Episode 134: 5 Secrets LinkedIn Doesn’t Want You to Know

Bob Woods  00:00

Greetings, everyone and welcome to Making Sales Social Live! Brought to you by Social Sales Link. I’m Bob Woods and I’m with my co-host as always the LinkedIn whisperer, Brynne Tillman. How are you doing today, Brynne? 

Brynne Tillman  00:11

I’m good Bob, how are you? 

Bob Woods  00:14

I am doing great today, thanks. So, I just want to let everyone know that for this one we’re going live on TikTok for the first time ever. So if you’re on TikTok right now, pardon us as we’re starting to figure out how to incorporate this program and this platform into our live streaming. 

Intro  00:32

Welcome to Making Sales Social Live! As we share LinkedIn and social selling training strategies and tips that will have an immediate impact on your business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods every week, Making Sales Social Live!

Bob Woods  00:50

Most everyone loves to talk about secrets because let’s face it, secrets are fun to learn about. LinkedIn has some secrets that we are going to expose. Sounds a little TV tabloid… 

Bob Woods  01:05

No, I love that. I’m loving it!

Bob Woods  01:06

Yeah, no, that’s great! Well, so they’re not secrets though they’re more of just ways to use LinkedIn that the powers that be at LinkedIn they probably just haven’t thought of. So you know, they’re not like “True, true secrets” So the one thing that I wanted to bring up is all of these are 100% compliant with LinkedIn Terms of Service, and all that type of stuff, too. So no worries about getting in trouble for you know, actually doing these things, because we wouldn’t do that to you. So the first thing that we’re going to talk about, which is the secret to like, everyone, I think we just kind of know how to do things with it is LinkedIn’s algorithm.

Brynne Tillman  01:49

First of all, I just said they were our secrets. But now we’re actually sharing the secrets that we learned from Richard van der Blom. But the LinkedIn algorithm is an ever-changing animal. So what we’re talking about now is from the most recent information that we’ve gotten, but it could be different tomorrow. 

So the algorithm really is how your content showing up and in front of whom, right? And so what does that look like? There are a lot of different general ways; there’s hashtags, they’re sharing in groups, there’s sharing into the inbox of specific people that you want to read that but there are a couple of really good benefits to some of the algorithm “hacks” I don’t know if that’s the right word to use “hacks.” One of them is to ensure that you’ve got in the first two hours, 10 people engaging. They used to be the first hour but now I think it’s the first 2 hours. 

Bob Woods  02:53

Yeah, two hours. It basically I mean, you know, as much engagement as you can get within those first two hours, should make an emphasize should because you know, again, algorithm who knows, because it’s LinkedIn, but the more engagement that you have early on, the better chance that the algorithm is going to pick up on that content and then push it out to more people. People meaning your 1st-degree connections as well as the people who are not directly connected to you, but follow you on LinkedIn.

Brynne Tillman  03:24

So one of the things you could do, a little Social Sales Link secret, it’s not really a secret but nobody’s really talking about this if you are an admin of your company page when you post something as you immediately go down and change your… there’s a little like, your little “me” icon with a little arrow change that to your company page icon and comment and like right away. Immediately you’re getting engagement even though you’re doing it.

The other thing is to use the send button and send it out to folks. Let’s say I want Jack to engage on a piece of content. I share it, I put the send button and I’ll say, “Jack, as one of the biggest sales trainers banking has ever seen. I’d love your one click, your engagement, your thoughts…” you know, if it’s a poll that we’re getting out there, “You’re one click vote.” Asking them to engage specifically. Now, make it very personal. This is really important. Don’t have a template that you send to everyone. You know, really talk about why you want their input. That’s a little bit of our slow down your outreach to speed up your outcome, make them feel special. That’s a great way to get that. 

One other interesting thing before we go to the second one unless you want to add to this one other interesting thing that I learned from Richard van der Blom is if you want someone to see your content, engage on their content. Our little secret is to go to their profile, ring their bell if they’re 1st-degree connection. If they’re not, follow them, and then the little bell will show up. And then every time they share content will come into your notifications, not just your news feed, so you will be notified. And then when you engage on their content, how many times? I don’t remember, six or eight times, (Bob: Yeah, something like that.) They will start and maybe earlier than that but they will start to see your content because you engaged with them. That to me, was a mind-blowing algorithm secret.

Bob Woods  05:35

Yeah, Yep, absolutely! So next, we’re going to push on to your experience sections. There’s a feature that LinkedIn has that we have adopted as our own, but we’re using it in a little bit of a different way. 

Sometimes when you go to someone’s LinkedIn, and you go down to their experience section, and then you can see their progression within a company, you know, a salesperson, for example, they may start out in the proverbial mailroom, then they go to associate assistant salesperson, you can chart your entire path through the company by using this feature. Well, here’s the secret, you can also use that to promote products or services that you have rather than charting your way through the company.

You can actually call those out so that it almost looks like separate bullet points underneath your main experience part in that section so that you can actually show the different things that you do for people, whether it’s products, whether it’s services, or whatever.

Brynne Tillman  06:40

So if you take a look, whether it’s Bob’s profile, or my profile, you will see, the first section will be our position, Bob is the CMO and CEO, right, it’ll show that. In there we have our story and why we do what we do. But then thread it together, which is what Bob is talking about. So you’ll see a next bullet point where it might have said, bank teller, Assistant Manager, they would all be threaded together. Instead of doing that, we can use either our solutions, or personas to whom we sell. 

So if you have two or three things that you sell, you highlight them and by the way, this really helps in SEO, search engine optimization. You get found, that title is a very important piece, or persona, maybe you sell one thing to three different types of folks, you can highlight that. So when people scroll through to Bob’s point is bulleted. Two more pieces to this, you can add media to each of those positions. 

So if you have supporting collateral, where you know, you’re looking at your featured section on LinkedIn to be all education. But if you have collateral that supports your solutions, you can upload it there and you can add up to five of your skills and connect them to each of those offerings and that will also help in search engine optimization. It’s pretty awesome.

Bob Woods  08:19

SEO especially it’s really great for besides just showing yourself, if you show yourself but you’re not being discovered, then why do it. This will help with discoverability as well. So the third thing that we want to talk about is that dreaded question mark thing that you get when you try to link like, let’s say something is primarily two sections that I’ve discovered with your featured section in your profile, as well as with external links that you put in in the experience section. 

Speaking of, if you want to link out to something externally, if the website that published it doesn’t have what’s called a featured image with it, it will pop up that ugly question mark. Two ways around that number one, just in those sections. So you can’t do this with posts, unfortunately but with things that are in your profile, rather, you can actually upload now your own graphic so that you can actually have something there that doesn’t come from the website that you’ve included, but you can actually put something there that’s graphically oriented so you don’t get that ugly question mark there. 

And the second thing that you can do is let’s say you want to link to something from your company website, but your company website doesn’t have that featured graphic there. Once the company after you tell them “Hey, dummies, you need to get featured graphics up. Once they do that, you can go to a special website and have LinkedIn recrawl that page and…”

Brynne Tillman  09:56

Can we talk about why first? So I love that. So what happens? This is brilliant and this is something that Bob discovered. And I’m like obsessed with this but if you share a link, and it’s the wrong picture, or is indexing the wrong thing, every time you share that link, it remembers the old thing. So if anything has been updated or changed, it does not naturally appear until you do this magic that Bob found out that it’s so exciting. Go ahead, Bob.

Bob Woods  10:29

Yeah, so then what you can do to tell LinkedIn, “Hey, there’s a new page here, recrawl it and put this page into your back end, rather than the one with the old graphic” we actually have a link that will take you directly to that it’s socialsaleslink.com/clearin so C-L-E-A-R-I-N, again, that socialsaleslink.com/clearin. So that’s actually for our podcast people who can’t see that.

If you use that, that will take you directly to the link within LinkedIn that when you type in the URL or paste in the URL for the page that you want recrawled, it will recrawl it, and then on LinkedIn’s back end, it will update the page that it has in there for that, which is “muah” chef’s kiss.

Brynne Tillman  11:24

This is amazing! So perfect example was I had “15 with Brynne” And originally it just went to Calendly. Every time that it went to “15 with Brynne”  it just showed the blank Calendly stuff, then we took that and we embedded that Calendly into our website at socialsaleslink.com/brynne. But every time I would put “15 with Brynne,”  it still looked at the Calendly even though it wasn’t there anymore. 

So this was a perfect opportunity. Now when it pulls up, it pulls up the picture that we’ve put on the website, Bob, that was one of my favorite. I mean, you always come up with these fun little hidden gems. This is a LinkedIn secret. LinkedIn doesn’t talk about this and it is amazing. It is part of LinkedIn, Bob found this inside of the hidden treasures of LinkedIn. So I would legitimately say this is a LinkedIn secret.

Bob Woods  12:17

That’s a secret. And again, because LinkedIn does it, they have no problem with you doing this. The fourth thing that we’re going to talk about is including video in the featured section, because for whatever reason, LinkedIn does not let you upload a video directly to your featured section of your profile. 

There are two ways around this, one link. Two if it’s like, say, housed on YouTube for example or on Vimeo, you can actually put in the share link into the slot that you want it to appear in the featured section, and then you can bring it in like that. So that’s one way to do it. 

The other way to do it is to upload the video via LinkedIn native video and put it into a post. Make sure that it reads like a normal post and everything and then go ahead and publish that. Then you go over to your featured section, click on the plus sign, click on add post and then the post that you just featured with that in there should pop up at the top, click on add featured. At that point, it goes into your featured section.

Brynne Tillman  13:37

So I love that! I’m going to add a quick little tip on top of that, that we can add on. When you bring that post in. You can edit the text in the description. I like all caps, I do WATCH and then I either use the “greater than” sign like the little alligator above the period or I use a triangle symbol so it looks like a video and then when they’re scrolling through that watch will catch their eye and will know that it’s a video.

Bob Woods  14:08

So now let’s get to the final one and in the promo copy. I put “advertising” very specifically because it’s really not advertising it’s more of a presence, but bringing your presence unto your client’s profiles, Brynne.

Brynne Tillman  14:23

So I love this! It’s such a simple way to win, win, win. Recommend your clients for being awesome clients. I know we want recommendations, we want our clients to recommend us but just bear with me for a second audience because I really think that this is a game changer and it’s a secret because no one I know is doing this.

Recommend your client for being a great client. “Jack, I really enjoyed working with you on ABC project. It was amazing that we took it from here to here. You were such a pleasure. I’m so glad we’ve been able to help you solve, you know, looking forward to future projects.” okay, we send that, they love us, we recommended them,  what else happens? 

When other people visit their profile, they look at who’s recommended them. And now they see that they were your client and how you work together. So if you look at all of your clients over three years, five years, 10 years, and we reach out, not asking them to give us a recommendation, but reaching out to them giving them a recommendation, we are now appearing on their profile. So let that soak in just a little bit how powerful that can be.

Bob Woods  15:47

It’s so powerful. And you know, again, it’s a secret that you know, more or less people don’t think about doing that. But you know, it’s kind of like saying, “Once you see something, you can’t unsee it.” It’s the same type of thing here. Once you hear about it, you can never unhear it and you can use it too to your advantage, which is just absolutely, absolutely tremendous. 

So with that, thanks again for joining us on Making Sales Social live. If you’re with us here on LinkedIn, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, or for the first time ever TikTok, right now we do this every week. So keep an eye out for our live sessions. 

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If you want more info on the podcast, go to socialsaleslink.com/podcast. We do two shows weekly, this one and our Making Sales Social interview series, where we talk with leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business, and many more areas. And so when you’re out and about, be sure to make your sales social. Thanks everybody. Bye bye. 

Outro  17:03

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