Episode 75: Five Ways to Use Video on LinkedIn

Bob Woods  00:00

Hey everybody, and welcome to Making Sales Social Live! My name is Bob Woods. I am the very dilated LinkedIn Sherpa today. I had an eye appointment, which is why if you’re with us live right now I’m kind of in the dark because it’s still pretty light-sensitive, but we are here to give you some great information and when I say we, I’m joined by the LinkedIn Whisperer Brynne Tillman. 

How are you doing today, Brynne?  

Brynne Tillman  00:27

Good, Bob. How are you other than your gigantic black eyes?

Bob Woods  00:30

Doing fantastic! And they are still pretty gigantic too although you can’t really see ‘em. 

Brynne Tillman  00:35

I can see from here. So yeah…

Bob Woods  00:39

Ohh… It’s kind of scary.

Brynne Tillman  00:41

Well so with dilation we get to see things from a  (Bob: Yes, we do.) different perspective. So today maybe we’ll bring a new perspective.

Bob Woods  00:50

Yes, because we’re talking about, if you’re watching us on LinkedIn right now, it means you’re viewing us on video. 

So using video is powerful, you can connect with your audience and prospects in a highly visual way to bring value in ways that you just can’t by using text alone or just using text, period, to be honest with you. 

Today, we’re going to share with you some strategies to get engagement then we’ll talk about some specific types of video, products, ways, I’m not exactly sure how you would categorize that, but anyhow, to deliver video to your audience. 

Let’s get started though with the strategies. The “strategery” part of things, Brynne.

Brynne Tillman  02:05

Yeah, so I love this and you know, before we get into four ways to actually present a video, let’s talk about what goes into these videos that make it valuable. 

Now, our conversation at Social Sales Link is always around social selling. So you know, when we think about video strategy for social selling there are a few things to keep in mind. Number one, we need to clearly identify what matters to our targeted audience. In many cases, our buyers. What content will be engaging for them, because one of the mistakes we often make as sellers is we share content that we want to talk about, not necessarily the content that they want to consume. So when you are putting together this strategy for video on LinkedIn, we really need to start with what value are we really bringing to our audience, number one.

Number two, is what we are doing and sharing leading to our solution? So we could identify all kinds of things that our buyer cares about but that may not be relevant to us, so there’s got to be a bridge, right? So what kind of content do they want to consume that will help us move closer and closer or help them move closer and closer to our solution? 

Number three, from a strategy perspective, we have to decide which direction we want to go in because there’s a lot. You can do solo tips and strategies you could team up like Bob and I do. You could interview people, like our every other Making Sales Socials and interview, and every other, is our tips that we do together. There are lots of different ways to create video. 

There is also raw video, unedited, and there’s edited video. And when you edit video, you can get good graphics that come in and subtitles, captions and such. So there’s a lot of things to think about when you are going to use video and so I wanted to start, kind of in that mindset of if we’re going to leverage video to attract, teach, and engage our buyers, let’s do it the right way.

Bob Woods  04:35

Exactly. And any of that can go in any type of different direction as well. I mean, if you got the money you can do the proverbial Hollywood production. You don’t have to though, but you should be doing something, especially because there are so few people out there who are doing it.

Now, I’m noticing that there’s like, more and more people who are starting to do it now but I think that it’s still unique enough to where if you start doing it, now, you’re going to be known for it. And just because you’re doing all of it, and because you’re actually showing up, and by showing up, I mean, on video in this particular case, you’re going to be obviously much more recognizable, but it’s the more recognizable people who are viewed, get viewed as subject matter experts. 

So that’s another thing that you want to do as well and if you’re showing up, and if you’re, you know, proverbially looking at the people in the eye, while you’re delivering your messages, again, it’s much more effective than just doing texts and things like that, although you should still be doing the text, you should still be doing all that stuff, too but it’s just it’s much more powerful with video directly.

Brynne Tillman  05:48

Absolutely. So what’s the first way we’re going to talk about to share the video?

Bob Woods  05:53

So a couple of these are going to be LinkedIn-specific, there are going to be a couple where you can go beyond LinkedIn, though. So first one is post a link.

Brynne Tillman  06:02

Yeah, so maybe you’ve uploaded it to Vimeo or to YouTube, you’ve got you know, your content could even be on your website. And so in a post, you can share a link and to Bob’s point, you want to add text here, too, not just share the link to the video, but if you’ve got video that’s living somewhere else, you can share a link. But there’s a negative to sharing a link, which is the algorithm. 

LinkedIn does not like you to send people away from their platform so when you link content that moves away from the platform, you won’t do as well in getting found and the algorithm is a little bit sacrificed there, but if that’s where your video lives, it’s not a terrible way to do things. So, let’s say that.

Bob Woods  06:57

Right. But if you do have the original video that you’ve actually uploaded to YouTube or to Vimeo, or wherever, you can then take advantage of our number two point, which is upload native video. 

So when you upload a native video, you’re essentially uploading it directly to LinkedIn, and to Brynne’s point, with that the LinkedIn algorithm likes that better because the people, when they view the video, they are staying on LinkedIn to do that. So the algorithm is gonna say, “Hey, they’re not going anywhere else, let’s promote this post more in other people’s news feeds.”

Brynne Tillman  07:37

Great point. Now the only negative to native video is you max out at 10 minutes. (Bob: Yep.) So you have, now I actually personally believe if you’ve got a video that’s more than 10 minutes, it’s not going to necessarily do well. Unless maybe the link that you’re sharing will go back to number one. 

So number two is the native video, number one, posting that. I mean, like a webinar is a video right? In some ways, right? So you can link back to longer videos, if you are going to use native video where you’re uploading it, you know, all the studies point back to under three minutes, performs best anyway.

Bob Woods  08:23

Yeah. And then if you want, if you’re starting to get a little video savvy, as they say, you can actually post maybe like a little highlight reel that’s under three minutes and then you can link out to the full video… 

Brynne Tillman 08:36

Ohh, a double…

Bob Woods 08:39

…somewhere else. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then, you know, if your marketing department gets involved and everything else, you can even have that video be gated to where people have to sign in and stuff like that, too. But that’s more of a sales marketing, kind of unified thing, but even if you want to just do a highlight, but you do think like if it’s a webinar, you really do want people to view that webinar and it’s entirely put together a three-minute sizzle reel — that’s what they call it, and then have that link in there to link out to wherever the full video lives.

Brynne Tillman  09:10

So I love that. So algorithm hack, maybe, upload that native video, publish your text without the link, go back and edit the text immediately and add the link in to the text that goes to the full video. 

I love that Bob! This is like kind of a little sidetrack. I think that’s brilliant. Alright, number… What’s the third way that we can share this with, Bob?

Bob Woods  09:39

The third way is what we’re doing now. Live streaming.

Brynne Tillman  09:44

Oh, this is one of my favorites. Now live streaming is native inside of LinkedIn and can go way over 10 minutes. So it’s almost a hybrid, right? You’re getting the value of the algorithm because it is natively staying inside of LinkedIn, but you are not limited to the 10 minutes that an uploaded video or native video limits you to.

Bob Woods  10:11

Yeah. And then the other really nice thing about live streaming is, depending on the video platform that you use, so with LinkedIn live streaming, you have to use a third party platform to do it, right, we use something called Restream.

So with Restream, you can actually go out to several platforms, not just LinkedIn. So that’s what I was talking about before that not everything is like really LinkedIn specific. So with this video, and every live video that we do, we also output that to YouTube. So you can do that to other channels as well, if you have presence there. And then you can you know, live stream individually as well. 

I’m looking into Tiktok right now. You can do live on Tiktok.

Brynne Tillman 10:55

I can’t wait. I’m so excited to see how that goes. Yeah, yep, yep, yep. We have our team right now doing deep dives into some of Bob’s very fast brilliance that we can Tiktok video. (Bob: Yeah) That’ll be great. (Bob: That should be a lot of fun.) 

So yeah, I love that. The other thing that’s interesting about live, especially now we’re going through these third parties, we use Restream, which also StreamYard and a whole bunch of others, it creates an event and so there’s some real benefit. I mean, you can obviously create your own events and link other things to it but this is kind of a big win because they’re really pushing events. So that becomes really helpful in getting people to visit your live because you’ve now created the link and it’s easy to promote that outside of just the typical algorithm. 

Bob Woods 11:49

Yep, exactly.

Brynne Tillman 11:50

Because you can invite people to events.

Bob Woods  11:51

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So. now we’re going to go from the wide universal to the extremely personal. Wow, that’s wild I didn’t even expect that to happen. And that has to do with sending a video message. So this is LinkedIn-specific. You can send short video messages to first-degree connections within your network and you would need your mobile phone to do it. It’s like the easiest way to do it and it’s actually pretty easy to do with the steps. But imagine if you reach out to someone with the phone in front of your face, and you talking on camera saying, hey, whoever and you have like a really short message after that and you’re talking to that person, one on one, because they can see you, they could say. “Hey, this is a real person, this person took enough time to send me a video message.” And just imagine what kind of good feelings that you’ll get out of that, especially because when it comes to video messages, there’s still hardly anyone doing this.

Brynne Tillman  12:56

Absolutely. And it’s brilliant. And it’s easy. So all you do is you go on mobile, as Bob said, you go to message, on someone’s profile, you click on the little paper clip, and then you click on video, you put it in selfie mode, and you go, “Hey, Bob, great to do a live with you today,” or whatever it is, right? 

This has been a wonderful way to reconnect with people and it’s clearly, as Bob said, a one-on-one. They feel like you really took the time and we have, by the way, over a 90% response rate. Like that’s crazy amazing!

Bob Woods  13:38

We tested it we have the receipts (Brynne: That’s right.) 

We really know that this works.

Brynne Tillman  13:46

Yeah, absolutely. So I have one bonus. So we said we were gonna give you five and the number one we started with strategy. So I’m thinking that’s not really five ways. So one more way, you can add video to your profile. (Bob: Oh, that’s right. Yeah.)

In cover story or linking video to your featured or even connecting it to your experience. So, cover story we did a live on cover story, (Bob: Yeah, yeah a couple of weeks ago) I believe, a couple weeks ago you were back and look at that. But it is literally a 30-second elevator pitch of sorts, right? If you were — I hate using the word pitch, your elevator speech maybe.

So you know if you were at an event and they were timing you for 30 seconds and really we say do 29 because if you go even the tad over 30 It gets cut off. (Bob: Yep, they won’t make it.) So cover story’s a great way to use video. Your featured section — if you post a video, whether it was a link or a native video or a live stream, you can actually connect that to your featured or you can upload native right to your featured up to 10 minutes and you can link in experience so if you have videos you know not that I love a whole lot on product pitch but if you have a visual product that you have video of, you have product in your experience, that’s a great place to put those videos.

Bob Woods  15:25

Yeah, that’s where you can definitely get away with that type of things a little bit more because especially if you’re splitting out your products underneath your main experience section with your current position, people are going to be just naturally more interested in what those products are so our services or whatever, so if you have video that supports it, that’s probably the only really good place to do that within the profile because you are educating but at the same time it’s very product-specific.

Brynne Tillman  15:55

Love it. Well, Bob, this was fun. 

Bob Woods15:58

This was a lot of fun. Just as you can tell we both love video we try to do it as much as we can. And you know like I said, we’re gonna be I’m gonna be on TikTok, probably, you know, no dancing, I promise no dancing on TikTok. (Brynne: I’ll do the dancing.) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe we do a little bit dancing, maybe like in a split-screen or something like that.

So thanks again for joining us here on Making Sales Social Live! If you’re with us live on LinkedIn right now or on YouTube, we do this every week, so keep an eye out for our live sessions. 

If you’re listening to us on our podcast and you haven’t subscribed already, we invite you to smash that subscribe or follow button to access all of our previous shows and be alerted when new ones drop. We do two shows weekly, this one and our Making Sales Social interview series where we talk with leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business, and many more areas. And I’m going to start doing these here pretty too soon.

Brynne Tillman  16:55

Can’t wait for that!

Bob Woods  16:57

If you want more information, go to socialsalelink.com/podcast Also, be sure to drop a like and a rating for our podcasts. And remember when you’re out and about make sure that you’re… (Brynne: Making your sales social!) social! Thanks, everybody. (Brynne: Bye-bye.) Have a great day.

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Resources Mentioned:

• Restream
• StreamYard