Episode 426: Want to Build Real Momentum on LinkedIn? Engage 10x More Than You Post

Intro

00:00:00:18 – (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.  Enjoy the show!

 0:00:55 – (Bob Woods): Welcome, everyone and thanks for joining us for Making Sales Social Live. Coming to you from from the Social Sales link Virtual Studios and brought to you by askSSL.ai. I’m Bob Woods. Stan Robinson is unfortunately having some computer gremlins, so he’s unable to join us right now, but Brynne Tillman is here. How you doing, Brynne?

0:01:17 – (Brynne Tillman): I’m great, Bob. How are you?

0:01:19 – (Bob Woods): I’m doing well, thank you. Appreciate it. So when it comes to gaining momentum, the big mo, as they say in football and basketball, when it comes to your activity on LinkedIn, it really comes down to trust. Do people trust you? If they don’t, you’re stuck in the mud. If they do, though, you’ll be viewed as an expert in your field. And it’s like I always say, people want to talk to experts. Experts get calls; they get conversations.

0:01:51 – (Bob Woods): Now, if you’re only showing up to post on LinkedIn, you, quite frankly, are missing one of the big points of the platform, which is to start conversations. While conversations can begin as the result of a post, the real magic comes, guess where? In the comments. If you want conversations that lead to business, you need to show up for others and show up consistently. And you really should be an expert when you do show up because you’re going to want to have conversations with people and they are going to want to have conversations with you as well. They have got to want that, which is why we have the 10 to 1 rule. Right, Bryn?

0:02:34 – (Brynne Tillman): 10 to 1 ratio is engagement to posting. Absolutely. I think that this is absolutely critical. So let’s break down why this matters. Well, first of all, when people post often, very few people are actually engaging. So when you engage, they’re like more excited than any content you could send them. Right. So when we think about it, when we share content, we’re so excited when people engage. So let’s make our buyers or our prospects or our targeted community members feel that good.

0:03:15 – (Brynne Tillman): So when we go out and we’re engaging on their content, they like us, right? There’s engagement. So that’s number one. Number two, when we’re engaging on their content, they are much more likely now to see our content for two weeks. Really important that we’re doing that. LinkedIn really rewards those who are engaging more than those who are posting. So we’re going to go through a lot of the ways to do this, but I think something that is not on our list where I want to start because folks will say, you know what, I go into my newsfeed and I search for content and it’s a ton of ads and it’s so I’m going to start with the big tip.

0:04:00 – (Brynne Tillman): So if you take nothing else away from what we’re about to talk about, what we’re going to talk about today, this is it. Go to LinkedIn and this is in the free version. Even if you have Sales Navigator, I recommend doing this. There are other ways to look for content in Sales Navigator, but I think this is incredibly valuable. Go up to the search bar and hit Enter and click on Posts and then choose the filter Latest.

0:04:32 – (Brynne Tillman): So it’s the most up to date piece of content at the top. Then you can choose your first degree connections and people you follow. So now just based on the people that you have chosen to engage with, you are going to see just their content. Following can be one way. You may say, well, I want everyone I’ve connected with, but I also want Brene Brown content and I want Oprah Winfrey content or whomever that is. You can go follow them and then when you choose that filter, their content is going to come up in this thread. You can also break it down by author, industry and maybe a couple of others. There’s not a ton of breakdown, but what happens is you now have a thread of content without ads, without all the noise that is simply from your chosen community.

0:05:33 – (Brynne Tillman): Go ahead and bookmark that. And because you’ve chosen the filter Latest, you come in every day. The top stuff is the newest stuff. So this is the best way to get started on the 10 to 1 ratio in a very practical way.

0:05:53 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, so that’s, that’s fantastic, as they say nowadays. I have no notes on that. I do want to say one thing though. We have an ebook that not only goes over everything here except for what Brynne just said, you need to be here to learn that, but also contains some AI prompts written in our crispy format that will help you with commenting. So you’re going to get a lot out of this ebook it’s @socialsaleslink.com.

0:06:21 – (Bob Woods): slmomentum again that’s social sales link.com momentum and if.

0:06:28 – (Brynne Tillman): You’re here live; just scan the QR code at the top left.

0:06:31 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, scan the QR code at the top left. It’s also in the comments in, in LinkedIn as well. And if you’re listening to this via podcast, we will make sure that, that, that that addresses in show notes as well. So with, yeah, this great we, we try our best here. So let’s talk really quick about why 10 comments outperform one post. So that ratio 10 to 1, there are reasons behind it beyond the algorithm.

0:07:02 – (Bob Woods): So the first one is you know, every thoughtful comment and yes, they do need to be thoughtful. They can’t be just great posts. I’m, I’m on a terror when it comes to the great post comments. Never do that. Every thoughtful comment serves a purpose. And we’ve got three that we’re going to talk about here really quick that I’m going to go over. 1. A comment shines the light on the original author, which is huge because you’re not just acknowledging their post, you’re helping it reach more people and giving it extra weight through your response, which is big. I mean because first of all, the post that you should be responding to should be good to start with to like really good. Don’t just go out there and comment on absolutely anything that is, is posted. I mean, make sure that it serves your audience.

0:07:52 – (Bob Woods): Always be thinking about your audience when it comes to these comments. But at the same time, you really should be amplifying the original post author because they put the time in it’s their thoughts. You should really, you know, by doing this you’re not only amplifying yourself, but you’re kind of applauding them and saying yay, good, good for them. At the same time, this is a really good post. I think that’s every bit as important as well.

0:08:19 – (Brynne Tillman): So. Absolutely. So let’s talk about some ways to do this. And, and by the way, you said something important, and I’m gonna share one other piece. You can find influencers that are talking parallel to what you do now. It’s important you don’t go to all your competitors to do this. I want you to go like for us sales trainers or marketing agencies, those are all parallel. We do not overlap, but we attract the same people.

0:08:51 – (Brynne Tillman): So think about who are those influencers, especially those that are attracting a lot of people. So you can now find their content. And by the way, you can use that post search based on specific author names. So you can have another search of posts. And I could go in and do Jeb Blunt, Amy Franco, Colleen Stanley, Liz Hyman, Mark Hunter, all Meredith Elliot Powell, all the folks that are sharing content that are attracting my folks. I can create just a list of their posts as well. And I would bookmark that so I can go back and look every day.

0:09:41 – (Brynne Tillman): So now not only do I have a specific list of people that are attracting my folks, but I can see the most current content. Now what do I do? And we can go deeper into using AI for commenting, but I would say. And we do have a prompt for that in the ebook, but I would say take the time and really read that post and find a quote from that post that resonates with you. Find something from that post where you can say, Meredith really loved your overcoming objections tip on X, Y and Z.

0:10:21 – (Brynne Tillman): Thought it was very powerful. Now, how do I create thought leadership beyond my acknowledgement that Meredith is the thought leader? Well, now I could say one, one example we’ve used is X, Y and Z. What do you think is, you know, and now I have both commented where I’m highlighting the. The author, just like Bob said where I’m. They spent the time give them those kudos and then I can add and this is, you know, curious. This is how we’re doing it. What do you think?

0:10:59 – (Brynne Tillman): Notice I’m not Even if I’m 100% positive that it is amazing, I still want to ask that author their perspective on it. You’re going to get engagement, but you’re also not hijacking their content. You’re asking them for their perspective or advice on your thought leadership. Often if you go in hijacking it like great post and then now it’s all your thought leadership without acknowledging theirs, as Bob mentioned, you start to lose them a little bit and they feel like you’ve hijacked their content.

0:11:35 – (Brynne Tillman): So this is a great opportunity to share your thought leadership in a way that you’re still respecting their mentorship and expertise. I think that’s really important. The other thing is you can comment on the commenters or like and engage with the commenters. When you do that, you do kick in the algorithm, and those commenters now will start to see your content when it shares. When you share it.

0:12:06 – (Bob Woods): Yep. Yeah. And two out of those three styles of comments that Brenda has just mentioned, comment to align with the author as a thought leader and comment to engage with other commenters and start conversations. We have those crispy prompts in our ebook. So be sure that you go ahead and download that when you get a chance. Hopefully it’s sooner rather than later. Hint, Socialsaleslink.com Momentum socialsaleslink.com

0:12:34 – (Bob Woods): Momentum so let’s talk about one of the other advantages that, that these have. So, we talked a little bit about opening the door to real conversations, which can really happen if done right. And especially. It’s always hot to me. I don’t know about you, Brennan. It’s always hot to me when you can actually get a really good conversation started in comments. I mean more than just like a one off thing. I mean if you’re going back and forth with someone, why wouldn’t you reach out to them at some point? I mean, even if it’s just a network, even if it’s not a direct sales thing, if it’s just a network at that point, not only will they know you and will they remember you, but if you got a really good vibe going, you should be able to just reach out and just connect without even a note necessarily. Although you want to do a note. But I’m just.

0:13:23 – (Brynne Tillman): No, always a note. Always a no.

0:13:27 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, always the note. Unless. Unless you have the paid. That’s a good point.

0:13:31 – (Brynne Tillman): But yeah, here’s what I would say. I know that’s right. You’re limited. I forgot you are somewhat limited. True, that’s a very good point. If you have the free LinkedIn, I don’t know, five notes a month.

0:13:44 – (Bob Woods): I believe it’s still five. Unless.

0:13:45 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, so that is a challenge. What I might recommend then is to publicly just say really enjoyed this back and forth. I’m going to be sending you a connection request and then make sure the moment they accept now you add that note. So because what happens is a year from now you’ll be like, wait, how did I meet Bob Woods? Where did I see him? And so that note’s really important.

0:14:11 – (Bob Woods): Yep, 100%.

0:14:13 – (Brynne Tillman): We have a wonderful little. So Larry, most of all my comments outperform my profile posts unless I’m commenting on one of Chad’s posts when it underperforms. What’s up with that? Oh my gosh. So here’s. You know, the funny thing is I will tell you. So Jeb, you put. Jeb puts out a post. By the way, he’s phenomenal at engaging with people that are commenting. Unless he’s traveling for training. Right. If he’s in training all day, it, he can’t get to it till the nighttime.

0:14:48 – (Brynne Tillman): So when you mention his name and he doesn’t engage for two hours, you’re. You. You’re gonna. It’s gonna reduce your exposure. So most people say, well, I. He won’t know that I engaged on his content if I don’t mention his name in the comment. Yes, he will. He will be alerted. So I would recommend. Don’t always say, ‘Hey,Jeb, great content. You can just say, really enjoyed this content. You can even use his name without the app mentioning his name.

0:15:25 – (Brynne Tillman): And then you will not be dinged for not getting a response within two hours. That makes sense. Did I articulate that right?

0:15:34 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was perfect. That was perfect. So with that, let’s go to the three styles of comments real quick. Like I said, we’ve done two already. The third is one that you may not necessarily think is a comment, but it is in a way. It’s just delivered a little bit differently. So this is commenting in the form of a reshare, but you’re adding perspective. You’re adding your perspective a little more completely than you can in a comment resharing.

0:16:08 – (Bob Woods): It’s one of the more underused tools on LinkedIn. Seems like I say that a lot. LinkedIn’s got a lot of great tools, though. When you reshare a great post and add your perspective, you do two things here. One, you build influence for yourself. At the same time, you’re lifting someone else, and you’re lifting them more with a reshare than you do with a comment within one of their posts. So, in other words, when you’re resharing, it’s got to be really good because it’s actually your name attached to the other person’s name. It’s like, you know, in the old mafia movies.

0:16:45 – (Bob Woods): Do you speak for this guy? Are you vouching for this guy? Same type of thing, except it’s on LinkedIn. Your reshare should give a hook for people to read both your reshare. So the part that’s on top and then the original post that appears just below as well. So you’re adding your point of view, you’re expounding on that. You may take that nugget that Brynne mentioned earlier. I call it like a seed. And you’re going to pour water on it so that it germinates through the valuable content that you’re adding there.

0:17:18 – (Bob Woods): And then you should also encourage your audience to check out or follow the original author. And if they want to comment on that post for the original author, they can do that. There or they can comment on the additional content that you’ve provided above. There now one thing or actually two things. You don’t want to rewrite their post. That’s bad. You need to take that nugget. Or you need to take whatever it is that attracted you to the reason why you want to reshare the post in the first place and put that up there. No rewriting. And don’t overshadow their message either. You are putting them in the spotlight. You’re kind of like in. In the spotlight together.

0:17:54 – (Bob Woods): Together doing a duet or something like Doobie Brothers or something like that. I don’t know. But you know, that’s the type of mentality that you really need to have there. But most important, you don’t want to just click on just reshare without having anything up there. Because LinkedIn does give you two options there. Just reshare or reshare with your own thoughts. I forget what what is exactly called, but you can reshare without putting anything there.

0:18:18 – (Bob Woods): That’s just a waste of electrons. It’s just, you know, it does. It really does. And it may do the original person a little bit of good, but without, you know, adding your context there. I mean, it certainly doesn’t do anything for you and it does something for the other person, but not really a lot. So I definitely wouldn’t want to do that either. Bryn.

0:18:38 – (Brynne Tillman): So we have this interesting question that came in. I posted something flashy and tagged several organizations and individuals and the post got 90 likes in nine hours. Indeed, this several times. And my, oh, I guess maybe tried to do it again several times and my post never performed. So what did he do right? So this is a great question. The first thing is we don’t always know what we did right. And I know that sounds crazy, but I am going to guess that you engaged a ton more before you shared that post.

0:19:15 – (Brynne Tillman): The actual post is not necessarily what does. Well, it’s how much you engage before and after you post. So if you engaged a ton and then posted it, LinkedIn is going to reward you by showing more people that content. So what you did right is probably not the actual post itself, it’s the activity around the post. That said, I always caution tagging organizations and people without permission unless you are sharing their content.

0:19:53 – (Brynne Tillman): Right. You share an organization’s content. Absolutely. You want to let them know. But it is a challenge and it’s something that we highly recommend you really think through. If I am tagged just arbitrarily because someone is looking for my engagement, I Truly feel like. Like it’s spam. The person will lose my trust if they’re now they share my content or Bob’s content or Stan’s content and they mention me a hundred percent.

0:20:29 – (Brynne Tillman): They share something around Sales Navigator and they, they say, hey, Brynne at Brynne Tillman would love your thoughts on this. Great, because it’s aligned with who I am and what I do. But if it’s just a group of 20 people tagged for the sake of getting momentum, you’re gonna lose momentum. And if someone de tags themselves, untags themselves, it will bury the content completely. So you have to really be careful around that.

0:21:02 – (Bob Woods): Yeah.

0:21:02 – (Brynne Tillman): So Larry has. I’ve known Jeb since he was a pop. It’s probably because I’m always busting his chops about not writing enough books. Well, Larry, I don’t know if you know this, but Jeb’s next book coming out October 6th, is called the LinkedIn Edge with me as the co author. So just. I don’t.

0:21:21 – (Bob Woods): So Larry, in other words, your check is in the mail for that one. Excellent. Excellent.

0:21:25 – (Brynne Tillman): Go buy. Go buy the pre-book. Pre-order.

0:21:28 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely the. Definitely the pre order. So just one more time. The ebook that accompanies this episode contains all of the crispy prompts to help you out. That’s at socialsaleslink.com. Momentum socialsaleslink.com Momentum. You can use crispy prompts that are on our ebooks in any LLM that you’d like to, as well as of course, in our own Ask SSL platform, which is available at AskSSL AI. Anything else, Bren?

0:21:58 – (Brynne Tillman): Yes, Barb wants to know what does bury the content completely mean?

0:22:03 – (Bob Woods): That’s a good question.

0:22:04 – (Brynne Tillman): It is a great question and thank you for asking because sometimes I just speak without realizing that it’s all in my internal head, the description. So bury the content completely. So for example, when you share content, typically 8 to 10% of the people that you are connected to it will appear in their newsfeed, even if you don’t do a whole lot. But if you break a rule, it will be in zero. If you engage with a ton of people, then it promotes or your content; it could be to 20 or 30%, especially if that content now gets engagement.

0:22:49 – (Brynne Tillman): If you break a rule, which I kind of consider, if you tag someone and they untag themselves, then you kind of broke a rule. LinkedIn is like, oh, this is spam. And so then they no longer share it in anyone’s newsfeed. They’ll still be able to see it. If they come to your profile and they look under your posts, it doesn’t. They don’t delete the post but they stop sharing it with other people. I hope that makes sense.

0:23:18 – (Bob Woods): Makes sense to me. Hope. Hope that makes. And then I. My. My functionality is not working for bringing up comments. So. So if you can do that on your site it’s. It’s like frozen.

0:23:29 – (Brynne Tillman): For some reason I. I’ve been doing terex so Terex. I don’t see it on. On.

0:23:36 – (Bob Woods): Okay. Oh maybe I’m gonna read this.

0:23:38 – (Brynne Tillman): So Tarek wrote, ‘Does the time or day of the week of publishing the post matter? So it’s interesting you’re saying the publish of the post. So which is different than the commenting? I would say the commenting doesn’t necessarily matter. We a B test or we have in the past time. I. There was a point where I was doing. I had this chart where Monday morning it was 9am Tuesday it was 11 and then the next Monday it was 11 and that like. So we mixed it up and tried to figure out what did best and it was it. We never really got to exactly what does best.

0:24:21 – (Brynne Tillman): So here’s what I’d say. You’ve got to B-test it yourself. Often my weekend posts will do much better, and I think maybe it’s because there’s less posts and less content and I tend to engage more on the weekends because I have more time than during the week. So I would just play around with it.

0:24:39 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, yeah. Everyone’s. Everyone’s audiences are different. That’s why it’s always like next to impossible to really answer that question. Didn’t definitively because my audience is different from Tarek’s audience. My audience may be on at certain times. Tareks may be on at completely different times. So it’s just, just. It’s really diff. It’s really difficult. That’s why you need to do the testing that Brynne mentioned and post Covid.

0:25:03 – (Brynne Tillman): Everyone is on all the time. Like you know you’re on and. And mobile phones and whatever it is like it’s just different. Bar said this. Does it bury only the one post or future ones? That is also a fabulous question. And what I would say is if it happens frequently it’s going to be all your posts there like LinkedIn will learn that everything you’re putting out there I believe you know you can redeem yourself with your next post.

0:25:36 – (Brynne Tillman): I will often send my post into the inbox. So you know when you post something and this is different than the Engagement. Right. This is asking for engagement. I would go to the send button and I would send this to 10 people at a time. Blind. Copied. I’m asking their perspective. Oh, hello. Our friend Brad Pierce. Hey, Bob and Bryn. How much of an impact does your comment or replies have in Sales Navigator vs LinkedIn?

0:26:11 – (Brynne Tillman): I’ve been commenting and replying to posts on my Sales Navigator alert page. Does that help exposure on LinkedIn as well? This is such a fabulous question. So the question is, if I engage in Sales Navigator, does it have the same effect as if I’m engaging in LinkedIn.com? And the answer is exactly the same effect. Because you’re really not engaging in Sales Navigator. You make it think you are. But that content actually only lives in LinkedIn. LinkedIn.com

0:26:44 – (Brynne Tillman): So those likes and comments, if you left Sales Navigator and you went to LinkedIn.com, you would see them there.

0:26:50 – (Bob Woods): Yeah.

0:26:51 – (Brynne Tillman): So it is exactly the same. Same engagement. I see what you did there, Jen. I own every one of his books. Oops. The LinkedIn Edge might be one of his. Your best, I’m hoping. But I’ll tell you, look out for Brad Pierce’s book. He has a book coming out on Sales Navigator that is going to be killer. Just FYI. I don’t know the name of it. Brad, you could let us know. I don’t know, but it’s going to be killer.

0:27:19 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, maybe if Brad gets it in the comments. As we’re wrapping up, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll say here, but we are right on time here, so we are going to go ahead and bring it in for a landing, as we like to say here. So whether you’ve been with us live or recorded via our podcast, we really appreciate you for joining us for this episode of Making Sales Social Live. Sponsored by askssl.AI.

0:27:45 – (Bob Woods): we do these live sessions weekly, unless you know it’s a holiday or something like that. So please join us if you haven’t listened or if you’re listening to us on our podcast rather, but you haven’t subscribed already, why not just click that follow or subscribe button? It’s literally that easy. And if you want to go the extra mile, drop us a like and a comment as well. Beyond these LinkedIn Lives, we also interview leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business and many more areas. So catch those episodes as well.

0:28:15 – (Bob Woods): If you’d like more info on our podcast. Socialsaleslink.com podcast again socialsaleslink.com podcast. So when you’re out and about this week or any week, be sure that you’re making your sales social.

0:28:31 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I’m doing it alone today. Yeah, you make yourselves social.

0:28:36 – (Bob Woods): I was thinking that just as I was reading as like, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s just been alone today, so that’s cool.’ Thanks, everybody, for joining us. Appreciate it. You all have a good week. Bye.

0:28:45 – (Brynne Tillman): Bye.

Outro:

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