Episode 150: Brynne and Gunnar’s 2023 LinkedIn Resolutions

Brynne Tillman  00:00

Hello LinkedIn family, I am so excited. This is our last LinkedIn live for the year! And I have one of my favorite humans, Gunnar Hood, joining us to talk about our LinkedIn New Year’s resolutions, what we’re going to do differently for 2023. Hello, my friend!

Gunnar Hood  00:26

Hello Brynne, it is a pleasure to be here and talk about 2023.

Intro  00:33

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!

Brynne Tillman  00:49

Ah, I’m just so excited. So let’s start with the obvious, which is something you should do across all of your sales and marketing activities but we’re going to talk about your LinkedIn activities. Let’s talk about what worked in 2022 and what didn’t work in 2022. And how we’re going to make some improvements for 2023. I’m gonna throw it to you to start the conversation.

Gunnar Hood  01:17

I think it’s a great exercise that you said that people can do for everything, not just LinkedIn, because review what was successful, you know, you can learn a lot from your successes and the things that weren’t. And with LinkedIn, it’s easy to go back and just look at your posts directly. And look for what really engaged your audience and what didn’t, and try and understand why and what can you do that is just a little bit different. 

An example might be, we know, when I look at, you know, like my posts for the year, when I had a selfie included in the post, or I told the story, I got tremendously greater engagement, I’ll admit that sometimes that’s very uncomfortable for me to do. So one of my New Year’s resolutions is try and get a little bit more comfortable doing those kinds of posts and I encourage others to do the same. 

Brynne Tillman  02:06

I love that. Yeah, you know, in today’s world it is really about connecting with human beings connecting people. And so those selfie videos really draw people in. Let’s talk also about topic, you wanted to things when we were working with one of our financial services clients, and I think this might have been last year, but we’re throwing in the story anyway, when we worked with them, because I think it’s still relevant is, you know, they were getting great engagement but the engagement they were getting was was from their colleagues, and other financial professionals, because the topic they were sharing was about stuff they cared about, not what their prospects cared about. So take a look at the topic and who was engaging on that topic, because some of your best posts that perform may not have been the most productive from a business development perspective.

Gunnar Hood  03:04

You are always so good about reminding people to make sure that the content is focused on the audience, not what you want to say but what they want to hear.

Brynne Tillman  03:13

Yeah, so thank you and it is so important. And you talk a lot about content type. There’s lots of different ways we can share content. Talk a little bit about what you see works and will work better in 2023. 

Gunnar Hood  03:29

Yeah, I mean, so you and I both really like polls as a way to engage an audience. And you know, I’ve seen people use simple polls around this time in your life, “Hey isn’t die hard a Christmas movie or not?” It gets a lot of engagement but it isn’t really business oriented. So it can be fun. But I like to be more strategic around polls and ask questions where it drives the conversation forward, because I can respond to anybody who answers the poll, thank them for that and continue the conversation in a very natural way, “Hey you answered this. I’m curious, tell me more about that” because it may lead to ways for us to help each other in some way going forward. 

So that’s one and another that we have seen really take off in just the last several months are the carousel or document posts that are formatted in a certain way. Sam Brown has, you know, kind of uncovered the secret to this and has, you know, tremendous engagement and viewership and even posted guides on how to do this and it’s amazing to see how people are using them. I think some are taking it overboard. I saw one that was 100 and some odd pages the other day and I thought that was a little much but I think that’s for his community. 

Brynne Tillman  04:43

I think Richard van der Blom said, was it five or seven slides was optimal, seven slides was optimal. Oh you know why I had five in my head because I have a cover and an end and five. I look at the sliders almost like an ebook. In fact, when I use them I am uploading a PDF, but they’re great. Now, I’m gonna go back. So Ron Fleming is asking here, “So how do you figure out what your ideal prospect wants to talk about?” So I love this question and I’m going to answer this before we go back to finish our other stuff and then you could give your insights.

Social listening is the best way to find out, take a look at what they are already engaging in? What have they shared? What hashtags have they used? Because those are around the content that they want and literally ask, forget even social, how about like in real person listening. Ask your clients, do you read stuff from Forbes? What topics do you like? What would interest you? And I’m gonna go and the reason I threw this in, right, in this place is, put out a poll. To bring it back to Gunnars. First, you know, real piece of content, or content type poll, if you want to know, ask.

Gunnar Hood  06:05

Two things that I’ll share for social listening too is use hashtags, search hashtags for topics that are in your kind of realm, and see how people are engaging on that and look at LinkedIn news as well, because they’re hitting on things and they highlight people who are talking about these topics that you know, could be in your sphere as well. And those are two ways to get some ideas on additional topics. 

Brynne Tillman  06:31

That’s awesome. Love, love, love it. Okay. What are some other content types? Real quick? We’ll just list them out.

Gunnar Hood  06:37

Well, how about you share a couple?

Brynne Tillman  06:39

Okay, so native video, right? We can upload a video of up to 10 minutes. I don’t think that’s too long but maybe 90 seconds to three minutes. You can do some native video, there is other content like kudos. Now you might think well, what is that? So kudos is this public acknowledgement that someone did something great in your world, it’s actually content, because it’s shared and then it’s nice that you are acknowledging someone. So it doesn’t even have to be on specific topics but my kudos sometimes have better engagement than other forms of content.

Canva images with a quote, what I recommend, and this is going a little deep is interview your prospects, get a quote from them, and then highlight it, you mentioned them, you get some value, you’ve got content, you don’t have to come up with it. And if your client or prospect is thinking this way, others like them probably aren’t. So there’s so many ways with –Oh, also, if, launch of projects is content. Now, I want to be careful with this but for banks, realtors and people that literally put a physical sign in the grass, you have a physical sign in launching a new project on LinkedIn. 

Now, that’s on the edge of salesy, but I think if you word it right, like we’re excited to be working with these folks, and you don’t over publish these, they can be good and they get you know, you’re mentioning the client you’re working with, and it can get a lot of play, make sure you have permission to do it, right. So they have to say “Yes, you can put the sign in our grass.”

Gunnar Hood  08:29

Yes, and for kudos is also, if you do a poll, then you can repurpose the results of that poll, highlight some of the comments that came through the results and tag those people in there and showcase them for being engaged.

Brynne Tillman  08:45

Gunnar the magic that you bring to every conversation is immeasurable. That’s brilliant. Let’s head over to some things that need to be updated for 2023 in the profile. What are some of the things that you’re hearing? I mean, you’re in our, you know, you participate with our membership group coaching every Tuesday and Thursday and we’re hearing kind of where the gaps still are with some folks. So we may have it completed but what are some things that people should look out for 2023 and updating their profile?

Gunnar Hood  09:23

You know, I think you encourage people to always think of your profile. It’s just a continuous work in progress, not a once-and-done thing and so your headline is certainly an element that we hear a lot of conversation in the coaching group is, you know, “Hey, I was thinking about making this change to my headline…” this and that.” So it’s an underutilized resource I think for most people on LinkedIn, and changing it to anything other than just your title, and you know, making it customer centric is going to be a key element that people should make the resolution to do first and foremost. because that shows up as part of three things in search, your face, you know, your picture, your headline, your location, that’s like a miniature billboard, a free billboard, that every time you post something, whether it’s a comment or elsewhere that shows up, so make it valuable.

Brynne Tillman  10:17

I love that. And then at the same time, yeah, so your banner is showing up as well, that just you mentioned, you know, it’s like this billboard, that’s the graphic side, you can switch it out, like we don’t have static banners, if you have an event coming up. If you know you want to, you have a new slogan, whatever, you can switch this up as your billboard so I love that!

I’m going to throw out a profile video, which used to be called a cover story. So I slipped into calling a cover story but a profile video in 2022 was completely underutilized. This is such an amazing free feature. So do you want to share a little bit about your thoughts around what should go into that.

Gunnar Hood  11:04

So you know, the thing you don’t want to do is say “Hi, my name is such and such…” they already know that they’re on your profile. The opportunity is to build the know, like, and trust factor by sharing something of value with people. If you look at mine, I offer a LinkedIn tip and then I just tell people, “Hey, if you want more LinkedIn tips, just follow me.”

Brynne Tillman  11:24

Brilliant. You’re earning the right and that’s great. Here’s the thing with these profile videos, people connect with you as a human being and I can’t say it enough and that’s why selfies work in content but I can’t say it enough that your profile video will connect people to you and they feel like they know you, Brian Fanzo has and this is over 10 years ago, he said this and it changed everything for me. His little quote was, “Social media does not take the place of a handshake but it turns a handshake into a hug.” So when you meet them, you already have that connection. So it’s one of my favorites. So that profile video helps them feel like they know you. 

Creator mode is another one. Now this rolled out in 2021, I believe, but it rolled out to everyone this year. So everyone in 2022 has access to it. Yet so few people are leveraging it. It’s so important. So let’s talk about the well if you want to describe creator mode and some of the pros and cons.

Gunnar Hood  12:40

So creator mode was designed by LinkedIn for people who really want to publish content. And so the main difference between it is it switches one element directly on your profile from seeing a connect button for people to connect with you to a Follow button, they can still connect with you, they just have to dig for it. But when it does that, every piece of content that you publish now carries a Follow button on it for people that are second degree or beyond know, second degrees and that helps you build a following. And this is LinkedIn’s way of trying to encourage people to be content creators, because according to Richard van der Blom still less than 1% of LinkedIn members publish content on a weekly basis. So it’s a huge opportunity for anybody that wants to take advantage of it. And it makes it much easier. So that’s kind of the general sense of creator mode.

Brynne Tillman  13:34

Yeah! And you also get additional features when you turn on. So one of them is, well, we’ll go quickly through you can add hashtags to the top of the fold. So which I believe if they’re not yet will be searchable. I mean, LinkedIn is funny, we’re not 100% sure everything that’s searchable from the profile at this point because it keeps changing but I think those hashtags, it’s what you talk about. There’s also the call to action link that you can get, mine goes to free content, free resources in our library. There’s lots of things that can lead to that. There’s access to audio rooms to LinkedIn live. What am I missing?

Gunnar Hood 14:23

The newsletter.

Brynne Tillman  14:24

And the newsletter! Ohh, we’ll talk about that at the end. That’s why I’m missing, I have a block. Okay. That’s great. We’ll come back to that, for sure. Awesome. Okay, anything else before we move to the next one? Oh, wait, we have a quick little… Jason Fare asked, “Can you see how many views your profile gets?” Absolutely. When you are on your homepage on LinkedIn on the left hand side, you’re going to see a panel, it will have your back under your head, your name, your headline, you move down and there’s going to be who’s viewed your profile and impressions of your last post. I think it’s the latest post.

Gunnar Hood  15:10

Since we were talking about profile videos. I’m wondering if that’s what he also met.Is how many times people watch your profile video. 

Brynne Tillman  15:17

Oh, that says, Oh, okay. Yep, there you go there. You can’t? Oh, no, you can’t. Yeah, there is no tracking on this yet. Um, I heard that something is coming but it was in a, “what’s coming in 2023.”

Gunnar Hood  15:37

So one idea is in your profile video, at the very end, have a call to action, say, “Drop me a message and tell me you saw this.”

Brynne Tillman  15:46

Yeah, I love that! Let’s talk about our existing connections. This is something I talk about ad nauseam, which is one of the biggest mistakes we make as social sellers, is we connect and forget. So we’ve got hundreds, if not 1000s of connections, yet we’re out there building new connections every day, and not taking enough, we’re not paying enough attention to our existing connections. So we can export our connections or we can search our connections and start a conversation. I like to start a conversation around one of three things. 

Number one, “I’d love you to vote on a poll” like I’d love your – and you should never say “I’d love” right but it might be “As an expert in this area, you know, it would be fantastic If you could share your one click vote on a poll that we just put out. Once it closes, I’m happy to share the insights we glean from your peers.” And that also then opens the door for us to continue the conversation. But we have to go through and see how many people in this list. Do you know, are the right people that we want? You know, who do we want to invite to vote on that poll? Are they the right people? 

Number two, send them a video message. Whether you use something like dubb or you use the native video? What do you use? What do you use for video?

Gunnar Hood  17:20

 I use Loom. 

Brynne Tillman  15:46

Loom you use Loom, Dubb is the next level of Loom but there’s a native video feature inside of your mobile app that you just go to send a message. You do a selfie, and you send a personal video message to reignite those people. Just start, have a conversation and you know, we’re right at the New Year, wish them a happy New Year. Ask them what their professional New Year’s resolution is right? Like start a conversation that way. So we have poll, we have send them a video. Another one could be, send them a gift of content. Now this has to be a really great gift. This is a good time of year, if you have, you know, “Top 10 Industry Trends For Their Industry in 2023.” What are some of the things you would say to start that conversation?

Gunnar Hood  18:17

You know, let me go back to number two, because reigniting conversations also has an additional benefit and this came out of Richard van der Blom’s algorithm report. And that is, if you haven’t been showing up in somebody’s content feed for a while, if you send a direct message to them, you’ve now just kind of triggered the algorithm to start seeing more of their content in your feed and your content in their feed. So it’s got multiple purposes to it.

Brynne Tillman  18:46

Yeah, I love that. So I don’t know if you want to add to that. Or if I go to Ron’s question here? 

Gunnar Hood  18:51

Why don’t we talk after we answer Ron’s question?

Brynne Tillman  18:55

Okay. Hello, Ron Fleming again, thank you for this question. “If I have a lot of connections that I don’t actually know, which is most of us, by the way, but I don’t have a high connection count yet? Is it better to purge some people that I don’t know, and don’t have anything obviously in common with or don’t fit the kind of people I want to talk to.” 

So I am going to say, potentially, but don’t just disconnect, I recommend you send a quick little video and in this case, it doesn’t have to be completely personalized. So you could do one video on your phone and use it over and over again, which is, you know, something like, “Hey, looking forward to 2023. I’ve been going through my connections and I recognize that we have not connected beyond LinkedIn. I invite you to take a look at my profile and let me know if you think that I’m a valuable connection to you.” 

And then if they don’t respond in a few days, go back and you can delete them because if they’re not going to respond to that, maybe wait a week, but if they’re not going to respond to that they’re not going to respond to anything. There is value in your 2nd-degree. So every time you disconnect from someone, you’re losing some potential second degrees, but the value of those second degrees is leveraging your 1st-degree to get to them. So if they’re non responsive, it’s probably not going to be very useful anyway. Do you have a thought around that?

 Gunnar Hood  20:23

Yeah, well, I think one other thing I’d encourage Ron to think about is, maybe you can’t do business with this person but part of the value of having a network is being able to connect others in your network with somebody. So it could be that there’s somebody you know, that you do business with, that could benefit by being introduced to one of these other individuals, even if you can’t work with them and that creates value for both parties and that can pay dividends going forward.

Brynne Tillman  20:51

Brilliant, as always awesome. All right, content and or prospecting plan for 2023. You want to start with that?

Gunnar Hood  21:02

You know, some people struggle with planning, I’ll admit, sometimes I do the same thing but there are some great tools that you can use to just map it out and the thing to think about is, you know, what we talked about earlier, use polls, everything else to understand, what is it my audience needs? How can I best help them do things? and you know, keep it simple, come up with a one month plan or two month plan and the key is going to be consistency in what you do. 

Can you come up with a pattern, you know, some people say “I want to post every day.” I think that’s a mistake, you know, unless you have the capacity but if you can say, “My goal is I’m going to post once a week, and I’ve got a plan. This is what I’m going to talk about, this is what I’m going to share with people.”   then you can also align your prospecting efforts around that because the cool thing is when you first connect with somebody for the next two to three weeks, your content is over biased in their newsfeed. So if you are publishing content, that’s going to be of interest to them, there’s a much greater likelihood they’re going to see that because you’ve planned all this out.

Brynne Tillman  22:07

That’s awesome. So I’m just going to quickly share what our plan is. And you know, I happen to be very fortunate that I have a great team that executes on a lot of it but there are really, if you don’t have a team, there are really great resources at Upwork and fiverr.com. So I’m just going to quickly share the Social Sales Link. It’s very, very simple. We do one live a week ”Hello, you’re here, or you’re listening on podcast.” And then they download that recording, they break it up into little kind of 30 to 60 second videos that get used everywhere, not just in LinkedIn, on Tik Tok, on Instagram reels. So that we were using that, they pull two quotes typically, if you guys are listening, Bob is my co host here and he is in Europe on a cruise so good for him and thrilled to have Gunnar as the guest host but you know, we each have quotes that go out that from that, that go into Canva from the live. 

So if you have a good plan, and you really only have to do one great piece a week, if you have folks that can chop that up for you and it doesn’t have to be that expensive to do that there are also VAs all over the place that would be happy to do some of that work. So part of getting that content plan is definitely picking topics, but then it’s making it seamless from starting with, you know, capturing your genius. Not that this is genius, but you know what I mean? Capture your genius and use that video for everything in life, in my opinion on that.

Prospecting plan. There’s lots of ways to use LinkedIn for prospecting, our favorite or I shouldn’t. When Bob is here, I’d say “our” all the time but Gunnar may have other ideas for sure. But my favorite way to prospect on LinkedIn is through your warm market. So identifying who your clients know that you want to meet and have conversations with who your networking partners know that you want to meet and have conversations with. Review the names with people and either get introductions or permission to name drop, but you need to plan around this because it’s incredibly… it needs to be focused. It’s easy to do, but time goes so fast and we’ll be in March or April before you’re like “Oh my god, I didn’t didn’t do this.” 

But if you have a plan I’m gonna reach out to one client a week with a list of people that she’s connected to ask her her thoughts around them and get introductions or permission to name drop and if you do that once a week. Taking into consideration you’ve got between 48 and 50 people that are making introductions or that you’re leveraging to gain access to new people, every single year. That’s once a week. What if you did it twice a week, right? Maybe you do a client once a week and a networking partner once a week. So really important and I’m going to go back quickly to taking inventory, because that’s where we can start to identify the past clients that we forgot to do this with, and all those other things.  

Gunnar Hood  25:33

Start the new year with resolutions around diet or exercise or things like that and you know, you can’t do it just one time and expect to resolve and the same thing happens with LinkedIn. So it is important to have a plan that you can feel confident that you can manage, because it’s that repetition over a period of time that’s going to generate those results, just like everything else.

Brynne Tillman  25:56

That’s awesome. All right. So I’m gonna end today with, what is your personal New Year’s resolution with LinkedIn?

Gunnar Hood  26:03

So mine is, I just purchased restream and the goal is to start doing more LinkedIn lives on my channel.

Brynne Tillman  26:11

Awesome. Mine is to finally start my newsletter. I’m a little embarrassed that I haven’t done that. We have a newsletter through email, but I have not started my newsletter inside of LinkedIn and I need to do that. So that is my New Year’s resolution. 

So thank you guys for showing up. We had lots of people on LinkedIn Live, we’ve got lots of people now listening in the replay but the bottom line is choose wisely. What are you going to do differently? What are you going to commit to doing in 2023 with LinkedIn that can move the dial on your business and make 2023 the most successful year of our careers?

Gunnar, as always it is such a pleasure. One of the things that I love, sometimes this is a little selfish, but I love when you’re here, is I learn from you and get new ideas every single time and there’s very few people in this world that I learn LinkedIn stuff from on a consistent basis. I mean, there’s definitely Richard van der Blom and Andy Foote and some people out there but every single time I talk to you, I get a brand new idea. 

Again, thank you Gunnar. Have an amazing holiday season and I can’t wait to see what we’re going to do together in 2023. Happy New Year everyone!

Bob Woods  27:39

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