Episode 83: How to Convert Lurkers Into Engagers

Bob Woods  00:00

Greetings, salutations, and hi there, and welcome to Making Sales Social Live! I’m Bob Woods, the LinkedIn Sherpa, and with me today, as always is the LinkedIn Whisperer Brynne Tillman. How are you doing today, Brynne?

Brynne Tillman  00:14

Good, Bob. How are you?

Bob Woods  00:16

I am doing great and looking forward to taking a deeper dive into our subject today. 

Intro:

Welcome to Making Sales Social Live as we share LinkedIn and social selling training strategies and tips that will have an immediate impact on your business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, every week. Making Sales Social Live.

Bob Woods 00:42

Do you have people who are looking at your content, but you just don’t know how many there are? And of course, the answer is, yes, we all have that. But just as or even more important, you don’t know who they are. So we call them “lurkers” because they’re behind the scenes absorbing all of the content that you put out but for whatever reason, they don’t want to be noticed. 

Today, Brynne and I are going to talk about ways we can move those lurkers into engagers. So first, we’re going to address why we want them to engage, Brynne?

Brynne Tillman  01:17

Yeah. So if we’re using LinkedIn and social selling to start conversations, we can’t start conversations with people that we don’t know exist. (Bob: Exactly.) So the first thing, you know, why do we want them to engage? Because we want to start conversations with them and we want to identify who’s engaging. 

Now, there are other reasons. Generally, you know, that’s the primary reason, but other reasons are “Is the content I’m putting out there attracting the right people? Is it the right content?” So sometimes we put out content that we want to share, not necessarily content that our prospects want to engage on. And so quick story, Bob, and I have a client who’s a financial advisor, financial professional, who started putting out content, which was great early on, and working with us, and started to get lots of engagement but when we did a deeper dive into who was engaging, it was other financial professionals. It wasn’t a prospect. (Bob: The audience. Not the audience they wanted.) Right. They didn’t need other advisors, they wanted business owners and other prospects. 

So what we determined was the content that he was sharing, which happened to be from MarketWatch, I believe, was something that the entrepreneurs and business owners were not nearly as interested in as he thought. So we, you know, we want to make sure that we know who’s engaging, we know who’s consuming it, we only know when they engage to make sure it’s the right content. So that’s number one.

Bob Woods  02:59

So number two is, why are they lurking and not engaging? So that’s like the real crux of the problem and in my mind, Brynne hit on that, to a very large extent, because we, as sales professionals tend to want to talk about ourselves, we tend to want to share our knowledge to everyone and that’s important. It’s good to want to do that but when it comes to social content, the type of thing that you need to be sharing, again, is what Brynne just said, the types of content that your audience wants to consume.

So number one, you have to determine who that audience is because just like in the example Brynne gave, you don’t want to attract other people who are in your profession, and quite frankly, who might be competitors. 

And number two, you want to attract with content that is going to make the people who you’re trying to attract just kind of stand up and say, “Hmm, I didn’t know about that.” or “ Hmm…that’s a good point, I’d like to add something to that” and then so that when you’re attracting these people, they are more likely to want to engage because you need to make them need to engage. And that’s something that I learned in broadcast journalism when I was producing TV shows like way back when. It’s not getting them to care, it’s making them to care. Now we didn’t have engagement and broadcast but that’s kind of like taking that concept and applying it to social nowadays.  

Brynne Tillman  04:27

You know, it’s interesting is that making them to care because we can’t really make that. (crosstalk) my mind goes to a couple of things, I just want to share, when we do that social listening, and we really understand what they care about, you know, one of the things deeply learned in the Go Giver, right? We can’t make them do anything but if we learn right, but if we learn what it is that gets them to engage and then we change the way that works showing up, you know, then they will engage. So I love that concept.

You know, I just want to play a little on where are they lurking and not engaging, like so where, (Bob: Sure.) even beyond the why, because it’s not just a blog post or a video or a LinkedIn Live, or, it’s also your profile. So we get a lot of lurkers on your profile, now you can go into Who’s Viewed Your Profile and if you have the free version, you can see the last five people unless they are in anonymous mode. 

And a lot of people are like, they’re in what we call lurker mode, right? So you don’t even get to see who they are. Or maybe you had seven people look at your profile and you missed two of them, right. So that’s another thing, right? Where it’s like, okay, so I don’t, you know, now if you have any kind of premium, you have the last 90 days, you can certainly go back, but you know, so it’s on your content, it would be in your newsletters, if you have them, in your lives, if you’re running them in events, that’s where they could be lurking and not engaging yet, or your profile. So I just wanted to share kind of the where they’re hanging out, lurking.

Bob Woods  06:09

Yeah, and especially when it comes to the profile. It’s kind of a shame to lose those people because you did something to generate enough interest for them to go over to your profile. So at that point, you really need to have the right quantity there to attract, teach, and engage them. And I just had a prospect called this morning, where we talked a little bit about that, about know, like and trust, which is what everybody wants to do to or wants to be at with their clients, but to get there, you need to attract, teach, and engage them. And hopefully, both your content and your profile are doing that. They should be doing that.

Brynne Tillman  06:48

I love that. So what’s number three?

Bob Woods  06:50

Number three, numero tres is what you can do, If I can read that right, to encourage engagement.

Brynne Tillman  06:57

Yeah, so number one, you have to create, you have to resonate with them. They have to know immediately that that content is for them. Number two, you have to create curiosity in the first line. You can do that with a statistic, you could do that with a question, you could do that with a hot challenge, an industry insight but you have to create curiosity. If you can’t create curiosity in the first line, you’re never going to get them to continue reading, let alone engage. Right? (Bob: Right.) So really important.

Bob Woods  07:32

Yes. So, you want to give them a reason to click on that See More and what I say, you know what I said before, “make” them care. I always put make in air quotes, because it’s not really making them, it’s really about compelling them. (Brynne: Encourage them.) Wow, and (cross talk.) (Brynne: I like the word compelling!) Yeah, compelling. Yeah, compel them to work (Brynne: I love that!) (crosstalk) …See More. Yeah, you see, we come up with strategies during LinkedIn Lives, you gotta love that. So because if they don’t click on See More, they’re just gonna keep scrolling, scrolling, you know, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. They’re going to keep doing that. So that’s why the first line is so important — (laughs) Brynne’s dancing — is so important to do that.

Brynne Tillman  08:11

So what can you do to encourage engagement is what we just talked about, right? Number four, also encourages engagement and I think this is a big deal.

Bob Woods  08:22

So types of call to action are what we’re talking about here. So encouraging engagement obviously should happen throughout your copy. But to really start the encouragement of the engagement, you have to get them on to click See More and that comes from your first line. Calls to Action generally happen towards the end. So Brynne, what are some of the types of CTAs that you like to use?

Brynne Tillman  08:47

Yeah, and I agree that most happen at the end, but you can in a LinkedIn post, move it up if you want to. (Bob: Yeah, you can absolutely.) Even though, generally, on blog posts and content,  CTAs / calls to action are almost always at the end. We could flip the script a little bit if it makes sense. So asking a question, but you could say, “Share in comments your thoughts around this.” Now, this is a fun one that I am stealing from an amazing colleague Joe Apfelbaum. He did this a year ago maybe he does it more often but it’s something that I keep forgetting to bring up that I love that he does and I think like we can do polls to do similar things but he’ll say, if this is your answer, click like, if this is your answer, click on the heart, if this is your answer, click on the celebrate because if you look at the, there’s a thumbs up, there’s a heart, there’s a clapping hand, there’s a curious, so you know you can actually get them to answer similar to a poll with the reactions. That’s a fun one. I haven’t, I mean, that just popped into my head from probably two years ago. Polls…

Bob Woods  10:02

Yeah, that’s the way people used to do polls before polls were polls. (laughs) Basically. 

Brynne Tillman  10:07

That’s right! And now, yes, right. So we haven’t talked about that because polls are how we get those answers, but which is fun. But this is just another way. Another call to action is telling them what the next step is, right? I read this, what should I do? So there, I tried one last week, which by the way, you guys can message me for this, where I had shared something about Magical, which is a template text expander and I said, “If you want our templates, put ‘Yes, please’ in comments,” and I got a whole bunch of people saying, “Yes, please.” 

And the more people that said, “Yes, please,” the more people saw what is “Yes, please?” And then they went and saw it. So then I ended up connecting or messaging them the link. “To get those templates, feel free to message me on LinkedIn. I’m happy to send you a link to all of our templates.” But that was a call to action. Right? (Bob: That’s a great one, too.) Yeah, yeah, yeah. So wow, what’s the last one for today?

Bob Woods  11:11

The last one is, so some people may call it “the circle life,” I personally call it “the circle of content,” how to keep them coming back for more. 

Brynne Tillman  11:19

Yeah, so I love this, right. So the number one way to get people to come back for more is acknowledge when they engage. Bob is famous for his quotes, “Don’t post and ghost.” When you do that, they never come back. But if someone comments, make sure you show appreciation for that comment, maybe you go in and engage on their content as well. 

Here’s where people miss that because that seems pretty easy. I can comment. You might get 20 reactions and three comments, but you never look at who’s reacting. If you can, if they’re first-degree, click on their name and just say, “Thank you so much for your engagement in my post, it means a lot.”  So easy but guess what, next time they see it, they’re gonna want to engage because you recognize them and you’re just building rapport over and over again.

Bob Woods  12:12

Right. And then you never know what’s going to come from even just that simple of a message because they may come back and say, “Hey, that, that made me think of something and then blah, blah, blah…”  And then you can even continue the conversation more from there because remember, this is ultimately about conversations, conversations that you eventually want to take off LinkedIn but it’s about starting those sales conversations. And you can go a long way just on LinkedIn, whether it’s via commenting, or messaging or whatever, to really get that ball rolling.

Brynne Tillman  12:44

Absolutely. I love Brian Monahan. Click the hands clapping if you’re looking, so if you are on, we’ve got lots of people watching. Yeah. Brian’s the first one to comment. Yes, yes. So go ahead.

Bob Woods  12:59

Brian’s a commenter, we know that and so very good. So thanks again for joining us on Making Sales Social Live. If you’re with us live on LinkedIn. (Brynne: We’ve got lots of hands clapping, by the way.) yeah, lots, oh, that’s fantastic. I love it. I love it. So if you’re with us live on LinkedIn right now and hopefully clapping your hands virtually, we do this every week, so keep an eye out for our live sessions. 

Now if you’re listening to us pre-recorded on our podcast and you haven’t subscribed already, smash that subscribe or follow button, whatever it is, and whatever it is you’re listening to, we’re in a lot of places, to access all of our previous shows and be alerted when our new ones drop. 

So we do this and then we do our Making Sales Social interview series where we talk with leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business and many more areas. I just did my first one last week. It was incredible. So hopefully that’ll be coming up pretty soon. If you want more information, go to socialsaleslink.com/podcast. And when you’re out and about make sure that you’re making your sales… (Brynne: Social!) Exactly. Have a good day, everybody. Bye-bye. (Brynne: Bye, guys.)

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Resources Mentioned:

• Magical