Episode 289: Cross-Platform Social Selling

Intro

Bob Woods: Welcome to the Making Sales Social Podcast, featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, Stan Robinson Jr, and me Bob Woods. As we each bring you the best tips and strategies. Our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. Enjoy the show.

Bob Woods:

I’m Bob Wood. I am a strategist, consultant, and trainer, as well as a LinkedIn top voice. Joining me today are the co-hosts of Making Sales Social. My first is a fellow social selling and LinkedIn strategist, consultant, and trainer. He is also our sales navigator, guru Stan Robinson, Junior. How are you doing, Stan?

Stan Robinson, Jr: And doing fantastic. Good to see you, Bob.

Bob Woods:  And speaking of Brynne, because she is last but most certainly not least, she is the LinkedIn whisperer. And the authority on everything that I just mentioned, as well as an official LinkedIn insider when it comes to sales. Brynn Tillman, how are you doing? 

Brynne Tillman: I’m good. Thrilled to be here because you won’t brag on yourself. I’m going to brag. This is Bob Woods, who is an official top voice on LinkedIn.

Bob Woods: I said, Dad, I really did this time. I’m trying to use that more. Yeah. So I’m bragging again. I’m embracing it. Embracing it. I am embracing it very much.

So speaking of LinkedIn and stuff like that, I said the word LinkedIn probably about 85 times or so in the first minute of this live. But there are other social platforms out there that we as social sellers can use to start those all-important sales conversations. So we’re going to focus on, as you can imagine, the biggies out there, we’re going to talk about Instagram, X, slash, Twitter, or whatever you want to call it nowadays, and a newer or new.

Again, I’m not sure if you would still call TikTok a new kid on the block. But any new kid on the block soon. Yeah, I know. Exactly. yeah. That’s a new story entirely. So with that, let’s get started. So we’re going to be talking about general concepts first, and then if we can apply them specifically to these specific ones, well, we’ll definitely talk about those as well.

But the first overall thing that we’re going to talk about is content teasers. Stan, why don’t you go ahead and just let us know what those are really quickly. 

Stan Robinson, Jr: But since the language of each platform is a little bit different, you won’t use the same opening or hook on a LinkedIn post that you would use on Twitter. Now I spend time on Twitter today. I’m here as much to learn as anything else from YouTube. When it comes to Instagram and TikTok I don’t spend time there at all. Yeah, but the point is, that each platform has its own convention as far as what you’re going to do. You won’t use as many hashtags on a LinkedIn post as you would on Instagram.

Bob Woods: So yeah, to get them over to your LinkedIn though, sometimes you may want to do a content teaser so that in other words, is just teasing people over from these other platforms over to your LinkedIn platform, right Brynne?

Brynne Tillman: Yeah, So, that’s exactly right. Right. So if you create little video shorts that go to an entire blog post or maybe a slider or e-book that you have inside of LinkedIn.

So the teaser really is about bringing people from Instagram, from TikTok, wherever you are, have a link like on Instagram, you can have a link and that can link back to your LinkedIn profile, your LinkedIn content. So the teaser is a 30-second or even 15-second video for TikTok or on Twitter. It could be just an interesting tweet or concept with read full post, but the teaser is about bringing people on the other platforms to LinkedIn. Did I get that right Bob? 

Bob Woods: Yeah, you got that right. And we’re actually going to be after our next one where we’re going to be talking about a channel strategy that I have taught in the past that I’m totally forgotten about until this came up. But, you can actually put kind of the strategy behind this whole thing and channel people from other platforms to LinkedIn.

And we’re going to we’re going to actually talk about that right now because Stan touched on this a little bit before, but platform-specific hooks are very important just to stand. Stan just said, because each of these other platforms do have their own flavors. They do even have their own audiences to a certain point and to a certain respect.

And you’re trying to get to those audiences with your voice, but yet in a way that it’s going to be pleasing to them. So, you know, Instagram, it’s going to be images or it’s going to be videos, Twitter. There’s actually something that I’m going to talk about in a minute that I am seeing that’s working very well. It has to do with multithreaded posts, and I’m going to go through a little bit about how that’s working because I’m seeing it working.

It’s working pretty well. But then obviously with TikTok, you don’t have to dance, so don’t worry about that. But, you know, more fun and engaging videos are almost edutainment-type videos on TikTok. And if you’re interested, I did a previous interview with Alex Sheridan and he does a lot of those edutainment-type videos.

So if you want to find out more about those, go back to the I have no idea what episode number it is, but it’s Alex Sheridan. We had a very long discussion about that type of thing. 

Brynne Tillman: So I love that. And, you know, I think there’s such a mess when we treat every platform the same. And I’m guilty of this, right?

We created a video for LinkedIn, and that’s the video I’m putting up on TikTok. That’s the video. So two stands point, I’m kind of learning. We’re learning together because we have such a strong focus on LinkedIn as a company that we typically are not embracing all of the ways that we can leverage these other platforms to drive traffic back. So I think you picked this topic. I think it’s a brilliant one talking about your multi-thread approach. 

Bob Woods: Yeah, so I’m actually not going to be able to show it, but to describe it, I am going to pull up. and it went away. But, basically what people have been doing, they’ve been doing like ten, eight, ten, 12, whatever multithreaded posts.

So they will start off with a topic, have an eye-catching graphic, and then they’ll, they’ll do like one of the acts with the X being how, many however many threads that they’re putting into it, and then they’ll just keep essentially replying to themselves. But they will build out a larger post within Twitter slash x slash whatever you want to call it, about whatever subject that they’re teaching, but it generally is educational in value.

And I’ve been saying this for about the past four, six months, four or six months now. This is something that really brings over our ethos when it comes to education and when it comes to providing value-added content that just hasn’t been seen on X before. But now more and more people are doing it. And just from the engagement that I’m seeing on X, it really definitely seems to be working.

So what you do is and if you go through your for yourself, you will probably come across this yourself because a lot of people are now using this. So what you’ll do is you will build out ahead of time, obviously, separate things that you can like if you’re going to do like a bullet point type of thing in a LinkedIn post, you can build that out a little bit for this X strategy.

And then within each reply, you know, two of ten, you’re going to build out this point, three of ten, you build out another point, four out of ten probably. You take all that through and then at the very end you can have a see-to at the very bottom, if you’re linking this to an e-book that you’re giving away or an offer that you’re doing or whatever.

And then in another reply, you can also push people to your LinkedIn directly from that because in your LinkedIn profile, you are all there as well. 

Brynne Tillman: So can I confirm this because I’m trying to absorb it? So we have one tweet and then we are replying to our own tweet. Yes, we are replying to our own tweets for each and every single one, and that builds out a much larger thread.

And then when people go to reply, they could reply either on the main one or each of the subcategories. Yeah, exactly. So I love that. I’ve never done that and I think that’s brilliant. 

Bob Woods: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s absolutely brilliant. And I had always been looking for something about X that we could really sink our teeth into when it comes to using it and the way that we use it.

Brynne Tillman: I think this is that kind of well, let’s, let’s put it on our radar. We’ll give it a shot and report back to everyone. 

Bob Woods: And halfway through Alex Sheridan’s episode is 133 133 So episode 133 for those edutainment style videos. So just what I was mentioning before, at the very end, what we would probably add to that is putting in your LinkedIn and encouraging people to go to your LinkedIn profile.

This gets to the channel strategy that you really should be using in all of your social and all of your social channels on your profiles in each of these because they will generally let you put a link into whatever you want to. We recommend that you put your LinkedIn URL for your profile in there. This is so that when they land on your LinkedIn profile, you’re automatically seeing who they are because you see that in your who’s viewed your profile at that point, you can reach out to them and then do what we always teach in terms of, you know, hey, I noticed that you visited my, my profile was wondering, you know, what, what brought you here today? At that point, they will probably say, hey, I saw your X thread on X, Y, and Z and thought I’d check out more about you. All right, so you take track of something, you know, you really want to push that channel into your LinkedIn, whether it’s Instagram or Bubble bar or whatever.

The one caveat that I would have is to make sure that your LinkedIn profile supports whatever messaging you’re using on the other platform. So to put it way overly simplistic, you’re you sell items that are purple and you do everything that’s purple. You don’t want to talk about something that’s red in your X or your Instagram or whatever, and then push them through and it’s talking about nothing but purple.

So whatever that is to your situation, just make your profile support whatever it is that you’re doing on the other platforms. 

Brynne Tillman: Yeah, that consistency in brand messaging is really important when we’re using this for business development. And I’ll tell you, my Facebook is my personal Facebook. Same here. And it’s not consistent there. But in that case, you know, I don’t stream to my personal Facebook.

I stream to the Facebook business. So yeah, I think that’s really smart to do that. And yeah, that’s what you know, the next one if you don’t mind finding the right targeted audience, this is, the one that I added in earlier. So I wanted to just chat about this a little bit because here’s the thing is you’ve got to figure out where your audience is hanging out and if people will, you know, people will say, I’m to they’re only hanging out on LinkedIn.

It’s not true, right? Where B to B, where are you hanging out? So there are other places and you may be getting them in a different mindset. And so I think, you know, as much as, you know, I like the edutainment in LinkedIn, but the quick, fast pace on TikTok can be different than a little more methodical in your approach on LinkedIn.

Yeah, right. So you know, you really can find the right people there. You can also find the right people and companies. So if you go to a company site and you go, okay, this is a company that I’m prospecting and you go down, you’ll see their social media handles. It’s not just LinkedIn. They may even have Pinterest, right?

Like go check out their handles and follow the companies, go in. And I think this is really important. Get on the radar of the companies on all the platforms where they’re hanging out. So just know that you may, I’m projecting because my assumption was I mean, we’re too late to take time. But, you know, my assumption was, you know, our professionals are and hanging out there they are they are.

They are. And so even if they’re hanging out there personally, you know, now when I’m on YouTube, I am fed two types of content Amazon reviews and AI chatbot stuff. Yeah, so that’s what I’m being fed, right? So I am there personally and professionally and so many of our buyers are too. 

Bob Woods: Yep. I could not agree with that more. So that actually gets into our number four which actually because because you’re going to you’re going to find a target audience when you do cross-promotion with influencers because the influencers obviously go after the same audience that you are, they just happen to have more because guess what? They’re influencers. So, you know, connect with all of them. You know, hopefully, you can, you can get them to share posts, whether it’s your LinkedIn post directly or a post from, you know, if you’re on Instagram and, you know, hopefully, they can redo whatever it’s called on Instagram.

I don’t even know. It shows you how you know, I know some stuff about Instagram. There’s stuff that I don’t know, but, you know, along those lines. So all of the stuff that we’ve talked about before when it comes to connecting with Linked on LinkedIn with influencers, same thing, other platforms. Stan, anything you want to add to that?

Stan Robinson, Jr: No, just that you mentioned about looking at the social icons and profiles on company pages because they do list all of them is great. And one thing, Bob, that you mentioned earlier very quickly is directing people back to your LinkedIn profile, which of course means that you need to have one brand needs to be consistent with your message.

There are a lot of people I can almost guarantee this on Instagram and TikTok and say, I don’t why do I need a LinkedIn profile? You know, my folks are here. But the fact that you can see who’s looked at your LinkedIn profile, you could not do that on the other platforms. None of that alone is really powerful in terms of leveraging the Fuze for you to file for the reason you mentioned.

Bob Woods: 

But yeah, so, so so just to be clear on most of the other social platforms that we’re talking about list, you can’t do that. It can be done on TikTok, but there are a couple of things that you need to do ahead of time, and it’s not really great if you’re if you’re really looking to like capture that information by pushing them through to LinkedIn is definitely the best way to go when it comes to that.

Brynne Tillman: So I love that. You know, let’s talk a little bit. We have put down cross-promotion with influencers, but it’s also kind of a filling. It’s networking partners. Yeah. So cross-promotion is huge. And this is actually something that we as a team have really been focused on building out a network that we can promote and that can promote us.

I am part of a group called JVM and it’s joint venture members, something that JP about and I’ve been in it for years and it’s made up of experts that all sell to entrepreneurs and coaches and you know, where that fits into our membership, right? So we can refer other people. In fact, we have them as masters master classes on our site and they help promote us.

But this is really important. So go out and find your group of eight or ten people. Think of this almost like an online B and I Business Networking International, right where you go out and you find people that are selling to the same type of customer but are not a competitor. So for us, it’s also it’s often a website builder, right?

Someone’s building a new website. They need profiles made over. They’re looking to draw traffic to that website. We’re often the next step. A sales trainer for us, right? The sales trainer does everything from hello on we get them to hello right? So there’s there’s so find your people That’s my point here find those people. The best way to do this is to ask your current clients who else they’re working with and who are their Other trusted advisers.

Meet people that you share a client with already because you probably have a similar ethos. You probably are. You know, if the client is attracted to the two of you as vendors, you probably have a very similar approach to business. So those are people to network with, but they’re also people to help you get your message out. Cross-platform on LinkedIn, on X, on TikTok, wherever they are, you guys can help amplify one another’s message.

Bob Woods: Yeah, 100%. 100%. So that actually threads into our next point, which is integrated campaigns. So, you know, don’t, don’t treat all of these things separately. You can actually use all of them together. And we’ve talked about, you know, channeling to LinkedIn but you can also channel among these various social islands especially I mean island may not be the the best thing to call them unless I’m actually dialing in.

Yeah. You know, we hop from the Instagram island to the LinkedIn island to, you know, it’s like Hawaii, You go island hopping and stuff like, yeah, so but we’re going to build the bridges. Yes. I love yeah, yeah, like that. Like, I like that a lot. So, you know then that’s about you started but I’m really excited about the integrated campaign.

Well know if you’re excited about it, you go for it. Yeah. Yeah. I look at her like.

Brynne Tillman: I love the idea of integrated campaigns. We are really focused on two major campaigns with our clients. I mean, many campaigns, but the first one is polls, right? So you said you put out a poll on LinkedIn and you proactively invite people to engage on that poll.

You know, we make a list of your first-degree connections that you want to engage, and you start a conversation around a poll that leads to, you know, doesn’t lead with your solution. It leads to your solution, but it helps you to start more conversations around a question or a topic that your prospects are interested in. Not only in voting, but seeing how their peers are voting, knowing you kind of that’s a big one.

And that’s one thing that I love that LinkedIn does really well, is you have to vote on a poll before you can see how other people vote. And so, you know you’re going to vote or prospects are going to vote simply to see how other people voted. So when you’re asking that poll question, you’ve got to be really, really specific.

And they have it has to create enough curiosity for them to want to vote. So you can create that poll on LinkedIn, but you can promote that poll on Instagram with a link. You can promote that poll and talk on X and bring them back to LinkedIn. Now they will have to get on LinkedIn in order.

They have to log into LinkedIn in order to vote on that poll. But if they’re not on LinkedIn, they can actually see the poll and it will say, log in to vote. So where are you going to add to that? I saw that. No. no. I was just just going to scratch the tired thing about it. 

Bob Woods: Scratching itches about the cross-platform stand. Do you have anything? 

Stan Robinson, Jr: Not nothing on this. I’m taking notes. 

Brynne Tillman: He is like my microphone, which is our big launch. And we’ve had some incredible success with some of our clients. And one that we did is prospect by interview. And this is a campaign where we’re going out. We’re putting together an e-book based on insights from our client, and then they are going out and interviewing prospects to be part of the e-book.

It does all kinds of amazing things in a sales environment. It’s a slower process with a big ROI at the end, but you build a deeper relationship. That’s really fun stuff. We actually have a class coming up on that. If you go to social sales links slash events, you can find the prospect by interview class. But we, you know, we are really focused on LinkedIn only in this approach.

However, you can use all of these other tools to find and engage your ideal prospects and invite use Twitter or TikTok to promote this. Right? So maybe it’s, you know, are you as the chief marketing officer who’s looking to amplify your voice, applying to be part of this publication? And you can put that anywhere, right? So you can lead it all back to one project.

So that’s just one of the projects. But the cross, you know, integrated campaigns, you could be running contests, challenges and, you know, bring it all back, have a hub. Your hub may not be LinkedIn, maybe your hub is your website and all of these web, all you know, or a landing page or so. And so the campaign might be to download an e-book that then leads to something else, but have a hub where you’re bringing everyone to one place and you know, you’re meeting that goal of identifying, you know, engaging and identifying all the right people.

Bob Woods: Yeah, a great way to spur campaigns and to really spur excitement for campaigns is doing what we’re doing right now. And that’s live sessions. Now, we’re not doing a campaign, but a live session where you can take comments from people and everything is really good. Now we do ours on we actually go out to all of our platforms, but our our main emphasis is kind of LinkedIn is kind of LinkedIn lives right now, although, you know, we’re on LinkedIn one, we’re on Facebook too.

We have eight people watching on YouTube, right on YouTube right now. So that’s great. So, you know, you can you can conduct these live sessions and then direct to your LinkedIn for more in-depth information. Further engagement. There is a tech thing that I want to drop here really quickly. Lives on Instagram are not easy to do if you’re if you’re if you’re if you feel that your audience is primarily on Instagram, it might be worth it for you.

But it it involves some API and some things that you need to do prior to like every single session that we’ve, we’ve kind of opted out on doing just because it’s just too much of a pain. But you know, if your audience is there, it might be worth it for TikTok, you need to have a minimum number of followers before you can go live.

And there’s like two tiers. I forget what the numbers are. You can Google those really quickly, but you can’t just start a TikTok account and just expect to go live immediately through it.

Brynne Tillman: So live sessions, great cross-platform platform. We’re doing it right now. So yes, we are.

Bob Woods: Yeah, I was just going to say the number of because man, we are, we are. We’re cranking along here. So let’s talk a little bit about interactive content, which we have touched on, you know, the polls, the quizzes, Q&A sessions, this live is interactive content, but there are many, many different ways to really be interactive with your audience. Also, when it comes to interactivity, just like on LinkedIn, don’t forget just simply responding to comments and do that type of thing as well.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen, especially on TikTok, these creators, they just don’t respond. And especially on TikTok, for whatever reason, there is a greater expectation of viewers that the creators will respond and people even get called out within the comments of a video. If the creator is not responding. And I mean, you should do that no matter where you’re at.

Don’t get me wrong. But, you know, realize that a great way to have interactivity is just through comments. But you can also use all the other tools that are available within these platforms as well. 

Brynne Tillman: I love that. You know, the last one I think we’re going to what’s on the list is not nearly as important as I think kind of wrapping this up with an all-inclusive conversation about really the goal here is to get engagement drive where we’re on this.

At least if you’re following us and you’re making sales social, our goal here is to start sales conversations without being salesy. So how do we do this right? We bring value. We in this cross-platform way are to start to build a new audience that we may not have even known was out there. YouTube has been huge for us in a way.

Like we we are now really connecting in and engaging with you with folks on YouTube. Thank you guys who are listening live. You know, it’s it’s grown week after week now that we’re really focusing on cross-platform. But we’re going to bring you back to LinkedIn, Right? So we’re going to, you know, come back to LinkedIn or attend an event, right?

So we have socialsaleslink.com, and social events. If you actually join the LinkedIn library, which is a social sales-linked concierge library, where you can scan the QR code if you’re watching, you’ll get invited to all of our public events. But the bottom line in all of this is about growing. You’re finding where your audiences are and growing a following there.

However, I do believe in having one home base, like what’s your home base, and that you don’t want it to be so watered down that everything gets siloed. Build the bridges from your islands to your home base. How about that? 

Bob Woods: I think that’s an amazing way to wrap things up here today. So I just want to thank everyone again for joining us on this episode of Making Sales Social Live.

If you’re with us live on here we go, folks, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, or X right now. And I think I’m never going to call it Twitter again after this. We’re just going to call it ex-premier Elon Musk. If you’re listening, you’re not listening. You’re welcome. So, you know, we do this every week, so keep an eye out for our live session on any and all of those platforms.

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