Episode 122: Establishing a Productive Daily Routine on LinkedIn

Bob Woods 0:00

Greetings to everyone out there and welcome to Making Sales Social Live. I’m Bob Woods and I’m here with my co-host, the LinkedIn Whisperer Brynne Tillman, how are you doing today, Brynne?

Brynne Tillman 0:11

I’m good Bob, how are you?

Bob Woods 0:13

I am great and that is excellent to hear and got a lot of people signed up for this one. So, we’re gonna go ahead and get right into it because there’s a lot of interest in this.

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. 

A lot of people, especially the ones who are joining us, I imagine, want to use LinkedIn for sales development and starting those all important first sales conversations. But they, you know, they look at the platform, and I’m guessing that they feel overwhelmed. So, we get it. We know there’s a ton of stuff going on on LinkedIn and one can easily get sucked into doing stuff on it and waste time on it, and, you know, they look at the clock on their computer and realize, “Oh, my God, it’s two hours later. What happened?”

Brynne Tillman 1:17

Yeah, they get stuck in that random acts of social, right? There’s no plan…(crosstalk)

Bob Woods 1:22

Yeah. Yeah, which as we know, and if you don’t know, you probably should know — random acts of social are not productive. So you need a process to ensure that the time you’re investing has a return on investment. See what I did there? That’s why in this Making Sales Social Live, we’re going to talk about what you should be doing. And not only every day on LinkedIn but there are certain things you don’t have to do every day on LinkedIn either, and even how long that you should be on it. So let’s get started with probably one of the, while all these are important, but let’s get started I think with checking notifications, which is probably the first thing— you should probably do that twice a day. First thing in the morning, and then you know, like mid afternoon or something like that.

Brynne Tillman 2:09

Yeah, I agree. I think notifications are a fabulous way to stay engaged with your network. There are notifications that are coming in for birthdays, anniversaries, new jobs, when people are engaging on content that you’ve posted or you’ve been mentioned in, but here’s a new little tip with notifications. If you want to specifically get notified when a specific person shares content or engages on LinkedIn, well, shares content on LinkedIn, you want to ring their bell, which is on their profiles. So if they’re a first-degree connection, you can ring their bell. Go ahead to Bob Woods and my profile and ring our bell, and then you get notified on our activity. And if they are a second-degree or beyond, you can actually follow them and then ring their bell. And this is a great way to leverage those notifications. What are some of the tip or two from you on notification?

Bob Woods 3:04

Yes, so my biggest one is, you know, just obviously trying to keep up with things there. Especially because it does things like, when you get mentioned in a post you get notified, when you get mentioned in a post, as well as people who are engaging on content. And if you publish a post, that gets to be really important because you want to try as much as your schedule allows. So, you know, if you’ve got a day full of meetings, what can you do? But you want to stay up as much as you can with the people who are posting on your content because otherwise it’s kind of a post and ghost situation, as we call it here. So you know, you don’t want to toss something out there, have people comment and you, not coming back on there, because it seems like, it’s you know, even though you don’t mean for it to be rude, it seems rude. So…

Brynne Tillman 3:59

And they’ll stop engaging. And so I think that’s even — (Bob: And they’ll stop engaging —) Yeah. So, to that, I love those points. One of the things that people ask — and then we’ll move on to number two because we’re spending a lot of time on this, even though it’s really important — one of the things that people ask often is, “Okay, so someone commented or someone reacted to my post, what do I do?” One just quick little, keep in the back of your mind, if you post on the topic, have a second piece of content on that topic that you can say, “Thanks so much for engaging on my post, I have another piece of content…” And that’s how you can start a conversation. So, I know, we, I said we would keep it brief, so we’ll run to the next one.

Bob Woods 4:39

Yeah, well, yeah, we’re going to run to the next one. And we do want to acknowledge all of the comments that are coming in as well, because we got a lot of people on right now. It’s just everyone saying hi, which is fantastic, obviously use the comments to say hi to everyone else. LinkedIn is all about networking, so please just go ahead and continue doing that, and we’re going to roll on with some more tips here. 

Number two is, Who’s Viewed Your Profile. So, you should be checking that every day, definitely. And if you could do it like, right after, when you check your notifications, that’s probably the best time to do it. So, one of the best things about Who’s Viewed Your Profile is, that can be, like, really brief, because if no one’s viewed your profile, you can just move on with the other things that you need to do. But if they do view your profile, these are perfect opportunities to start conversations on LinkedIn that you could then potentially take off of LinkedIn into sales conversations.

Brynne Tillman 5:39

Yeah, absolutely. So there are two kinds of people, two categories of people are visiting your profile. Your first-degree connections, people that you can message directly and people you’re not connected to that you’d have to either send an InMail, if you had a premium account or Sales Navigator, or connection requests. I typically, because they made the first move, they made eye contact across the room by viewing the profile, I feel comfortable sending them a connection request. But here’s the key, whether it’s a connection request or a message saying, “Hey, thanks for visiting my profile, I had a chance to look at yours. I’m curious what brought you here today.”  Or you know, and say something about their profile that you notice. But the key is to ask the question, “Can I ask what brought you to my profile today?” That’s the conversation starter — that I saw a piece of content, you came up in a search, Bob says I should check you out. Right, whatever that is. That’s your conversation starter.

Bob Woods 6:42 

And there was a really good question that just came in from Jay, “How do you check who’s viewed your profile?” So, there are two really quick ways to do that. One, from your main feed. So when you first log in, and you see your feed and everything, on the left side, underneath your box on top, there’s a little thing that says Who’s Viewed Your Profile, you can check on that and you’ll go over to that. The other way is, go to your profile itself, go down to the Analytics box. And I forget what the exact verbiage there, 192 profile views, you’ll click on that and that also gets you to Who’s Viewed Your Profile. So, two really quick ways to save that and you may even want to bookmark that page and that specific page and put it somewhere so you don’t have to go through that, you just it’s one (crosstalk)

Brynne Tillman 7:28 

That’s a great tip! The next one’s pretty simple. I don’t want to spend any time on this but, basically, it’s check your messages just like your email. Normally, we recommend you’re doing this two times a day. I’m probably in it 10 times a day but just respond. You don’t want to rely on the email notifications that come, the message notifications that come into your regular email, make sure you’re looking at your message. What’s next after that one?

Bob Woods 7:52

Next is managing invitations. So this is a really, this one’s a really good one. Again, this is probably a first one of among the first things in the morning that you do, is to hop on and just check and see, you know, who’s invited you, as well as, who you have invited. God, say that three times fast.

Brynne Tillman 8:16

Yeah, so when you go into your, the people tab, the My Network, it’s My Network tab, it’s just the little people. If you go to the very top that says Connections, this is, you’ll see all your newest connections. So if you send out invitations, this is a great place to see if they actually accept it. And you can send them a welcome message.

You also want to take a look at who is asking you to connect and you have typically three options. And we actually, when you go into your connections, I mean into your invitations, there are one of three. It’s the same place, you go into the little people icon and click on See All at the top right. That is going to give you events, newsletters, pages, I mostly care about people. And when you click into those people, you’re going to have one of three options: ignore, accept, or message. I rarely ignore people. Unless they have like three connections and they’re in Australia, which is really far away from me. How did I become their third? There are a few things that when it looks a little shady, I’ll ignore, but mostly, I message, unless they have a personal message to me or I know who they are, with just a quick little note. And by the way, I’m going to pop that up here again in the ebook, all of our templates are in there. So this ebook, as I’m talking about this, if you go to socialsaleslink.com/day, you can download the eBook that has all the templates of what we’re talking about. But if you accept their connection requests, be ready with the welcome message, right? Again asking them, “How did you find me?” And are you, you know, “What are you exploring?” Right, “What made you connect today?” start those conversations and even consider, although I’m not going to get deep into this, offering a resource or content if it makes sense, there’s a lot of caveats to that but the last piece is if you’re on the fence, and you don’t know, you can actually message them. So, you can and you could just say, ”Hey, Bob, thanks so much for your connection request. Typically, I only connect with people I know, may ask how you found me?” And then you can exit out so it’s gone from your invitations but it’s in your messaging. It’s in the inbox on LinkedIn. So you can always go back.

Bob Woods 10:44

Yeah. So then, two real quick things: one, someone asked, “Can people see if you ignore them?” No, they can’t. There, that’s a really easy one. The other one may take just a little bit more time to answer, “How do you feel about people connecting with sales pitches?” Which is happening, unfortunately, more and more and more and more on LinkedIn.

Brynne Tillman 11:04

So a connect and pitch is a bait and switch. No question. (Bob: Yeah) It’s awful. We need to treat people on the other side of the message the same way we would if they were on the other side of the table, they are human beings not leads. They’re not a lead until they raise their hand and say they want to talk to you, in our opinion. (crosstalk)

Bob Woods 11:26

It’s a really, really, really short and sweet way to put it because time is ticking on the clock, as they say. (Brynne: All right, I know, I’m a talker.) Yeah, no, we’re both talkers and we’re getting lots of good questions in so we can’t be avoided. So the next one that we’re going to talk about, and this is not a daily activity. So, remember, when I said that some are going to be daily and some, you know, a couple of days or weeks, this is actually a weekly activity, and that’s mining your clients’ connections, which is huge, because we’re all about networking when it comes to using LinkedIn. And this is a prime way to network on LinkedIn is by using your, is by mining, rather, your connections’ connections.

Brynne Tillman 12:04

Absolutely. And so, what I would recommend is look at your week and look at what clients you’ll be having conversations with, make sure you’re connected on LinkedIn, and pull out the 5,6,7 people you want to meet. Now if they’re in a big company, you may want to meet people internally, right, you may want to expand your reach inside of that client. You can also look at other people like them, right? If they’re a CEO, there’ll be other CEOs that they’re probably connected that are like them, and then all you need to do is review the names with them and that will automatically either become introductions, or they might give you even permission to just drop their name when you reach out. Yay! Next is —

Bob Woods 12:44

Yay, Next, so, actually, before we get to that, there is a quick question that came in, “Is there a threshold of requests we can make in a week?” 

Brynne Tillman 12:55

So request to connect is what I’m going to assume that is. (Bob: Yeah, that’s what I’m assuming as well.) So, there’s an unofficial, 100 a week. It’s unofficial because I think it’s almost slightly random. But here’s the thing, I, this should not be a cold calling tool. And there’s no way unless you’re at an event that you’re going to have 100 people to connect with in a meaningful way every week. So if you’re in, I think there’s a limitation if you’re in an event and you’re meeting a ton of people but then, you know, I rather you do quality over quantity anyway. So I actually don’t mind that limitation.

Bob Woods 13:35

Yeah, yeah, yes, it’s good. And then and then also remember that to get to that 100, you’re probably looking at even more profiles at that point and if you look at too many profiles in the day, especially if you like, start from doing no activity, and then you view like tons of profiles a day, LinkedIn will slow you down by letting you know that “Hey, you’re doing too much you should back off.” So there’s kind of a little automatic break or if you’re a car person, a governor there that will kind of hold you back from doing all of that activity as well.

Brynne Tillman 14:11

Yeah, yeah. When you have a premium or Sales Navigator, there’s more leverage in that for sure.

Bob Woods 14:14

Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, the more advanced ones.

Brynne Tillman 14:18

I love the next one, which is, send a video message to first degree connections. (Bob: Yes.) Like literally, it’s the easiest thing in the entire world — well, I’m sure there are slightly easier things. But it’s, I think, one of the easiest ways especially as salespeople we’re talkers. On the mobile device, you can look up any first-degree connection and send them a video message, personalized, 10 or 15 seconds. So simple. And it can be many different opportunities. It could be inviting them to a free event, it could be “Hey, I just listened to a podcast and thought of you. Let me know if you’re interested. I’m happy to send that link over to you.” Whatever it is, you just restart that conversation with video and they really connect with you. The next one. I love this one.

Bob Woods 15:06

Yep, this is, I don’t know if it’s your favorite but it’s (crosstalk) (Brynne: It’s my favorite.) definitely up there.

Brynne Tillman 15:11

It’s like having a favorite child. You don’t have a favorite child, you don’t have a favorite LinkedIn activity.

Bob Woods 15:20

Next one is giving back.

Brynne Tillman 15:22

Yeah. So, I love this! On a daily basis, make sure that you are either making introductions for people in your network, you’re giving them a public kudos, you’re engaging on their content, you’re liking and sharing their stuff, you’re endorsing them. I mean, there are so many ways to show appreciation and give back. And I think actually, the biggest one in the give back is liking and commenting on their content because that matters the most to them. But there are lots of other ways to do it as well. 

Bob Woods 15:57

So the next thing that we’re going to want to do daily and probably twice a day is finding, sharing, and engaging on other people’s content.

Brynne Tillman 16:06

Oh, I just said that in the give back.

Bob Woods 16:09

And yes, you did. But it’s still great —

Brynne Tillman 16:12

Two, two, two activities in one. (Bob: In one.) Yeah. So this is great, right? Make sure every day, you’re either sharing content, or you’re engaging on content. So I mean, it’s that simple. I mean, there’s tons of different content up whole, you can put up, you know, you could use Feedly.com to curate content. You can find content now a little bit easier searching inside of LinkedIn, but make sure that you are active every day. Couple of times, and I do this a couple times a day. And by the way, side note, when you engage on someone’s content, they’re more likely to see your content, right? So you can help that algorithm of your own content by the more you engage with people, the more people will see your stuff.

Bob Woods 17:03

So the next one we’re going to hit really quick is working your ACS or account-centered sales program, which is (crosstalk)

Brynne Tillman 17:14

I love this one! I know I sound like a broken record. I mean, unless you are account-centered, like unless you are assigned accounts. If you’re assigned accounts, it’s a little bit different. If you’re not, and you’re pretty much prospecting with people, consider choosing one account a week to go deep and wide with connections and engagement. And, you know, and really try to go, to build a reputation, not sales, but value inside of one company a week. I mean, it’s amazing how fast that, it’s not the only activity you’re going to do but, and you may reach out to lots of other companies throughout the week but pick one that you’re going to go really deep and wide.

Bob Woods 18:00

Yep. So before we go on, let’s do a couple of questions really quick, “What is the right cadence for sharing versus engagement?” So that’s a little bit of, “it depends”. When it comes to sharing, just do something that you think you can do on a continuing basis. So you know, be regular about it but at the same time, I would recommend actually starting out slow and then, and then ramping up. So you know, like a post every other week can go to a post every week. If you’re feeling good with doing a post every week, then maybe you’re bumping up to two posts a week or something like that, you know. It all depends on what you feel that you can do. Now, engagement is a different situation. Brynne?

Brynne Tillman 18:47

Before you go to engagement, I just want to add to that. The quality again, over quantity. (Bob: Yes, quality. Yes.) To Bob’s point, if you can end up sharing content twice a week, if you can get there, fabulous! Just, I would, but what I, make sure you’re not sharing just to share, because you can lose a lot of followers faster than you can gain them. So if you start sharing content that doesn’t interest them, and isn’t leading back to your solution and ends up random acts of social.

Bob Woods 19:22

Yep. And you definitely don’t want that. So speaking of and we actually did an entire podcast on this a couple of weeks ago. So if you want to check that out, because we had a long discussion and there were a lot of people who are commenting on that one as well. But the question is, “How do you feel about all the personal posts that are occurring since the pandemic, posts that aren’t really business like but could potentially be on Facebook?” like we called iit the Facebookification of LinkedIn. So we have discussed this far and wide. Essentially what it comes down to is, you know, yeah, different situations. Brynne —

Brynne Tillman 19:59

(unintelligible) engagement, I just want to add to that, the quality again, over quantity.

Bob Woods 20:04

Yes, quality, yes. A lot of these posts are definitely more Facebook-like. If you can write a post that is personal yet you can bring in something that’s business-focused that will eventually help attract people to you because you are telling a story that relates to them, and then offer them help on their situation, if they find themselves in a similar situation, you know, like that type of thing, that is, in my opinion, a good kind of Facebook-ish post. But it’s not really Facebook, because you’re just not saying, “Hey, look at how great my kids look.” Which, you’ve got great kids, don’t get me wrong, I’m just saying that maybe not so much for LinkedIn.

Brynne Tillman 20:49

The test for me is,“Is this a conversation I would have with someone in a networking meeting?” If you would naturally have that conversation. So I almost never post personal but I had a new grandbaby last week and I posted it, you know, and I made a little like, “If I’m not getting back to your mentions and the messages, it’s because I’ve gotten a new baby granddaughter.” So I did mention that. Now, one out of every 200 of my posts might end up to be personal but you know, I really wanted to put that out there. So I’m not against personal, just personal from a professional perspective.

Bob Woods 21:29

Yeah, yeah, that’s a good way to put it. So the next one, where we’re going to cover really quick, and this is, and this is not a daily thing, although you can make it daily if you want to but we suggest doing it weekly and that’s a networking Zoom call virtual lunch or, if you serve a local audience, you know, hey, actually go to lunch.

Brynne Tillman 21:46

Yeah, ultimately, you want to have conversations with ideal referral partners both ways at least once a week. I’m part of a group called JVMM, it’s a joint venture group. And once a week, I’m on a call with one of the members. Sometimes we end up making introductions for each other. Sometimes, they end up a guest on our podcast, or I end up a guest on theirs but we are leveraging referral partners all the time, which ultimately creates opportunities, short and long term. You can also, once you have a deeper relationship with that person, you can actually search their connections and run names by them and let them search connections, your connections. And then, you know, make a few meaningful introductions but don’t do that on a first networking meeting. That’s something once you have trust and rapport built. (Bob: It’s like dating.)

Brynne Tillman 22:41 

It’s like dating. 

Bob Woods 22:45

It’s like dating, exactly. So, the last one before we have an additional tip, talks about which is something that a lot of people have brought up already, actually creating content. When the heck should you do that? How often should you plan on doing that? And all that. and all that good stuff. So when it comes to, Brynne and I are a little different. I like to create content during the day because my brain shuts down at night. Brynne’s brain, as you can imagine, doesn’t shut down at night, so she likes doing it at night. But again, it’s more of a consistency thing. Can you do it consistently? And as Brynne said, can you put out good quality content at the same time? So you know, it’s all kind of a, depends on the… (crosstalk)

Brynne Tillman 23:36

I keep a little — well right now a little, right now I have my I have a clipboard of idea. Oh, look, my name is on the back. I have a clipboard of ideas. So when I say something, we call it capturing your genius. But if I say something, and I’m training or I’m, you know, I’m prospecting, or whatever it is and it’s a great idea. I write it down. And the reason that I end up doing the content at night is because that concept is still fresh in my mind. If I sleep on it, I wake up, I don’t remember the gem all the time. So that’s typically why I do that. (Bob: Absolutely.) Did we get through it all?

Bob Woods 24:11

We got through it all. I do have one additional tip that’s not in the book. We may want to put it in the book at some point. I don’t know. But for those of you and I’m like this, this is why I know about it, who experience a bit of FOMO, you know, fear of missing out when it comes to anything. But if you have that fear when it comes to LinkedIn, there is actually an extension called, conveniently, LinkedIn Extension that comes directly from LinkedIn so this isn’t a third party. This is something that LinkedIn has actually developed that works with Chrome, Firefox and Edge. I did some research on Safari, it doesn’t look like it’s available for Safari. But if you use Chrome, Firefox or Edge, what this does is when you download it, it will put the LinkedIn icon into your extension bar. So when it does that, if there’s just the blue LinkedIn and nothing there, it means that there’s nothing waiting for you. But if there’s a red number or but if there’s a red box that has a black number in it, that means that there is stuff waiting for you on LinkedIn. What you can do is, you can hover over that and then it will tell you, when you hover over it, without even having to click into LinkedIn, what is waiting for you there.

And it goes by three different categories. So, for, and for some reason, mine’s not— there it is. So right now, I’m hovering over mine, and I’ve literally got, in my network, there’s nothing waiting for me there. In messages, there’s nothing waiting for me. But I do have seven notifications waiting for me. If you don’t have anything else going on LinkedIn, you didn’t post or anything like that. You could probably go, “Eh, I’ll get to it later.” But if you’ve like, messaged someone and you’re waiting for a message back, and there’s like one or two messages waiting for you, you may want to click over at that point.

With notifications, if you’ve posted content, and people are starting to comment on it, it’s going to land in notifications. You can see that there are just a number of notifications. It’s not going to tell you what it is, you have to actually click into LinkedIn to find that out. But you can, but you can see, like right now I’ve got seven notifications. If I published a piece of content, I’d be like, “Whoa, I gotta go in and see what’s going on.”  So you can actually monitor, kind of, what’s going on on LinkedIn without even having the window open. And that’s why I love the LinkedIn extension.

Brynne Tillman 26:43

That’s a great— and you know, when we’re trying to make our day more productive, that’s awesome. I just got a couple of questions here. Angela said, “Original content in relation to sharing someone else’s.” So, when you share someone else’s, it’s curated content. Original content, is if you’ve written it, if it’s a poll, if it’s a video that you’ve uploaded, and literally if you’re the author of it, it’s original, if someone else’s, it’s curated. 

Bob Woods 27:09

So, I think we’re gonna go ahead and wrap it up, I think. So, thanks again for joining us on Making Sales Social Live. If you’re with us live on LinkedIn, YouTube, or Twitter right now, we do this every week, so keep an eye out for those live sessions. As I mentioned, if you’re listening to us on our podcasts recorded and you haven’t subscribed already, subscribe or follow, we’d appreciate it and leave a review as well. We’d love that even more.

If you’d like more information on our podcast, it’s at SocialSalesLink.com/podcast. We do two types of shows weekly. We do this one and our Making Sales Social interview series where we obviously interview a bunch of people from marketing, business, and many more areas. So we’re going to sign off and say when you’re out and about to make sure that your sales are —

Brynne Tillman 27:57

Social. We’re making your sales social.

Bob Woods 28:00

Making your, make your sales social or something like that. (Brynne: Yeah! That’s it.)

Bob Woods 28:04

Yeah, that’s it. Alright. Thank —

Brynne Tillman 28:05

Alright, cool, have a great day! (Bob: Bye bye.)

Bob Woods 28:07

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