Social Selling Tips n Tricks - Live Greenroom Broadcast 7 July 2021

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Con Sotidis or Costa Sotidis. I'm going back to my roots there. I am a social seller, and we'll talk a bit about what that is. But I am a LinkedIn lover, someone and somebody who's enjoyed LinkedIn for a number of years, and I've utilized LinkedIn in a number of ways, and One way that I have used it, and I'd like to share with, um, with my followers, is in relation to social selling. And that's why we've created this, uh, social selling tips and tricks room on a Wednesday evening here in Australia, but Wednesday somewhere around. And, uh, we are going live on Green Room. I'm now gonna ping Mac and see if Mac can join us. I've sent Mac an invite. Andrew is there listening. He's running interference. There he is. Welcome back.

Hey, Con, I finally worked it out. I'm glad to be here.

That's good, good. It's only the two of us at the moment, but that's okay. We can use this as an opportunity. Like you're aware, in the top right-hand corner there, you'll see there's a little red dot and the time is saying about 3:39, 3:40. That means this has been recorded. I will get an audio download of this, an MP3 file of this later on, and I'll be able to share it with you, Mac, given you're one of the people on the stage. It's only fair that I do that. And you and I can utilize it in many ways we want. So whatever gems we drop today and whatever aspects we cover, we can then go through and cut it and edit it and splice it and share it in, uh, any way we see fit.

That sounds amazing.

That's good. All right, so Mac, thanks for joining us. And Andrew, uh, is there too, and Andrew's just running a few errands, but Andrew's a good friend of ours. We both know you very well from, um, both Clubhouse but also with what he does with his social events, um, that he organizes. The one he did recently on the environment, and he's doing another one coming up soon which I believe is going to be around the Youth Skills Day. So that's going to be very interesting as well. Okay, let's get into it, Mac. Uh, I don't think it's, uh, you know, wasting some time. It'd be good to get into it and, uh, get cracking. Uh, we have both been on LinkedIn for a while. Uh, why don't we just do a bit of an intro? And again, we can use this as part of the podcast or not. So do a bit of an intro about who you are, um, what you do, what your business is, mate, because like I said, I'll be publishing this, so be good for people to understand what your business is and, uh, how they can find you.

Excellent, Con, thank you so much. Um, so my name is Mac Lautcher. I've been on LinkedIn for as long as I can remember, somewhere around 2007, 2008. I spent 10 years on LinkedIn with various different organizations helping blue-chip companies and various others under NDA specifically for themselves, and then started building my own brand probably about 2010, 2011. But I found that I was sending stuff to social media. So, you know, and that's not only LinkedIn, but all social media platforms. And figured that, you know, a lot of people were doing great things out there, but noticed that a lot of people were just not getting their voices heard. So about 5, 6 years ago, I decided to start getting much better at LinkedIn and just invest a ton of time. And I spent about— invested about 1,600, 1,700 hours over about a 5, 6 month period, just jamming in any form of learning on LinkedIn, learning from others, doing courses, the whole works, and just trying to figure out what makes it tick. So over the last few years, I've been running various different LinkedIn-specific courses on how to get the best out of LinkedIn for both sales and corporate teams, as well as entrepreneurs and coaches and business owners around the world. So I now own the domain TheLinkedInExpert.com, so you can find me on there, and that'll come directly to my LinkedIn profile. And ultimately, for me, it's just leveraging LinkedIn as a platform that we can use to connect and socially grow our network. And it's been a pleasure for me to meet somebody and people like yourself, Con, right around the world. I've made some phenomenal LinkedIn friends that I've never, ever met face to face, but I consider them as really good friends and contacts and what I now call the LinkedIn family. So for me, it's all about helping people leverage LinkedIn specifically for them and what they want to achieve and make sure they get eyes on the expertise that they have. So that's me. I'm Mac Laubscher and I'm done.

Thanks, Mac. That's great. I suppose we do have some of those with the old clubhouse traits where we've got to say we're done or we're done speaking, but that's okay. Social audio apps, That's that way, Con, and there's nothing wrong with that. So, well done. And that's a great summary, mate. And what I like about what you said there was that towards the end, which is about the LinkedIn family, and we are a LinkedIn family, we are all very much in a similar sort of business model. But having said that, we all have some uniqueness about us and we all bring something unique about what we do and how we do it that our clients probably find suitable and appropriate to what they need. So, the way I've always said it is, there's enough there for everyone to go around. It's a matter of how you want to position yourself in relation to what you do and what you have to offer, and people will, will see that and come, come to you as required. And that's the way it's always been. I wanted to invite Mark also too. Mark, welcome there. I wanted to give a bit of a shout out. Mark's a good friend of ours, uh, does attend a number of the rooms on Clubhouse, but also, um, has now come on to Green Room. So Mark, hopefully, if you'd like to speak, buddy, put your hand up. Happy to bring you up on stage. And guys, the reason we're going on to Green Room is one, I'm one who likes experiments, and you would have seen that with my LinkedIn posts. I'm not saying this is going to be something in the future. Hey, I'll give it a go. I'm not going to give it one go. I'm going to give it a couple of goes and see how it pans out. And like I was saying to Mac, the beauty for me will be that I'll finally be able to get a podcast. I've been thinking about podcasting for a while, but I'll finally be able to create a podcast of some sort. I'll be able to edit it and then publish it and put something out on a podcast network somewhere. So that's going to be the other benefit, and I think it's better for content creators in general. So, Mac, I know you do a lot of, uh, video stuff. This might be a platform for you to explore too. I suppose we're all experimenting with it. And the other thing I like about this platform is we've got that chat facility down the bottom. So for example, Andrew's saying there at the bottom he's listening in because he's not able to participate, and that's great. We can able to send messages, whereas within the other competitive app, we have to send an Instagram note to the person for them to read that, or we might send them an SMS if we've got their phone number. So it's got some advantages. We're going to give it a go. We're going to give it a try. Um, and it's about experimenting. It's about innovating. And it's about— for me, it's about creating a, a resource that I can then use in many different ways, whether it be a podcast or like I said, to make Creating some audio snippets we can use as social media bites here and there, or even doing a transcription of that and maybe eventually creating a blog out of it. The sky's the limit. I'm definitely one of, um, of the school of thought where you create once and use many. So this is a great opportunity to do it that way. And also want to welcome Sue. Sue, welcome to, uh, the room, the Social Club Social sewing club and a social sewing tips and tricks room here today. Please, if you feel like you'd like to, yep, great. She's a great. There we are. There she is. Hello. Hello. Welcome. Welcome, Sue. Welcome, Sue.

Excited to be here.

Good on you. Part of my experiment, which is great. I love loving to have you here, Sue. Thanks very much for coming on, and I'd love to also get your input as we go along. So. Let's get the conversation started. Let's make it a bit meaningful for some of our listeners and also potential listeners of the podcast eventually. Social selling. Now, Mac and I have had this conversation in the past, but it's always good to revisit this because I think starting off with some sort of benchmark or some sort of understanding of what we mean by social selling is good because that allows us to have the conversation going forward and either articulate it or differentiate it in our particular way. the way we see social selling. So, uh, Mac and I have discussed this. So, Sue, since you're the guest today and you're, uh, one of our first-timers here, have you heard of the term social selling? And if you do, if you have, and you have done heard that term, what do you, uh, perceive it as and what do you think it is and how have you adopted that?

I haven't actually heard the term social selling as a specific term. I mean, I kind of understand the concept, I think, of social selling, which I'm thinking Hopefully I've got this right—that it would be about selling in a less formal way through social channels, through conversations and building relationships, and especially harnessing power of apps like this because they are so powerful to really quickly build relationships because there's no fancy Instagram photos to hide behind. It's just you know this is what you get. It's you know. pretty real and raw. So did I pass?

You passed with flying colors. That's exactly right. The only thing I would slightly differentiate, and this is not a critique as such, it's more about that word selling. We don't sell on social platforms. You know that too anyway. We don't sell on social platforms. What we do is we create those relationships, we create those connections, and what we do is then take those relationships, connections, and conversations offline, and that's where we sell. So that's— yeah, so although we call it social selling, and the history here is that LinkedIn coined this term as part of its initial creation of the launch of the Sales Navigator product, or the LinkedIn Premium product, and one of them was Sales Navigator. So now when they were launching Sales Navigator, they started thinking about how they can best market it and position it, that product. In the LinkedIn market. And I thought, okay, well, let's talk about this social selling concept. And I came up with, um, with 4 pillars of social selling. One of them was creating a professional brand, which is what we all do. We're on LinkedIn, and we've been on LinkedIn for a while. We all have created a professional brand. Now, it does vary from brand to brand, but it's professional. It's got a profile picture, it's got a nice clean headline, it's got an About section, it's got a Featured section, and so forth. And we won't go into a professional profile because that's probably for another room, some other time where we talk about LinkedIn profiles and reviews. We then talk about focusing on the right prospects. So it's how do we find the people on the platform, how do we connect with them. So how do you search and discover and find that unique client, that avatar that you've created. The third one is engaging with insights, and I call this the education phase of social selling, which is about you educate your market, you educate your followers. And the last phase, the last pillar of social selling according to LinkedIn is building trust and relationships, which is as part of the education phase, people start trusting you. And, you know, for example, with Mac, he's the LinkedIn expert. Now I know if I need a LinkedIn expert, I know it's Mac. If someone wants a social selling expert, they go, I'll go for Con. So it's building that trust relationship and people can associate you with your expertise in the industry, and then we take that conversation offline. Mac, I've said enough there. You want to add to anything I've said so far?

I think that, you know, between the two of you, you've pretty much covered most of what, you know, the whole social selling concept is about. And, Con, you've hit the nail on the head there with regards to, and what you said earlier as well, with regards to who people gravitate towards and being very clear on the message of what it is that you provide. And, you know, with your Social Selling Warrior as an example, it's, you know, it says what it does on the tin. And, you know, the same with mine. But one of the things that I found fascinating about LinkedIn is the fact that we've got 756 million people on there. And that means there's more than enough opportunity for everybody. But at the same time, people gravitate towards, you know, People buy from people, and this is why it's so important from a social selling aspect to you know be authentic, give people a bit of a taste of who you are as an individual. Because you know trying to be that copycat, trying to trying to be what everybody else is doing, and and not being yourself on on social platforms is one of those things that you know a lot of people will end up struggling for ages to try and find themselves as such because they're trying to copy everybody else. But Once you start looking at who you are from an authentic perspective, what value you bring, and just focus on how you help people, that's when the magic happens, I believe, in social selling.

True. So, Sue, that's great. That's exactly right, Matt. And so, Sue, we didn't get a chance, and I apologize, we didn't get a chance to introduce you and tell us a bit about what you're doing, and then maybe talk to us about how you use social to advocate for your business.

Yeah, thank you. Um, so I have, um, I'll start with social first. So I've been using Clubhouse since January and really loving it. I, I'm keen to, um, to learn from you, Costa and Mac, about LinkedIn. I know very little about LinkedIn. I don't use it a lot. I kind of have a profile and that's about the extent of it. I don't really do a lot more than that with it, so I'm keen to learn some some new things about it. Um, but yeah, so I've been doing Clubhouse rooms. I am a Kajabi expert and help coaches and consultants and course and membership creators get their programs set up and online and get them selling. And I really focus on selling in a really authentic way, which is why I'm just completely digging everything that you're saying because it is so important to build relationships. Um, it's, you know, one of the core things and, you know, you're right before with what you said that you don't technically sell on the platform. It's all about, um, yeah, just opening up that relationship with someone and using it as a start point and being really authentic in what you're doing and, and really honest. And I think that's why I've really gravitated towards these types of platforms because it gives you an opportunity to just, um, you know, learn from people because you get a lot of really great questions, which can help you learn and understand your ideal customers a lot more. Um, it's given me some fantastic ideas for content, for things to include in programs. And yeah, it just— I think it just gives a more, um, I don't know if it's a deeper or— I think the relationship that you can build through something like this is a lot stronger than, um, and quicker than it would take for you to build a relationship through putting up multiple posts on Instagram, Facebook, etc., because it is so personal. It's like having a chat with someone. Um, it's— yeah, it's just more intimate and I really like it. So, so that's a little bit about my experience and keen to, to do more.

So, Sue, you said you don't do much on LinkedIn, but you obviously got a business model that relies on people knowing who you are and people knowing what you offer. So with that in mind and with the admission that you don't do much on LinkedIn, how are you driving that social awareness, that brand? Where do you drive it and how do you—

Um, a lot of it is through Facebook. Um, a lot of it is through referrals. So, um, I have become known as a Kajabi expert and help a lot of people. So that's always fantastic when you get those referrals. Um, Clubhouse has been fantastic for me actually. We've run weekly rooms, like I said, since January. Um, I do it with a copywriter, so it's a really nice blend of skills. And we usually aim for about 2 hours. Often the rooms will go a lot longer. We've, you know, had people that are our regulars in our rooms. And, um, you know, I then engage those conversations and relationships further, mainly through Instagram. So I have Instagram, I have someone on my team run Instagram. I don't love Instagram very much. Um, but yeah, and then apart from that, it's through some paid ad strategies through things like Facebook. Um, I'm just about to go into a challenge period where we're doing, um, some pre-launch content for a program, um, which is really helpful because Kajabi are also launching some new features tomorrow. So that'll be a really great opportunity to talk about that, to then lead, um, into a launch, um, a few weeks later and hopefully gonna get, um, you know, new people in through that, through Clubhouse. Um, also looking at some Facebook strategies. That's It's always getting harder. And, um, yeah, one of the things, it's not even social. Um, it's the social network that's not social, which is, um, Pinterest. So, um, I actually have quite a lot of traffic coming through from Pinterest. But yeah, people always call it a social media. It's like the anti-social media because there is no engagement. It's just, you know, a traffic driver basically.

And you know what, so you might just listen to you there as I was thinking You, you, you're so active on all of these other platforms, but again, you admitted you don't do much on LinkedIn, but you've got enough coming through those other platforms. So I always go back to that principle that I've learned from Seth Godin, which is about build the tribe or build your tribe where your tribe lives. And it's about, you know, always go to where your tribe— if your tribe is on those platforms then and you're getting enough out of them from those platforms, then I think you're doing the right thing. And maybe, maybe, and here is a LinkedIn trainer and guru talking to you, but maybe you don't need LinkedIn. But maybe the opportunities with LinkedIn might be different and bigger. I don't know. I'm just going to bring Mac in here.

What would your suggestion be to someone like Sue in relation to her particular business model at the moment, the way she drives So, a really important point that you raised there, Con, about being where your tribe hang out, and it's about really understanding who your target audience is and where they do hang out. So, Sue, if you could tell me a little bit about who your target audience is and where they hang out. target audiences, I'll be able to give you some insights and let you know whether LinkedIn's the place because it's not for everybody.

No, it's not. And funny you say that, actually. I did have a client find me through my very ordinary LinkedIn profile and connect to get me to do some Kajabi consultation work. However, they're a corporate client, so which is a little bit different to my usual clients who tend to be small business owners who maybe they've had a business, they're a solopreneur, maybe a service provider, a coach, and they want to move into some more passive income. So they want to create a program potentially to move away from that service-based work or to supplement it. So yeah, so they tend to be smaller businesses, solopreneurs. Sometimes they are brand new to business. Like one of my clients that I work with has, you know, worked for 30 years in the education space and, you know, just went, all right, enough. I need online. I want to get that part of the world set up. So yeah, hopefully that's clear enough.

Yeah, absolutely. And luckily I know the Kajabi platform because I know quite a few international speakers and coaches who use the platform. And to give you an example, 70% of my clients fit exactly what you are, you know, the target audience you just mentioned now.

Oh, and they're on LinkedIn?

And they're all on LinkedIn.

So, okay, you guys might inspire me.

So, you know, if you look at LinkedIn just from a small business owner perspective, I'm just going to give you a quick idea here, just so that you can see. Just running a quick, quick search. So if you look at just people that have, that are coaches, as an example, you've got over 89,000 active coaches that have posted in the last 30 days. So you know, that gives you some idea, but there's over 600,000 coaches just on LinkedIn. So, you know, it all depends on exactly what you're looking for. But, you know, there are so many, especially solo businesses make up about 80% of LinkedIn. And it's the business platform. And when you're looking at people that are wanting especially residual income or, you know, the income while they sleep as such, so that they only have to do it once. That's a massive, massive need by a lot of people, you know, from coaches to small businesses to teachers to, you know, various other industries. So it's definitely a place where I think you should just give it a go and make a bit of a splash.

And Sue, I was going to add too, I'm from the learning and development background, so I've got a lot of connections in that space. During COVID the number of coaches, trainers, and freelance consultants who were looking to get onto a platform in order to share their knowledge expertise because they couldn't do many face-to-face Went up by about 60-70% dramatically overnight. So you know that—

That was the reason for my pivot into specializing and helping people with Kajabi rather than being a small business coach because of that massive—

And a lot of those live on LinkedIn. A lot of those tout for their service, tout their services. A lot of them position their services, position their workshops, their face-to-face events. A lot of them do that via LinkedIn. Okay, I think Mac makes a good point that there is potential and, and using LinkedIn in a number of ways. And you don't have the premium feature, but there is some aspect, some, uh, additional search parameters you can use in, um, the premium features. But even using, um, my good friend Craig Langley's, uh, Boolean search strategies, you can actually hone in and find the people you want to find. And then start to social sell with them, as in reaching out, connecting, sharing some knowledge, educating them around going online, passive income streams, and all those things. Start to position yourself in a way that you are identified as a person that they need to go to. There are major LMS providers at the moment who are starting to revisit their business models because they're realizing there is a market for small business solopreneurs and entrepreneurs and coaches who need to get onto a learning management platform to deliver their learning, their online courses. So even they are looking to downgrade their sophisticated learning management systems in order to accommodate for people that you are catering for. So there is a great opportunity for you, I think, on LinkedIn. But again, Uh, we can have the conversation offline and you can talk to Mac and myself. We're both available to have a chat.

Can I ask a question just about— so say someone was in my situation where, you know, there is no LinkedIn strategy or anything done. I've just had, you know, people that I've connected with over the years and that's been pretty much it. So where would you start if you were pretty much brand new to the LinkedIn platform? Because I've heard lots of things about connecting through DMs, and I get lots of random DMs as well, versus using the more social features and like using posts, maybe using videos. I know that you mentioned the other day about LinkedIn Audio. Like, are they— is there also a LinkedIn Audio website?

It's coming, it's coming, it's coming. Look, I think the word you use there is the most important part. It's a matter of sitting down with someone like myself or Mac and saying, What is your intention? What is your purpose? You know that word strategy. So it's about mapping out a high-level strategy. What do you want to achieve? What do you want? So you might, you know, for example, brand awareness might be the first thing you want to get going on LinkedIn and then create some sales. So it's about creating that brand, a trusted brand, the trusted advisor, and from there. So that might be about developing a more polished profile and then developing some aspects of that profile where people can see what you've achieved. So it's the featured sections about your About section, getting some recommendations in your profile so people can then see the social proof of what you've done. Because remember, LinkedIn is all about yourself except for one part of LinkedIn, which is the recommendations at the bottom, which is what I call the social proof. That's where others talk about you and you don't talk about yourself. The rest of LinkedIn is all about you talking about yourself. In some way or other. So it's getting a recommendation. And then once you've developed that part, which is the first part of the, the strategy, then it's about, okay, once we know we've done that, what our purpose is going forward is X, Y, or Z, then we might do content creation, then we might do some content curation, we might do some, um, personal invitations, we might create, um, a small event, a webinar, A LinkedIn Live. So there's a couple of things you can do. Again, it comes down to where do you want to end up and what's your strategy, your overall strategy. Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's like with any social, like start with the end in mind.

Correct. Yeah, you've got to have a strategy. So, Mac, I mean, Mac's very knowledgeable too, so I always defer to Mac because I love his input.

Mac, would you add to anything there to seeing where you want to Well, I think one of the things to realize with LinkedIn is the fact that there's something that— what somebody who's become a good friend of mine over the last year, Chris Reid, and Con and I both know Chris through social media and through LinkedIn. And Chris talks about this concept of the 1-9-90, which is basically that only 1% of people are actually posting content on LinkedIn. And 9% are what I call the journalists or curators. Those are the people who, if they approve your post and engage with your post, then the other 90% get to see it. So one of the things that really stood out from those stats for me was the fact that just by posting— so there are 3 pillars, I believe, to LinkedIn. One is your profile, the other one's your content, and the other one's your outreach and connection strategy. But if you've got your profile up to speed, you're posting valuable content, and just those 2 will bring you inbound contacts and inquiries. But you're already 99% ahead of your competitors just because of the fact that you've updated your profile and you're posting. So that's just, you know, the easiest quick win. And then, you know, the rest of it's looking at that detailed strategy, the long game, what is the end in mind and working backwards. So, yeah, everything else that Con said is 100% on point.

And then, Matt makes a good point. The other stat I read recently, Sue, was that over, again, during the COVID period, content consumption increased by 60% on LinkedIn over that last 12 to 18 months because we're all stuck at home and because we were stuck to our computers, the thirst for content, original content, just went through the roof. So if you were at a particular point in time creating some content, you would have got so much exposure and so much attention because, like Max says, only 1%. Now remember, there's about 756 million people on LinkedIn. If the stat says about 1% are creating content, imagine what the opportunity is there for you.

Oh my God.

Yeah, that's it. Yeah, it's a— it's— I think it's gone to about 2%, but even if it goes to 2%, even that's phenomenal.

So, absolutely.

Yeah, 2% of 750-odd million people only creating content, and we're talking about original content. Now, I'm also one who believes in— and I, I like curating content because I believe that I'm not the purveyor of all the knowledge that's out there. I like to create content because I like to see what other people are saying. I like to see what other people people are pushing out there. There's people like Richard Vanderbloem, John O'Sperry, and others who do a lot of testing. I love to see what they're doing and share some of the stuff they do because they do a lot of what we call A/B testing about what works, what doesn't work on LinkedIn. I like to always listen, see, and I like to share some of that stuff too. So it's always good to share some of that stuff. So I curate content but always put a perspective on that content saying, this is what I got out of it, or this is what think, or this is not the stats that I'm getting because my content seems to get more engagement in these periods of time, or my blogs are getting more engagement than my original post. So anyway, it's always good to curate some content, look at what other people are sharing, and provide a perspective. And that's about engaging, what Matt talked about. If you engage, engaging, engaging, engaging is one of the biggest strategies or the most effective strategy you can use on the platform. platform. Profile is one, like Max said, and also educating, but engaging in commenting, interacting. I know the likes and the shares, we all do it as a matter of habit, it's convenient. That can get you some of it, but it's not going to give you as much as commenting, responding, interacting with the posts. That's where the engagement will go through the roof.

That is, yeah, that's really great to know. So can I just ask you something about the content. Is that okay?

Yeah, yeah, please do. Yeah, that's what we're here for.

Great. So when you were talking about curating content versus original content, I'm assuming by curating you mean sharing other people's content or sharing articles or things that you've read, and by original content you mean creating your own posts like you would on Facebook or something like that. But you also mentioned blogs, so You know, is there a situation where if you do a blog or a video or something like that, that you would put the whole thing onto LinkedIn, or would you do like you do on Facebook and, and do a summary and then drive someone to the actual blog post?

LinkedIn is a very jealous platform. Like any platform, it wants people to stay on its own platform. LinkedIn, like any platform, doesn't want you to leave its platform, doesn't want you to move off that. So So what it does is it likes you to post native videos on LinkedIn, but also allows you to blog on LinkedIn. That's it, by the way, what we call the article. So when you go to LinkedIn, you can do a couple of things. You can do a post, you can do a poll, you can do an article, or there's a couple other things you can do too. But anyway, it's called the article feature, is what they call it, or I call it the blog because I'm the old traditionalist. At least I remember when Pulse was around, which was the original blogging platform of LinkedIn. So if you're going to do a blog, and I'll give you an example, I had not done a blog for a long, long time. I did a blog about nearly a month away now, and I'm just staggered because I use— Mac and I use a particular tool called Inlytics that gives us our LinkedIn analytics, and we both love that tool because it's a really good tool in that it gives you analytics on your performance of your posts, when is the best time to post and so forth. But that's another conversation for another day. But I did this blog and even though it's been nearly a month, it's still averaging a 47% engagement rate. That's staggering. And I know it's probably going to stabilize there because that's all it's probably going to get. But even that for me indicates that blogs/articles articles on LinkedIn are somehow favored by the platform, and it does give them a bit of— give it a bit of love, even longer than just 24 hours or 48 hours, which is which we, we believe a normal post has. So it gives it a bit longer love, or maybe it gives it a lot of love, is that it keeps positioning it into the people's feeds over a period of time, a lot more than what a normal post would. Uh, video is also another good medium to use too in to advocating something. So when you talk about curating, I don't curate many of other people's videos. I might curate a Harvard Business Review article, or I might curate an Inc. magazine article, or McKinsey. So I'll read a McKinsey article, I'll curate it by sharing. Now what I don't do— what I do is I don't reshare from that actual link from the HBR post. I will take a link to the article and I'll I'll post it, but also put my perspective on it. So when I curate, I'm actually posting the link to the HBR article, but I actually put it into a post. I call that curation because it's not my article, but I'm giving a perspective on that article. Whereas original content creation is where Sue writes a piece about how she created a Kajabi online course for a particular client and what were some of the tips and tricks she learned along the way. Makes sense. So, Mac, did you have anything to— Mac, did you want to add anything to what I said?

Yeah, well, a couple of things. I mean, really good points there, Con, as always. But what did I— sorry, I went blank there for a second. So articles or blogs, as you were saying, is also a great position for building your credibility and authority on LinkedIn. Because when people go on to LinkedIn and they go and have a look at your, uh, your profile, um, you know, the, uh, articles are something firstly you can feature just like you can with posts, but you can also, um, have those articles— they, they're much easier to be able to put external links in, um, and put more of a professional opinion in there about you know, specific things that you do. And, and if you look at Kajabi as an example, a lot of people will look at trying to position themselves as, um, you know, trying to give information about how you use Kajabi and all the other things, as opposed to looking at the, um, the outcome that it results for the client, which would be things like, you know, the ongoing income, being able to make money while you sleep. About being able to increase your time, all those kind of things. So it's looking at what the benefits are for the client. And the article side of things really, it just adds that position of authority. So, you know, even just doing 1 or 2 articles a month are more than sufficient just to keep your credibility and your authority up on LinkedIn. So, so those are really key. And then what, um, Con was talking about with regards to the, uh, articles or curating, um, I've also— I don't know, Con, if you've heard this term, um, newsjacking, um, but, uh, effectively it's a great way to be able to get whatever is trending in the news currently, um, and then giving your opinion on it. And LinkedIn see that as a great source where ultimately they— your reach is— it can be exponential through using other people's, you know, content or articles. Because if LinkedIn's algorithm finds that firstly it's trending on a major news platform and you're talking and giving opinion to it, it will then give it much greater reach as well. So And one of the things that I really like about LinkedIn, because you can't really do that like on Instagram as an example, you're posting the link in there, it just doesn't go anywhere. Whereas with LinkedIn, it really does get a lot of additional reach just, you know, within a very short period of time. But it also, as Con was talking about, the engagement is key because what most people do is they'll post and they'll just expect to get inbound conversations and, and, you know, leads, whereas the reality is it's all about that conversation that you then generate off the back of that and how quickly you engage with those people. Even just saying thank you to somebody for, for a comment that may just be, you know, thanking you for, for the post or sharing the valuable information is, is really important. Just, you know, acknowledging your audience is so That is incredibly helpful.

Thank you. I really appreciate that. I mean, I guess that's sort of— some of that is, you know, the same across other platforms. I think a lot of people use social to sort of, you know, bark your messages out there to the world and then not do anything afterwards. And it's what you do afterwards, that after you post engagement, where you get the most value. And I'm guessing like just engaging on other people's posts as well, like going and finding relevant, um, you know, people in your target audience who are posting things and then commenting on their posts would be really valuable as well. Um, I might have missed it, but if you do have a blog post on your website, should you repost that blog post on LinkedIn? Should you change it like you would do if you were, you know, putting it onto Medium or something like that? Is it SEO discoverable or is it just within the platform? Tell— I'm asking you all the questions, so I hope that's okay. I'm like, I'm just curious. I wanna—

No, no, please. Hey, that's what we're here for. This is the beauty of these social audio apps you get. And that's why I'm glad this has been recorded because we're gonna go back and be able to re-listen to this and the gems that Mac and I drop will be able to be appreciated by a lot more people. But great question, Sue, great question. So this is my approach, and I'm sure Mac might have a very similar approach. If I was to blog, and I have a Medium platform, I know Medium is very popular, I would blog on that one. What I would do then is I would reblog the first couple of paragraphs onto LinkedIn and then say And I mean, there is a certain view. Now, this I've heard recently it's changed, but there's a certain view that then you put a link to say you can read the rest of this blog by clicking on this link, which takes them to your Medium site for reading the rest of the blog. The view was that if you put a link into LinkedIn which takes people off the platform, LinkedIn does not like that, so it doesn't give your post as much love. What people used to do is they would use the comments section of that post to say, to read this blog in full, please go to my Medium blog, which is here. So you put that in the comment section, not in the original post. I think that may have changed, and Mac might know a bit more on that. But I would, I would not repost at all. I would, I would give a bit of a teaser on LinkedIn, because one of the key things we all need to do in relation to social selling is get people to go to our websites. One of the biggest call to actions we must all have in relation to what we do is get them to go to a website where they can find more of our products and services, and they can buy, inquire, make a web inquiry, whatever the case may be, via that website. So if you're blogging on your own website, it's always good to drive traffic to that website and therefore just post a couple of paragraphs of that blog and put a link to say the rest of this blog you can read here, or repost that whole blog, but maybe after a couple of weeks when you posted it onto your website, and say this blog was originally posted on this website, please go here to see more of my other blogs. Matt, would you have anything else to add to that?

The, the One thing that really, you know, I think regarding your question with about the SEO side of things that is really key is that, you know, LinkedIn are now owned by Microsoft and they have a massive trust rating when it comes to Google. So if you just have a very simple example, if you put your name into Google Google now, what tends to happen is LinkedIn will be one of the top 3 or 4 links that come up on your name anywhere. It's number 1, Mac.

I just did it.

It's number 1. Oh my God. So, so that is how important it is firstly to use LinkedIn and make sure that, you know, if it's the number 1, 2, or 3 links that come up when people search your name, you know, what disservice are you doing yourself if you don't show up in that media, as an example, that social platform? So that's a key thing. But from an SEO perspective, yes, if you are copying from a blog and then putting it straight into an article on LinkedIn, again, it's just reproducing. So I always recommend that you, you know, yes, maybe extract 1 or 2 paragraphs, but add, you know, something very specific to those readers on LinkedIn so that it becomes very audience-specific and not too generic, so that the reader on LinkedIn feels that you've written it for them as opposed to this is something I copied and pasted from somewhere else. And that also helps from an SEO perspective, which is really Does that help, Sue?

Oh my God, that's amazing. That is phenomenal.

Isn't it great to Google your name? When you Google your name, you find that your LinkedIn profile always comes up in the top 2, 3, or 4 results.

Yeah, and it doesn't say what I want it to say.

So I'm like, I've got to change it. Exactly right. There you are. We're going to talk, Sue. We're going to talk. We'll get your LinkedIn profile fixed up. We'll talk.

Thank you, I love it. I'll stop hogging the stage now because Jazz might have some good questions.

Jazz has come up. Thanks very much, Jazz, and thanks for putting your hand up and coming on stage. We are in the Social Selling Tips and Tricks room here tonight. We are doing an experiment, but it's going well so far, on using Green Room to converse on various business matters and issues, and one of them was around LinkedIn and social selling. We have come across from Clubhouse, and we could try this out to see how this fits into our sort of conversations going forward. So, Jay, I won't say any more. Thank you very much for coming on stage. Did you have a question, thought, or comment on social selling?

Well, so far I've been listening to you guys, and it's been really insightful.

So, So I guess you guys should like keep doing this often because it's given me so much insight on like LinkedIn, blogs, and everything else in relation to that. My question particularly was that if you're writing blogs or sharing blogs on LinkedIn, how do you connect it with like the rest of the world? Because from what I know, or I may be wrong, is that once you write a blog, only your connections would be able to see it. So how do you like share it out there? Any tips and tricks on that?

And I'm done speaking. Thank you.

Mac, you want to take that one?

I'll— Con, you're so right about the whole Clubhouse behavior coming across here. I was doing that as well earlier with regards So, Jaz, pleasure having you on here. When you refer to blogs, are you talking about articles on LinkedIn, Jaz? Yes, yes, articles and what you write and share, created articles. Okay. So the key thing is I used to find when I, you know, right in the beginning, because I wasn't engaging with everybody else on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, as, um, you know, Sue mentioned earlier about going and finding relevant content, relevant, uh, influencers within, um, different spaces or wherever your clients hang out and going and engaging with those people first. Um, I was also only getting first-level contacts that were really engaging with my posts. And the reality is the way your LinkedIn algorithm works is it, it only shows whatever you post or whatever articles you share to a small percentage, and, and that's generally less than 9%. And those are the people that are active, you know, they're posting, commenting, sharing, liking, as an example. Um, and, you know, if that gets viewed in their, in their feed and they don't engage, then LinkedIn doesn't extend that to your second, third, and, uh, fourth level contacts. Um, but also, um, You know, it's really important that within those first 2 hours of sharing anything on LinkedIn, that you— that's where the engagement happens. So, and that's where the extra reach. But one of the things that you can do with blogs and articles, and it's one of the things that I do on a regular basis, is, you know, you want, as Con mentioned earlier, you know, he's got an article that has got 40— did you say 47% engagement? Con, which is awesome. But in order to maintain that is all, you know, all you need to do is if you are posting and bringing content on a regular basic, a regular basis, is making sure that you are able to feature that on your profile. So that means that, you know, you might share an article today, but in 6 weeks' time, if that's still relevant, And it's, which means they will go back into it, which means it just keeps getting life blown into it, you know, for as long as it's relevant. But it's also important to make sure that you, you know, you update things, you know, on a regular basis as well. Don't leave articles for, you know, like 12 months and still featured because things, as we know, change so much with, uh, with the world when it comes to information and data. So it's really important to make sure that you keep your content, uh, up to, up to speed and, and refreshed. I would say at least, you know, once every 3 to 6 months, make sure that your, uh, your featured section is still relevant and, um, uh, you know, it still serves the purpose. That's one thing I find a lot of people forget to do and Many people have still got featured stuff from when they joined LinkedIn a long time ago. Con?

Yep, Jaz, I was going to say one of the questions you asked was how do you get more than just your connections noticing your post? One thing that I've used very effectively is hashtags. Finding hashtags that pertain to your content, but also starting to develop a unique hashtag that pertains to yourself. Like, uh, Max got the LinkedIn Expert, I've got the Social Selling Warrior as my hashtag. But also when I write a post, I also use some other more broader hashtags, like for example Social Selling, which has got a couple of hundred thousand users, you know, whatever. And then I use LinkedIn Tips. So it's right in the blog post, yes, your connections will see it, but also if you want to extend that reach using hashtags but also tagging someone that you know might be an expert in the field and you'd love to see their perspective. Now, that person may or may not be a connection, but if they're an influencer, they won't mind being tagged in. Sometimes the usual approach is we should seek permission to tag someone in. My view is if there's someone who's known in industry to, for example, I would tag in Richard van der Bloem on something in relation to statistics on LinkedIn, even though I've never sought his permission, I think Richard would love me to tag him in on something which is about LinkedIn statistics and some data that I've come across in relation to my posts. So tagging is one way, but I would suggest you use that with caution, but hashtagging is the best way. Now, this is not Instagram, so don't go with 20, 30, 40 hashtags, go with 3 to 5 as a maximum, Go and do some searching and find which ones are popular hashtags pertaining to your content or your post, and then you'll get a bit more of a reach. That's the other strategy that I would add. Awesome. Thanks for all the tips, and I'll be listening in the background. Now, Sue's asked a question there, and she's on stage. You can ask Sue. You want to ask that question? You got it in the chat there. You want to ask that question again? Yep.

Yeah, I'm just curious. Um, I heard you mentioning that you had a 47% engagement rate, and I was just wondering what that refers to.

Now, Mac is going to help me out here. I think it's a number of likes and comments and shares. Is that the way they do it, Mac? Is that some sort of ratio, the way they do it? Because all I do is just look at my LinkedIn data analytics.

Sorry, can you just rephrase it? For some reason it dropped out there.

How is the engagement rate calculated?

So the engagement rate is based—

What is the 40%?

Yeah. So when I say 40% engagement rate, do you know how they calculate that? Do you have any insight with your knowledge on how they calculate the engagement rates?

Yeah. So the engagement is pretty much, you know, comments as a ratio to the number of views that you get as well. And it's a bit of a painful one at times because, give you an example, I did a post recently where the post itself got great engagement in comparison to, you know, many of the other posts. And I had you know, hundreds of comments and likes, but that also then exponentially pushed up the views because it went viral. And initially, my engagement rate was, you know, between 20% and 40% right in the beginning of the post for the first probably 4 or 5 hours. And then after that, once the views went exponential to, you know, kind of 40,000 plus, then the engagement rate dropped because it was a percentage of the total number of views. So all of a sudden it dropped to like 1.7, 1.8%. So, you know, it's one of those things that I wouldn't always, you know, I'd look at it, especially if you're using data analytics like Shield or Analytics. It gives you the opportunity to kind of look at the picture over time and realize that actually, you know, if the engagement is low, it's not necessarily fully reflective of how the post did, if that makes sense.

So, Sue, according to LinkedIn, the engagement is done by adding up all the audience interactions, that is reactions, likes, shares, and comments, together with clicks and new followers, and divides them by the number of impressions the post receives.

Okay, cool.

All right, but it's a— look, for those of us into analytics, it's like Max said, it's a very valid point with any data you get from any platform. Don't hang your hat on it, but it's an indication of the potential reach and the potential eyeballs your posts are having out there and what kind of reach it's getting, what kind of engagement So I use it with caution, like I use the Social Selling Index with caution and everything else. I use it with caution, but it's a good indicator of how well you're performing on the platform.

Well, it certainly sounds like you can get a lot more reach organically potentially than you can with something like Facebook where you get nothing, like no reach unless you pay for it. So that's really encouraging.

Mind you, LinkedIn's got ads too. You can pay for ads. For them, but we can, we see that you can get some organic reach. Although having said that, Joe made a good point there in the chat saying, I've noticed a decrease in LinkedIn organic reach. Is it just me or maybe I'm targeting the wrong audience? That's a good one, Joe. I've heard that recently too. I don't know if it's, I think creator mode is something that LinkedIn is looking to push a lot more. I read an article the other day which says that Creator Mode will give the opportunity for you to get your posts out further, but also more extensive reach. So if you have got Creator Mode, I know you need to also, by having Creator Mode, also activate the follow button instead of the connect button, but it does give your posts a wider reach. And I think it's probably attributed to my blog also getting the engagement it did because I just had activated Creator Mode and I just had done my blog article. And in the absence of anything else I did, which I didn't do much else different, my blog went gangbusters. Gangbusters, sorry, for myself. And not gangbusters compared to someone else as an influencer, but gangbusters compared to what I was seeing previously with my blog. So I'm thinking it was Creator Mode. So Joe, I don't know if you've got Creator Mode, you should activate Um, Mac, have you noticed a decrease in organic, organic reach for LinkedIn? Have you noticed anything there for your posts?

I, I have. I mean, um, it's a bit of a bizarre one because since Creator Mode I've been doing a lot of testing on various, um, kind of sequences of events, um, to have a look at what is boosting. And it seems that With Creator Mode, I mean, a lot of people that I've been working with and that I know in the LinkedIn community saw a bit of a drop with the kind of natural organic reach. But then that happened for about 2-3 weeks and then it started picking up again. So, you know, the key thing is don't get too worried about the statistics initially, but just make sure that you keep bringing that valuable content, making sure that you're engaging with, with your audience, and then it starts to pick up again. But there's just a little tip that I would suggest, which I didn't really rate very high and wasn't something that I thought was a great idea in the beginning, but the algorithm actually likes you liking your own content. And I did a little exercise last night where I tend to do a lot of my testing in hours where most of my audience are asleep, just to see what the impact would be. So I know that my target and my main audience are not going to be engaging. So I did a post where I literally did 4 or 5 comments immediately after my post about— in relation to the actual content in the post, and I hit the like button on my own post. And I've done this several times now over the last probably 6 weeks. And that post, which under normal circumstances would only get like 200, 300, 400 views if that, by posting it at 1, 2 o'clock in the morning ended up getting about 3,000, 3,500 views. And it got you know, some direct messages to me as well, which was bizarre because it was a throwaway post just for testing. So thought I'd just put that out there and, you know, go and play.

I noticed that, Mac, and I thought you were talking to yourself. Okay, this is good. This is a good one by Mac. Okay, but obviously it's a great strategy. So just repeat that again. So when you write a post, you like your own post, but then there's also comment on your own post. Is that what you're suggesting?

Yeah, so I've done done, um, using the analysis tools, I've done various, um, tests with, uh, 1 comment, 2 comments, 3 comments, 4 comments. And if within the 5 first 5 minutes of, of doing a post, if you hit the like button and then you, um, post, uh, 4 comments, um, in relation to the post that's actually relevant— so as an example, I I did a post about a specific tennis player recently and a quote from him. And all I did at the bottom was, hey, have you heard of this guy before? If not, go and check him out. Here's his profile. Then I put, you know, really inspirational guy. Didn't realize he was one of the first, what do you call it, amputees to play professional tennis and things like that. So, I put relevance and then asked questions. Questions in my comments about the post that I wanted people to engage with. And yeah, it has this weird knock-on effect. And this is a tip that I actually got from somebody that I follow who's in the motor trade, and she has about 3.5 million followers. And she did this talk to the motor trade about how she gets her engagements. And I thought, what are you talking about? And anyway, so I've played and tested it over the last 6 to 8 weeks, and yeah, she's right, which is really annoying.

There you are, folks. You heard it first on the Green Room Social Selling Tips and Tricks from Mac. Hopefully, people will be able to hear that again, Mac, on the replay of the podcast. Look, I know people are always conscious of time. I did allocate 1 hour for this, and I'm very much committed to making sure that we try to finish on time because people do have other things to do in their lives, and I'm always respectful of the time commitment people make. So I want to thank you all for joining us today. Please, if you enjoyed it, tell your friends. We will be doing this again next Wednesday, and hopefully Mac will have the courage to join me again. Also, we're putting out the welcome mat, so hopefully, Mac, you'll join me again. It'd be great. So we'll be doing the social selling tips and tricks here every Wednesday, wherever you are in the world. I do put them on LinkedIn, so you follow me on LinkedIn, you'll be able to see the times, the worldwide times on LinkedIn. But if you've joined us today, then you know what time it is wherever you are. Feel free to join us again. Tell your friends, ping your friends in next time, and we're happy to take questions either via the chat, or we are also very happy to take questions by you coming on stage. So thank you very much, everyone. Max, My deepest respect for you, sir, and thank you for coming on and joining us today. You just want to quickly tell people how they can find you, where they can find you, where they can connect with you.

Con, thank you so much for this afternoon. My first experience on the Green Room, loving the platform because there's so much, you know, the whole chat function I wasn't used to until you pointed it out again earlier, Con. So So, you know, definitely share with other people. You can find me just by searching or just putting in thelinktinexpert.com and it will go straight to my LinkedIn profile. And yeah, you can just search and follow the LinkedIn Expert hashtag on LinkedIn and you'll find me there as well. So thank you everybody for the value that you've added. Great questions, Jazz and Sue. Thank you so much. And, you know, Con, for the value that you brought to Thank you, thank you very much, Meg.

Much appreciated. And to Ashley, to Mark, to Andrew, to Joe, thank you for sitting there listening patiently. We really do appreciate it. And thanks, Joe and Mark, for your comments. And Andrew, I know you were busy doing errands. And Ashley, we really appreciate you using us as your first room. So we want to say, I hope you enjoyed the experience and you continue to use Green Room. And Sue, thanks for the great chat. We'll be connecting and talking further and how we can improve your profile and get you out there.

I can't wait. I'm excited. I'm going to be a regular now just because I'm keen to learn. You've got me intrigued. I've ignored it for what, 15 years?

Too long. Too long.

Time to start.

Too long. All right, guys. Thanks everyone. Thank you very much and much appreciated. And take care wherever you are in the world and have a great day or evening. Thank you all.

Thanks, Con. See you next week.

Thank you.