll have my VA use the template I've created in Canva. to drop the headlines and the secondary text in so we can find a workflow process. Because the first one took quite a few— took a bit of time. Yeah, I shouldn't say how long because it's a bit embarrassing, but that's also because I'm slow. But it can be made into a process, and that's really what we're trying to get to, Simon, isn't it? So we have the integrity of the content and creativity, but without the time.

Exactly. Again, get faster but have better quality content.

Yeah.

And yeah, the other thing you said in the beginning, first slideshow, second slideshow takes a lot of time. Once you know how it works, it becomes very fast and you also develop your style. And with a choice of images, also an experience share, I have, I think, 20, 30, 40 images. that I reuse stock photos and I have them in the back of my head. So whenever I do a slideshow, I already know what images I want to take or how I can use an image to make a statement more funny or contradict it or something. So it's another thing.

That's a really good idea. That's a really good idea to create, as you say, a content library, because that's what took time was finding it and then rendering it.

Yeah.

So as you say, once you build an archive of stock footage where you've treated it, like I removed all the backgrounds, for example.

Yeah.

That's another good learning.

Without going on a tangent here, but it's my favorite thing with good stock photos, or a lot of stock photos, they just look like stock photos. You want to avoid that. And so it's a bit of like a treasure hunt in the stock photo libraries to find the ones that are maybe not that obvious or that have some sort of like quality to it that you resonate with.

Yeah.

And so the pictures that I chose, I like them. I think they have some uniqueness and I think they also sort of match me, my character. And so I've chosen those over many, many others that technically you could say show the same thing. But maybe for the setup, for some reason, it just didn't look as good.

Okay, and you can, you can either use Canva or Unsplash has pictures as well. Pixabay is another one. So there are quite a few free photo libraries out there. Okay, Simon, we've got just 5 minutes left, 4 minutes left. So where are you going to take us?

Exactly. So your second slideshow, we can see clear changes. You have started with a very strong statement on the first page. You could say it's the hook line of the slideshow, and then you have explained the issue and you put things into perspective. You are showing the price that entrepreneurs suffer by having to suffer through the stress, and you introduce a mentor or you introduce a person that has a solution to this problem. And that is sort of tying into the story arc that you mentioned earlier.

Yeah. And that's, you know, this comes from then Mason Harris being in the book. And Simon, he, Simon, sorry, Mason then reposted this post to his network, which is the first time really that's happened. So that's a real indication that we're moving in the right direction because he liked the post enough. To repost it and to schedule a call with me again this week.

Yeah, I mean, that's a whole new avenue. Once you get people to repost your posts, then you are on a winning lane because it helps you reach massively and you can tap into other people's audiences. So quick back here, you've basically taken, you took the Content from your chapter in the book, which is sort of what Mason Harris teaches. You transferred it into a slideshow and it's his chutzpah philosophy. You've broken it down, every letter you can see, C-H-U-T-Z-P-A-H.

Took me ages to do the little letters, but I got in a place where I wanted to get it done. But anyway, you know, Simon, speaking of We've got about a couple of minutes left.

Okay, so that is the slideshow where you summarize the chapter. You end it with a call to action, with a picture of yours. And what I want to show our viewers is the breakdown that you've developed. You've developed your own framework. That's very interesting.

Yes, I developed a framework after talking to Simon where I thought we could share this because it would give you a template. We could put this even into a post, couldn't we, Simon, as well to help people?

Exactly. So here it is. To sum it up, open the slideshow with an interesting fact, what you did. You shed a light on what the current situation is. You shed a light on what the problem is and you explained it, and then you introduced the person who solved it, which in your case with the 50 chapters and the 50 guests that you had, it's always— you always have somebody who solved the problem that you can discuss.

Yep.

Um, then you explain how they solved it. So in the case we just saw, it's the chutzpah philosophy. And, um, sometimes I think you can also mention where they solved it. I think that was not fully applicable to Mason. And then you have the summary of these facts and you end the whole thing with a call to action, which then is this last slide with the image of yours.

That's great. And Simon, we can find a place to make that available to people. Maybe we can put it on— I can put it on my SlideShare, for example. Or maybe what we do is we make that into a post From you, maybe, uh, in your LinkedIn so that people can get access to that. Okay, there you go. So we're trying to share—

stealing your framework.

I didn't see the copyright. Anyone see the copyright? I didn't know whether you saw the copyright on there. When the student teaches the master something, you know, that's nice. Now, Simon, half past, mindful of the time.

I'm the dogs.

What do we need to do to close?

What do we need to do? We need to do a new slideshow for the next week, and we're going to improve that, and we're going to see your numbers slowly creep up with people following you for your good content.

Okay, great, Simon. I think this, if I can share this sort of a takeaway for this week for me, has been, you know, the need really to focus on thinking about who I'm writing for and the goals I've got for the post and investing the time in the content creation, not the distribution. Um, and in really thinking through, would that add value to me or to my avatar? And if not, going back to the drawing board. And it's been really, really valuable.

Just said a great thing— to invest your time not in distribution but in creation. That's a nice one.

Thank you so much, Simon. Simon Chappazone, South Africa. in Cape Town. Thank you for keeping the power on for us today.

No problem. Thank you.

And thank you to everyone for taking time to watch this on live. I know most people are working and won't have half an hour, but we're putting this on the YouTube channel, uh, on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. We'll put a link in the— in my next post to that. Um, we're also learning the things that we're writing about are in this book, and you can also listen to The Unnoticed Entrepreneur podcast, which you can find on on any player with me here, Jim James. So thank you again for joining us on what was session 6 of the Unnoticed LinkedIn Safari. And then we will be back the same time, same place next week. That's Thursday, 12 o'clock here on LinkedIn. Thank you for joining us. And yeah, until we meet again, keep on communicating.

Exactly. Thank you.