Episode 263: 5 Ways to Use Video on LinkedIn

Bob Woods  0:30  

Welcome sales and marketing pros to Making Sales Social Live. Coming to you from the Social Sales Link Virtual Studios, I’m Bob woods of Social Sales Link, and joining me is the co-host of Making Sales Social Live. She’s a fellow LinkedIn and social selling and AI strategist, consultant trainer and coach, Brynne Tillman. Sup, Brynne?

Brynne Tillman  0:54  

Strategist trainer and coach – I sound so good.

Bob Woods  0:58  

I’m just kind of keep throwing adjectives in there until I run out of breath. Anna Bubie? Now we’re going to.

Brynne Tillman  01:03  

Anna Bubie.

Bob Woods  01:59

Yeah, Anna Bubie, exactly. Look it up. If you don’t know, I spell it.

Brynne Tillman  1:09  

Or I’ll wear my sweatshirt next time that your lovely wife made me that says. 

Bob Woods  1:14  

But is this true to Bobby’s B-U-B-.

Brynne Tillman  1:09  

Well, it’s I-E. But that’s okay.

Bob Woods  1:14   

Yeah, That’s right. Okay, well, sorry, someone may be listening and have Google up in there. So let’s get right into it. So they say, and of course, we never know who they are. But they say that half the battle is just showing up. When it comes to LinkedIn and social selling, showing up is more than just logging into LinkedIn. The ultimate way to show up on LinkedIn is with video. 

Now, I can’t believe that it’s 2024. And so many people out there still aren’t using video in any shape or form on LinkedIn. It’s nuts, especially because LinkedIn makes it pretty easy for you to do. So that’s why we’re here to talk about video on Linked In. So Brynne, what do you think about video just over on LinkedIn?

Brynne Tillman  2:12  

Video is amazing, right? There’s so many ways we’re gonna talk about. I get to pick five of them that you can use video, but here’s the thing. Video is the medium that gets people to know you. They can read your content, even listen to it, so like listening is going to be listening to podcasts, you definitely get to know people. But when I was at a conference, just just a couple months ago, I had someone come up and give me a huge hug, all excited to see me. 

And I had no idea who they were. So fortunately, I’m a hugger. And I have my open boundaries. So people can come and hug and I’m happy. But I didn’t know who they were, or why they were hugging me. But they were hugging me because they watched this. They saw the videos and they felt as if they knew me because of the video. And that’s the piece that connected. They’re watching me it’s it they know it’s it’s just this connection, right? 

I have connections to other people. Because I watch their videos and I do audio from an audio perspective. I absolutely connect with people. But video, You can’t hide behind photoshop. Yeah, ultimately, right this video is how you get others to know you. Oh, that’s a saying, right? I don’t remember who said this. We have to Google it. I used to say who said it and I can’t remember. It’s not about who you know, it’s about who knows you do that at scale?

Bob Woods  4:06  

Exactly. I mean, it’s like back when I was in television news. I wasn’t on camera a lot. I was on camera. Some but not a lot. But whenever I would go out with, you know, with anchors and the reporters and things like that, yeah, sometimes people would recognize me, but they recognize those other people a lot. And it was amazing to see, you know, the public quote-unquote, which is, you know, fine and everything else. 

But even though it’s a local market, even in your local market, people feel like that they know the person because they because, you know, back then, before all this internet stuff, everything the only thing that people had was television in terms of the video experience, but people felt like that they knew these people now. We all have that capability. And I think it’s really cool because we can, you know, even though we all have our own communities or whatever. 

And, you know, community obviously includes any of your potential prospects, networking partners, and other people who are in your community who do the same type of thing. I mean, just being able to see and listen to someone and look into their eyes because they’re hopefully looking at the camera. Like, if you’re on the live right now, like I am right now, you know, you form that connection with them. 

And that’s so much more valuable than text or an audio or a – what does it used to be called that used to be called? voicemail! Yes, voicemail and even, you know, cold calling, nobody knows anyone on the first cold call, or even successive ones more than likely. Video just takes your message and yourself to a whole different level.

Brynne Tillman  6:03  

So I did a quick Google while we’re alive, and apparently the most I did not know this. But Suzanne Roanne R-O-A-N-N-E is the originator of the quote. It’s not. It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you. So I would say yeah, yeah. But I don’t know. I mean, I’m actually connected to her on LinkedIn, which is interesting. I might reach out. She’d be great to have on the podcast. 

Bob Woods  6:36  

Yes she would. 

Brynne Tillman  6:38 

But I find that’s interesting, because I think I probably had been giving the credits to someone else. Yeah, a lot of people use it. But we like to give credit where credit is due. So let’s talk about the first place.

Bob Woods  6:55  

I open things that we promised and we always deliver on our promises. So the five different ways to use video on LinkedIn. Number one is probably the most obvious, but it’s called native video. So this is when you create a video, and you upload it directly to LinkedIn and then share it as a post. And you’re promised and you know, I had said up at the very top that you know, not a lot of people are doing this, more people are actually starting to catch on. 

So I’m guessing that you’re probably starting to see people use native video. That’s what it’s called native video more and more in their posting. Goodness knows that we’re doing that here at social sales link. Other companies are doing it as well, individual entrepreneurs, especially individual entrepreneurs seem to really be taking hold of this and using it. But not just, you know, not just sit in front of cameras. 

“Hey, how are you doing?” It’s really about doing everything that you would normally do in content, and that’s deliver value and promote your thought leadership and attract people to you. But because you’re using video, you kind of have to you should be working in edutainment a little bit. So edutainment is education and entertainment. And entertainment should probably be a little entertaining somehow, not like over the top or anything like that. 

But you know, at least be interesting. I think it is probably the easiest way to say it. And you’re already trying to do that in your text. In your if you share ebooks is carousels like that type of thing. You’re always trying to create interest, you can actually create interest, probably more with video, then you can definitely with like text and even with like Ebooks and things like that.

Brynne Tillman  8:52  

So one thing, so a couple things I’d recommend, one of the things I’d recommend to do is don’t over practice. Yeah, make it natural. Now, you can practice a little something, it gives you confidence, but don’t like memorize what you’re going to say. Because it’s the natural video that people are going to now really connect to. The next thing which I love about LinkedIn is doing is you can choose to automatically have captions uploaded. 

So there you don’t have to do any video editing to get your captions there. And I don’t know if it’s in three second or five second intervals. You can go in and edit your captions. So they always spell my name wrong. There’s a couple things that you know, but I can go in and edit and when and I’ll tell you this is funny, you’ll get a kick out as Bob sidenote, we have a new phrase that we’re talking about the new era of sales, and because I’m a New Yorker North Jersey, I say ever I add that are at the end. 

So there are three or four times or now I’ve had to go back, but it’s great, you can actually edit it, it’s easy to do. So, native video, I’m gonna some advice, no more than three minutes. Right? This is really, if you think about this is your real, your story. LinkedIn doesn’t have the stories anymore, but this is it. Keep it simple, keep it short, you can do it on Zoom, just talk about a topic, make it really clear in the beginning what they’re gonna get in the three minutes, then give it to them and then recap what they got. 

Like, and it’s a quick thing. Here’s the other thing. When you have text that’s going with that, you want to create engagement. So you want to have a call to action, talk about what the video is. You can mention people if you mentioned people shout out in this video to add Bob Woods, right, whatever that is. And then you want to ask a question, share in comments, your perspective on this topic, or should you know, and so I just did this. And, you know, I’m finding it interesting I had, I can’t even now remember what it was. 

I think it was like sharing your favorite book on this topic. People are not only just sharing, but they’re bringing in authors of books. Right. And so we’ve got this momentum going. So talk, just talking about a quick topic and then asking others to add to it and comments is a great way to use native video. Lastly, if you don’t want to do it on Zoom, you can quickly do one on your phone and upload it on mobile, very simply. So take advantage of number one native video.

Bob Woods  12:06  

Absolutely, absolutely. And just keep in mind, because I’m sure that most vast majority of people who are listening and viewing us right now haven’t done it. Your first video is probably not going to be great. Give yourself grace, give yourself permission to do better than it’s just like Brennan said before, though, don’t over practice, just just do it. And then keep doing it. I promise you, you will get better as you go along. And I’m guessing that you’re probably going to get better a lot sooner than you think you’re going to be. Because most people.

Brynne Tillman  12:43  

I do love that. And to that I would add, start with something you know very well, something like there are things that you talk about all the time to your clients, you’ll find yourself repeating the answer to the same question all the time to your clients. That’s a great way to get started because you already have confidence in having done that and talked about it. 

And, and but you’re right, like you get better over time. And then sometimes you get worse over time, too. Like sometimes I look and go who I really kind of that’s not one of my favorites. And it’s okay, and I would say out of maybe 8 or 10 with this it is different. This is edited shorts for native videos that have been edited. I probably only use three or four. So we’re gonna I don’t like my sound there. So I’m still hard on myself. 

Bob Woods  13:38  

So everyone, everyone’s gonna be hard on themselves. I mean, that’s just how it goes.

Brynne Tillman  13:43  

Oh, I love it. No runs. No hits. No eras.

Bob Woods  13:47  

No eras. Love it. That’s great. That’s great. Ah, exactly, exactly. So let’s get an accent

Brynne Tillman  13:56  

So I think New York adds the are in Boston and takes it away. 

Bob Woods  14:00  

Yeah, that’s Yeah, that’s probably a good way to look at it as well as England Great Britain so they had the are on words as well. So let’s get to number two, which is links to external videos. And here we’re probably talking about YouTube videos. So if you want to do that you can link to like any external video that you would like to definitely I would definitely suggest making sure that whatever you link to externally is of value and is thought leadership driven and hopefully it comes from you or your company. 

But you know, if you want to include something in a post that’s a video but you want to draw comments out from someone or from your audience, feel free to do that as well. So this is a way to actually use video where you’re not necessarily in the video, but people do like video people love to consume video so feed into that.

Brynne Tillman  15:00  

Yeah, I love that. And so if you’re taking something from YouTube, let’s say you want to share one of our YouTube videos with your network, and you just grabbed the link, sometimes they have a share URL link, right and you grab it, here’s the thing that’s really important. You need to add, number one, who it’s for, why you’re sharing it, maybe even the insights you gleaned, and then ask them their insights. The next thing and you could do this also with native video, or with a link to video, is you can now share it. 

So things have changed over time. But right now, if you click the little paper airplane at the bottom of your share, you can get up to 10 people at a time buying a copy. But if you have threads, so we have like for our members, we are Premium Members, we have like an SSL thread where there’s almost 50 people in that group, and we help promote each other and help each other. I can click that, and it’s now considered one message not. So I can click up to 10 threads and hit 500 People max at a time. So they’re playing with it. 

But you can get this content in front of folks. The other thing is when you share. So let’s say you decide to share one of ours, you’re going to mention something like great insights at Bob woods. And Brynne Tillman at social sales link. Right. And so now I engage in Bob engages in our company page engages. And so now that content, which may have initially been hurt by the algorithm, because LinkedIn does not like External links, well now actually almost balanced out by the engagement you’re getting by the author and the company of the content.

Bob Woods  16:59  

Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. So let’s go on to number three, which is live streaming, which is LinkedIn Live, which is if you’re watching us right now live, as opposed to listening to us on the podcast. That’s what we’re doing. We are doing LinkedIn live right now.

Brynne Tillman  17:21  

So this has been so much fun, we’ve been doing this, generally making sales social, we’re probably at 150 live streams at this point, or close to that. And then close to maybe 140. So a few things that we love. We love going live, we love having like right now we’ve got a bunch of people on LinkedIn listening to us, we had folks on YouTube, and we get to engage, right? 

So you guys get to put in comments, we get to talk with you. It’s engaging. It’s two ways. We really really love it. But we download this and it becomes our podcast. So if you’re listening you , that’s where we got it. Right you we were on live. So we get the best of both worlds, but we stream to this particular one goes to Social Sales Link, YouTube channel, Facebook channel, my LinkedIn, Bob’s X.

Bob Woods  18:24  

Yeah, Twitter, your ex Twitter and I and social sales link. The corporate accounts X Twitter as well. Fabulous, right. So that’s six channels, that’s six channels that we go out to every week.

Brynne Tillman  18:38  

Yeah, and it’s a one, you know, it’s a wonderful way to you guys get to know us. And I would say we have a bunch of people that are live listening or even if you’re watching in replay, if you’re like, I feel like I know Bob and Brynne put Hello friends in our comments, right? Because, you know, we’ve been doing this for so long. Lots of people know us and we love that.

 And so that live, I believe is huge now, we know we’re talking video, but I can’t. I have to throw in there’s also audio rooms that you need to leverage more. We tend to during COVID and shut down. We did a ton of audio rooms, mostly through the clubhouse. LinkedIn audio rooms are pretty good. I have been a guest lately. 

I like being live but audio rooms allow you to bring people on stage easier. We could do that here if we changed it up a little bit. I like the interaction. But at the end of the day, I like to watch videos. I like to be, I like to do things on video. And I really think they’re both good. But if you were to say obviously we do LinkedIn live so, yeah.

Bob Woods 19:56  

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, number three.

Bob Woods  20:01  

So number, actually, we’re on. We’re on number four now. So we are Wow. This is one of my favorites. Besides name, what was one? Name one was needed video. Number two was links to external videos. And number three was live streaming.

Brynne Tillman  20:22  

Yes, now we’re on the floor.

Bob Woods  20:27  

Number four is videos in your featured section of your profile. So let’s say you’ve got a great native video that you published, had a lot of cons or, of course, had a lot of content, had a lot of comments, had a lot of likes, and things like that. And it was really great from a content standpoint, too. So it hit on the edutainment, you delivered some really good deep value there, showed your thought leadership, you can take that post that had the feature that had the video in it, and put that in your featured section. 

I think that that is tremendous. Because, as you know, if you just go to someone’s feed from their profile, it’s you know, first in first out, so are first didn’t know, yeah, first in first out. So that thing is going to get buried eventually. With this, you keep it in fray and quickly. With this, you keep it in front of people at all times, if you position it right, because you can change the order of things as well. If you want to have like that really, really good kick ass video. 

You can always have it in that first position if you want and then switch out some of the other ones. Because again, you can order within the featured section. The one thing that you have to remember though, is you can’t upload videos directly to the featured section, it needs to be in a post first and then you can bring it into the featured section. I don’t know why. I don’t know why LinkedIn does it like that, but that’s the way it is. So that’s how we have to deal with them. 

Brynne Tillman  22:11  

Um, yeah, so I absolutely love all of that. One of the things that I haven’t done that’s on my bucket list. And now I’m wondering, the best way to do this, and it was probably a link from somewhere else. But we lost. Like, why how LinkedIn makes their choices, and their platform astonishes me. 

But we lost what I thought was such an amazing feature, which was the cover of video, right? The when your headshot turned into a video, I loved that. So very disappointed that that was retired. However, you can do a welcome to my profile video. Yeah, in your featured section. So we haven’t done that yet. But now it’s on my bucket list to do.

Bob Woods  23:00  

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So yeah, So I’ve been thinking about that, too. I’ve been thinking about a way to do that, you’re basically just going to need to do it as opposed to and then you know it, it’ll look weird for a day or two, but it’ll go away after that. So don’t.

Brynne Tillman  23:18  

Yeah. I am wondering, though, if you can embed it, which is probably what I would do embedded in your website, if you have the ability to do that.

Bob Woods  23:26  

That’s a possibility, too.

Speaker 3  23:30  

It clicks, we’ll work on it and get back to you.

Bob Woods  23:34  

Yeah, I would prefer to keep everything within Linked in. So that you’re not giving someone the opportunity to click away and go off your profile and you know, go into the rabbit holes that all of us go into all the time on the internet. So we are going to think about that though. And if we come up with an update on that, we will definitely let you know. So the fifth and last one and an especially powerful one.

I think because now we’re gonna go from that more kind of broadcasting model, which I know I always come back to but it’s my background. Shoot me. This one is personal videos from the phone app. So this is you actually recording a personal video to someone and sending it to them as a message so you’re not even worried about the feet at this point. This is you talking to someone via video and messaging them with it.

Brynne Tillman  24:37  

The results of this is crazy. So you do have to be a first degree connection. But you hop into the phone and click on send a message and then there’s a little record. Record a video there, send a video or record a video. 

Bob Woods  24:57  

Yeah I’m trying to remember what the yeah with the free.

Brynne Tillman  24:59  

Want to selfie attention when you talk to them? And you’re just like, “Hey Bob, great see you on the live today,”  I just wanted to follow up with you and send the article we talked about I’m going to send a link below, looking forward to chatting later was one of the activities we have our clients do is export your connections, and go through and categorize. 

And who do we want to re engage and we highly recommend, each of those reengagement starts with a video message. So the response rate is high, so few people are using it. And it’s hard to ignore someone that sent a personal video. Here’s what not to do. Don’t create one video that goes at it you use over and over again, because I want you to use their name. I want you to say something personal. I don’t want it to look like automation is the oldest or that.

Bob Woods  26:05

Right or AI. Or AI because that will.

Brynne Tillman  26:07 

Yeah, but I will tell you where I would use AI. Where we would recommend is going to Chat GPT that helps you write the little script you might want to say to them. 

Bob Woods  26:21  

Right. And then and that was all the way up to native video to I mean, chat. GPT is amazing for coming up with video scripts as well.

Brynne Tillman  26:27  

No, yep. But make them individual messages. If you’d like to try to connect with Bob and myself, and send us a message and we’ll say, here’s the thing, I guarantee I will make this promise Bob, it’s up to you. If you send me a video message, I will send you a video message back so you can see what it looks like on your end.

Bob Woods  26:51  

Yeah, bet I’m in. 

Brynne Tillman  26:55  

Okay, Yep. Cool. Wait.

Bob Woods  26:58  

So, no we don’t have anymore and unlike most of our most of our lives, if you choose, you actually have a little bit of homework to do. So hopefully we will see some of those videos and it’s so easy to do. Really, it’s so easy to do. I mean, any of this stuff can be just so easy to do. So, you know a few people are using native videos and everything else. 

Very, very, very, very, very, very, very few people are using the personal video so you will 100% stand out with personal videos. And you also stand out with native personal videos. Way to go. So thanks again for joining us on making sales social live. If you’re with us live on as we said before, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook or X, formerly known as Twitter. 

We do this every week. So keep an eye out for our live sessions. If you’re with us on our podcast, go ahead and hit that subscribe or follow button and do all the other things that will bring us up as well as access all of our previous shows. And we’ve got plenty of those out there on a wide variety of topics. 

If you want more info on our podcast, go to socialsaleslink.com/podcast. We do this live show every week and we also have our making sales social interview series where we talk with leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business, and many many more areas. So this week, when you’re out and about, be sure to make your sales.

Brynne Tillman  28:27  

Social. Bye guys.