Episode 376: Establishing a Productive Daily Routine on LinkedIn

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, me, and Bob Woods as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

00:00:53:11 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): Howdy. I am Stan Robinson, Jr., Chief Coaching Officer here at Social Sales Link. Welcome to Making Sales Social. Brynne and Bob will be back with this next week. Today we’re going to be talking about establishing a productive daily routine on LinkedIn. One of the questions we get a lot of times from people in sales and business owners and so forth is, I have a limited amount of time.

00:01:27:16 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): How do I make sure that the time that I do have available to spend on LinkedIn is as productive as possible? So today we’re going to run through some quick tips on how to make sure that you’re getting the most out of the time that you invest in LinkedIn. So tip number one, check your notifications. And it’s worth doing this probably twice a day.

00:01:59:02 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): So pick the times of day that work well for you, and you can spend five or 10 minutes just checking your notifications because that is the best way to keep up with what is going on in your network. And of course, the notification is the little bell icon. Just to the left of your thumbnail picture in the upper right of your profile.

00:02:27:14 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): But do make the time to check notifications because you’ll get notified about new developments with your network from birthdays, job updates, engagements with your content, which you definitely want to make sure you reply to. Now, one thing is that if you want notifications particularly about what people of interest to you are posting on LinkedIn, go ahead and ring their bell.

00:03:00:19 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): Now, if you’re already directly connected to them, you’ll see the little bell icon on their profile and it will be just below the banner on the right of the banner. If you’re not directly connected to someone, you won’t see the little bell icon. So what you can do is simply follow them. And once you follow them, then you will see the option to ring their bell, so to speak, and you’ll see also the options to manage the types of notifications you get, so you can get all notifications most relevant or you can turn it on and off.

00:03:41:04 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): So again, notifications worth checking that these twice a day just because they move very quickly and you don’t want to miss important notifications. Next, who’s viewed your profile, which is one of the favorite features for many of us on LinkedIn because it is one of the few, if not the only social network that easily allows you to see this.

00:04:11:21 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): Look at your profile even if they don’t otherwise engage with you. So do check who’s viewed your profile regularly because people do not stumble across your profile and look at it for no reason. So someone may have preferred them. They may have looked at one of your podcasts or other content that you’ve published. They may be interested in what you have to offer.

00:04:40:06 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): So if someone looks at your profile, it’s like they’re knocking on your front door and take the opportunity to reach out to them. And it could be as simple as an invitation message saying, “Hey, thanks for stopping by my profile. Can I ask what brought you here today?” Something as simple as that. Now, one other quick tip is that you can also bookmark the link to who’s viewed your profile.

00:05:10:09 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): So when you’re in who’s viewed your profile on LinkedIn, just go ahead and bookmark that URL and it’ll make it easy for you to get back there the next time. So check in who’s viewed your profile. That’s the second tip. Next, check your direct messages. Good idea to do this twice a day, if at all possible. Because when people are messaging you directly, again, it’s for a reason.

00:05:41:01 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): Now, I realize that we all get messages from people that are trying to sell us something, and that’s part of life. But if someone has taken the trouble to direct message you on LinkedIn and it’s not a sales message, it’s worth taking a minute just to read through what they have to say. And it’s a way to stay in touch with your connections.

00:06:10:14 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): So do check your messages regularly and yeah, so I’ll leave it at that. As far as that goes. These messages are direct outreaches to you from people that you are connected with. Of course, people can send you emails, but it’s worth taking the time to regularly check your messages. Now, next one, it’s kind of a related, though, is managing your invitations.

00:06:39:21 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): So the people that invite you to connect on LinkedIn, take a quick minute and do this first thing in the morning. Doesn’t take much time. But just to take a quick look at who’s invited you to connect on LinkedIn and if you have new invitations, you will see the little red number pop up at the top next to my network.

00:07:06:16 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): And you can quickly have a look at if there are multiple invitations. If it’s more than three, you can click on show all and it will show you all of the people who invited you to connect. You can see if they’ve included a message with the invitation to connect, explaining to you why they would like to connect with you.

00:07:26:12 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): I realize that there are limits that LinkedIn’s imposed on free users as to how many invitations they can send out with a customized message. But do quickly check if they’ve sent you a message and you can see their headline. And sometimes just seeing someone’s headline is enough for you to know whether it’s worth it for you to go ahead and accept their invitation.

00:07:55:13 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): Okay. Also, so when people have accepted your invitation to connect, make sure that you send them a welcome message, and you can use it to like get magical for this. Just put together a quick welcome message template and make sure that you do respond when people accept your invitation to connect. Because what happens all too often on LinkedIn is people will invite you to connect.

00:08:24:26 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): You accept their invitation and you never hear back from them. So don’t be that person. Make sure that you send people a welcome message when they invite you to connect. Now, next is what we call mining your clients connections. Those of you who are working with clients and you have a good relationship with them. One of the things that you can do, and this is something you could do on a weekly basis, it’s not something you’ll do every day, but it’s worth doing this once a week, once every two weeks, is having a look at who your clients are connected to.

00:09:08:23 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): Now, this isn’t limited to your clients. This can be anyone that you have a good relationship with. But the great thing about LinkedIn is you can see who a particular connection of yours is in turn connected with, as long as they have their connections open. And most people do. And so if I wanted to see who Bob was connected to, I could go into LinkedIn search filters.

00:09:40:08 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): And there is a filter that says Connections Of. you can type in the name of the person whose connections you want to have a look at, and then you can search using some of LinkedIn’s other search filters. So that is extremely helpful because I can look at who’s Bob connected to certain industries. I can look at who’s Bob connected to that has different titles.

00:10:13:13 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): And of course, that’s what you can do. And so it’s an opportunity for you to identify people that you would like to reach out to that your clients are connected to, which means that they’re potentially in a position to introduce you to those people. So, what you can do is put together a list of, say, 5 to 10 people that you would like a client to introduce you to, let them know, “Hey, you know, Bob, I notice that you connected to these ten people that I would love to meet.”

00:10:55:10 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): Are you open to a quick call just to review these people with me and see who you are comfortable introducing me to. Now, of course, with this your focus, one needs to be on quality of people because you don’t want to go to one of your clients with a list of 30 people that you might potentially like introductions to.

00:11:19:27 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): You want to keep this to a list of, say, 5 to 10 people at most. So in a five-minute phone call, you can run through the list very quickly, find out who they’re comfortable introducing you to. And of course, offer to do the same for them now. Next, send video messages to your first-degree connections as your LinkedIn network starts to get bigger.

00:11:47:01 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): One of the challenges that all of us have is keeping in touch with the people that we’re connected to. And you have the option to send a video message to your first-degree connections through LinkedIn natively. And this is a great way to just lightly touch people. Let them see your face. It is a great way to stay in touch and to stand out from everyone else because most people are not sending video messages.

00:12:20:05 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): So this gives you an opportunity to personalize the message to someone, stand out in their inbox, stay visible with them without selling. Okay, just staying in touch. And this is something that you’ll want to use or you’ll need to use the mobile app for. So take advantage of the ability the LinkedIn gives you to send video messages to people that you’re directly connected to.

00:12:57:16 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): Next, give back to people and this can take so many different forms. It could be as simple as acknowledging a promotion in someone’s posts on LinkedIn, it could be recommending them. So, writing a LinkedIn recommendation for them, it could be endorsing them for a skill. It could be connecting to people that you know, that you think would both benefit from getting to know each other.

00:13:33:06 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): All of those are ways that you could get that. And of course, we always talk about engaging on the content that people post with relevant comments, because when you do that, it amplifies the visibility of what they post. And the side benefit, of course, is that it makes you more visible to them. But that is another way you can get that.

00:13:59:20 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): Now, related to that, we talk about sharing and engaging with other people’s content. So that’s kind of an extension of giving back in addition to reacting to people’s comments with a like or commenting, you can also share their content to your network with a comment from you about why you’re sharing the content. So don’t simply share someone’s content on LinkedIn without a short explanation to your network as far as why you think this content would be of interest to them.

00:14:40:12 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): Now, those of you who are in sales, particularly if you’ve got an existing list of target accounts, one of the things that’s a good idea to do is to regularly focus on one account and focus on building your connections within that account and simply building your reputation within that account. And there are lots of ways that you can do that.

00:15:08:19 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): You can do that by identifying additional people to connect with within the account, beyond the people that you already connect to. You can look for opportunities to engage with people that work at that account. So the point is just to focus on expanding your network within accounts that are your responsibility. Now, next, many of you may have referral partners, and for a lot of us, those are businesses that are complementary to ours.

00:15:47:25 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): In other words, they say they serve the same audience, but they’re not direct competitors. So it could be someone that your client purchases from either before they purchase what you have to offer, or after they purchase what you have to offer. But people that are in a position to give you referrals, and of course vice versa, who you’re in a position to refer.

00:16:15:07 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): So on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to stay in touch with your referral partners, have conversations with them, have a virtual coffee with them, and you can do that on Zoom on the phone and so forth. But stay in touch with your referral partners and that’s part of your regular routine. So even though this is entitled Your daily routine, some of these things are activities you don’t necessarily have to do every day, which you do want to do on a regular basis.

00:16:52:14 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): Next, regularly create content or curate content, and curating content is simply a fancy way of saying find content that’s of interest to your audience that was created by someone else that you can share with your audience with an explanation as to why you think that content would be helpful for them. And of course, when I say share with your audience, I mean sharing the full post or article or video with attribution to whoever’s published it at LinkedIn, makes it very easy and a piece of content that is created by someone else that appears in your news feed.

00:17:42:02 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): There’s the option to share with your network and you can share the comment. And that way you’re sharing the original content. And the creator of the content, of course, gets full attribution. So those are some things, some just some activities that you can do on a regular basis that are the most productive activities that you can do on LinkedIn, particularly when you are limited in the amount of time that you can devote to the platform.

00:18:13:21 – (Stan Robinson, Jr.): All right. I hope that helps. Look forward to seeing you again next week. And if you haven’t already subscribed, if you’re not already following our podcast, go to social sales links slash podcasts to keep up with the latest content. Have a great day.

Outro:

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