I’d like LinkedIn to be big for you for 2020. I’ve been focussing more of my time and more of my testing on LinkedIn. It’s probably one of my more effective social media platforms. I have 10 things I’m going to cover in this post and this also will be on The Disruptive Entrepreneur Podcast.The LinkedIn platform gives you a huge advantage and totally levelled plainfield for one main reason, and that is, it does not restrict your reach to your first stage connections.
Facebook, if you have 100 people who like your Page, you’re very likely to reach no more than 4, 3, they say 3 percent, is,- about your reach on many of these social media platforms. You might be lucky, and you might reach 10. Whoa ooh, look at me, living the dream!!! But what LinkedIn will do, is, it will allow your post to go to second and third stage connections. So, you get 100 followers on Facebook, and get 10 view, if you’re lucky. You could have 100 followers on LinkedIn, and you could get a million views or 2 million views. One of my friends who just put up a post about his cars, selling his car, had 2.4 million views. He reckons he’s got 1,000 new connections request from that.
If you’re a marketer, you’ll pay about £5 a lead. That’s £5,000 worth of connections. If you know how to monetise social media, each follower, or like, or connection should be worth between £1 to £5 per person per year. That could be £5,000 per year, that one post has created.
- I’m going to cover the volume of posts that I think, the ideal, for you to get maximum reach on LinkedIn.
- I’m going to give you a cycle, a weekly cycle of style of posts to post, which will again, I’ve been testing, and I think will be the most effective for you.
- How to create inbound leads when selling.
- A couple of little detail distinctions about posts especially with links.
- The importance of the first hour.
- The new documents feature.
- The new lives feature.
- Recommendations.
- The SSI Score.
- And then adding connections and growing your network properly.
I’ve tested anywhere from 2 posts a week to 2 posts a day on LinkedIn. And I’m finding that the optimum for reach, is about one post per day. I don’t expect you to do one post per day, if you’re not even doing one post per week. Ratchet yourself up to that. If you’re doing one a week, get it to 2 a week. Then a few weeks, when you’re used to that, get it to 3 a week. And then get it to 4 a week. I find there’s a lot of people out there, big influencers, well, when I say a lot, not a lot. But if you follow a lot of social media influencers, there’s a few. They’re all telling you more content, more content, more content.
Gary Vaynerchuk is like 50-60 pieces of content a day. I see Grant Cardone posts often up to 9 times a day on Instagram. Now, it’s very difficult for you to model what they do, because if they have 7 million followers, it’s much more worth their time, and the overall reach to post multiple times a day.
Let’s say, you’re going to hit 3 or 4 percent of your audience. Well, if you get 3 or 4 percent of 10 million, of course, you’re going to post as much as you can, because that’s just going to get you dramatically increased reach across the board. But if you only have 1,000 followers or 100 followers, that’s way overkill, and it’s a waste of time.
I’ve tested 2 a day. and I found that when I’ve got to 2 a day, the reach started to drop, not just per post, but overall. So, the most important thing really, I think, for reach or engagement. Well, let’s just take for reach for now, which is the amount of views your post has had. I believe you’re the only one that can see that information. It says under the actual post.
If I had a choice between one post that got 8,000 reach, or 2 posts that have 5,000 reach each, i.e., 10,000 in total, I’d take the 2 over the one. Because the total reach or the total views, is ultimately, the most important metric.
what I found when I went from one a day to 2 a day, is, yes, maybe per post, the reach went down a bit. Maybe, I wasn’t hitting the 50,000, 100,000, 400,000 reach as regularly. But when I total them up, if I was doing twice as many posts a day, 2 instead of one, maybe each post was getting 70-80 percent of the reach of the one post, because there are 2 of them, I’m getting way more reach.
I’ve done a lot of testing. Now, you can do your own testing. That will probably be wise to do. Or, you can just take my word for it, because you’re watching the live and listening to the podcast, and go for one a day. Now, of course it does depend on what those one a day are. And if they’re all the same, your reach is going to reduce. If you do have the LinkedIn Live functionality, I found, when I went live, my first live had 20,000 views pretty much in the first day, my first LinkedIn Live. And the last 2 I’ve done are like barely struggled over 3,00 views, which for me, is very low on LinkedIn.
Definitely, the reach of lives has gone down, because maybe, it’s not so new anymore. More people have it now. The algorithms are changing. But also, things like length of lives, the longer you are live, the more reach you’re likely to get, because obviously, you’re on the feed a lot longer. So, people always ask me, how long should your lives be? Well, not too long that you’re waffling. But I would say at least 15 minutes. If you can get 30 minutes or longer on a live, you’re going to get more people seeing it, because it’s going to be there on the feed for longer.
But of course, your paradox, is, the longer a video, someone is scrolling and goes, um, that video looks interesting. 45 minutes, not sure. I might scroll on. So, you’ve got that balance. Always be testing, when it comes to your posts on social media. By the way, what works on LinkedIn, is very different to Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, Instagram, YouTube. It’s all very different.
Okay, next then, is, let’s say, you’re going to take my suggestion to do one post a day on LinkedIn. I would recommend you cycle one engagement jacking post, one story-based post, 4 content-based posts, and then one offer post. Look, some people say, never sell on social media. Always only do social selling. Only ever in inbound leads. But a lot of people obviously are selling on social media all the time on LinkedIn. A lot of people say, well, LinkedIn is a business platform. It’s for generating business. That’s what it is. It’s not Facebook. So, they’re either in the end of the extreme.
In reality, if you put a link or a pitch into a post on LinkedIn, it’s going to get significantly lower reach. Most people know that. I test from time to time. In nearly all cases, as soon as you put a link in, my average reach might be 30,000 or 50,000. If I put at LinkedIn, it might be 3,000, 5,000, something like that. So, it definitely does kill it. I’ve got a little tip on that in a minute.
You do have to do the content marketing thing. So, one engagement jacking post. I did a post talking about some female speakers that had let me down. I’d thought I worded it quite carefully, but it was clearly an emotive subject. That maybe had pushing 100,000 views now. I did an anniversary post of crushing my Ferrari into The News International Building, which had on The Sun newspaper. That got over 400,000 views. If you were to post about Anthony Joshua when he won his fight, or something really big in the news that everyone is talking about, that’s an engagement jack post. Or, if you were to create a debate or ask a very controversial polarising question, i.e., your main strategy for it, is, to get a lot go engagement. It wakes up your fans and followers. It gets you wider reach on algorithm, and pushes you out to lots more people.
There are some people you follow, they’re just doing that every day, engagement jacking, engagement jacking, engagement jacking. In the end, it’s boring. So, anything you do too much, it’s boring, and people tune out. The algorithm figures out, that you’re doing the same thing. So, you need variety.
Story-based posts work really well on LinkedIn. Maybe, when you were struggling, and then how you became successful, or just maybe, some of your stories of your best clients that you’ve helped, or some challenges that you’d overcome. Stories work really well. So, I’d do one of those per week.
And then 4 content-based posts. That could be a video, a document, a text-based post. But you know, a really good content on your niche. Maybe, some hard-hitting bullet points, et cetera. I’ll talk about documents in a moment.
Then once a week, now, I do a lot less, I probably should sell a lot more on social media. But I’m just really doing a lot of content marketing. My companies do between 15 and 20 million, well, 2 of them, without really my involvement. So, I guess I’m not needing to make the money. if I was, I would be selling more. And I should be selling more. But an offer could be, subscribe to my podcast. Join my YouTube Channel. It could be a ticket to a free event or a low-cost ticket, or buy a book. I definitely recommend it’s a lower price product so there’s not so much friction, so that you can build the trust of your clients.
In an ideal world, you might generate an inbound lead, which might be to private message you, or to fill in an application form, or something like that, or to make a comment in the thread, and then you follow you with them. Because then you’re not put in the link, which kills your reach.
In an ideal world, you create inbound leads when selling. So, make sure that you know your ideal client demographic. You know who your ideal target market is. You’ve got that very clear, and where you would find them online, and what message you would create for them. So, for me, it’s start-up and scale-up entrepreneurs, business owners, anywhere from one-man bands to people who probably own £20 million plus companies. That’s my kind of like, target demographic, if you like.
If I was doing an application for a product, it’d probably be good to be a business Mastermind, or a Marketing Mastermind, or some kind of business course, because obviously, it’s on point. But if I went, hey, buy my course at 2 grand, in the LinkedIn post, it’s not going to work. So, I want to generate some interest in that to maybe then have a consultation call with me or one of my staff, or to come to the Discovery Day, or Preview Event or something like that. So, you’re generating inbound leads.
If you share a link on a post, it’s going to dramatically reduce the reach. Your quandary, is that, you want to be able to use LinkedIn to generate revenue. Otherwise, what’s the point? Otherwise, what are you doing? You’re just, I don’t know, spending time on social media for what? Okay, you might build your brand. You might get more reach, more impact. You might get that trickled-down effect. And I certainly believe in that, and the more of content I put out there, I reckon my podcast, generated between £3 to £4 million in trickled-down revenue.
When I launched my Marketing Mastermind on January 4th this year, so just a year ago, if you’re listening, I got one-quarter of the leads from LinkedIn. So, I sold 75 at 5 grand. By the way, I had 250 applications. I just had to stop. I could have sold a lot more. So, 75 at 5 grand, one-third of them, well, just under one-third of them were from LinkedIn, and they were the best leads. They were like, it was taking me an average about 8 minutes to speak to someone, and then get them to book on. Whereas Instagram, they were taking me 15-20 minutes of my time, and they weren’t really as serious. So, that’s an interesting data.
What I would do, is, get them to show their interest in the thread or to private message me their interest. Then I could follow up with them, and then I could send them the link via private message. So, it didn’t reduce the reach on the post.
A little trick. I know it works, because I’ve tested it. But you’d always want to keep testing, because the algorithms are changing, and sort of we’re gaming it, and it’s gaming us. If you make a post, and then share a link, I don’t know, a few minutes later, often you can get away with not being reduced so much in your reach.
Okay, next then, the first hour of your post is the most important, because the first hour is when the algorithms are reading your posts the most. I know this to be true on many of the other social media platforms too. So, generally speaking, your post might reach up to 3 percent of your audience initially. And then if you get more comments and engagements, you get a higher score, whether it’s a like, a share, a comment, or a click on a slide share, for example, or on a document, then you’re going to get pushed to more people, and more people in second stage connections and third stage connections. So, that first hour for engagement is really important.
It’s really wise for you to keep that hour relatively free. What a lot of people do, is, post and then go off about their day. That makes common sense to do. But the problem with that, is, you’re not there to engage, when people comment on your posts. So, therefore, it’s you’re not pushing your reach wider.
Your post counts as part of the score. But just saying thank you is not enough. I believe it needs to be 5-7 words, something like that. You’d never know exactly. There’s always a bit of theory out there. But if you put at least 7 words and engage a bit in the comments, and ask questions of the people that comment, then hopefully, encouraging them to respond again. Then hopefully, in that first hour, you might get 20 or 30 comments, and then what? You’re going to go wide, wide, wide, wide, wide, wide. Sometimes, post will go on for weeks, and weeks, and weeks, going wider, and wider, and wider, and wider, and wider. But that first hour is vital.
A lot of people are worried about critics, trolls, haters and wankers. I’m not. I like them on my threads, because the critics and the trolls, the haters, they encourage more debate. They get more people commenting. They often go and comment on a load. You reply to them. They reply back. You’re getting a bit of a debate or an argument with them. And that is brilliant for your algorithms. So, embrace that.
By the way, I just think it’s good from, anyway, on social media to get involved with discussion and debate with everyone, not just people who agree with you, and go, yeah, Rob, Love your work. Best of fan. That’s obviously great, and I like that. but that’s not getting extra comments, engagement. It’s not challenging my thinking. So, embrace that. If they go on and make a bit of an outrageous statement or critique you overly, ask them to explain. Thank them for their feedback. Have a bit of a joke with them, just to get more comments on your thread.
Document is a relatively new thing. You’ve got posts, articles, videos and documents as the kinds of posts you can post on LinkedIn. Now, document is getting really good reach. So, you can post a pdf. So, let’s say, and a good thing to do, is, say like, 10 ways to create, let’s say, recurring income. You might have books and audiobooks. You might have music, songs, films. You might have property, rental properties. You might have intellectual property. You might have franchise, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
If you wrote a 12-page pdf, the one-page word document, and then pdf it. Page One is the title. Make them really big letters. Then page 12 might be a summary, and maybe a couple of your social media handles. I don’t know, or a bit of bio about you. Then Pages 1 to 10 are just a few words on each one of the points as if you’re writing a bullet point list. But you put in the word document, and then you pdf it. Then when you upload it onto the document, it creates a slide share. It takes it from horizontal to vertical. And I’m told this by Sam Raphling who told me this, by the way. I’m told that each click, it counts as an engagement. And I’ve got one going that’s got about 13,000 views literally, just today or yesterday. That may go up more and more. Compared to a couple of my live videos, which might only got 3,000 views. That’s a pretty good reach.
It’s not really an engagement jacking post, because they’re the ones that get the most or story, they’re the ones that get the most. But it’s very visual. Like I said, those clicks count as engagement. So, start using the documents more. Imagine you’re almost like doing it like a PowerPoint presentation. Make it really big and clear and summarised, not like full of words. Don’t upload a book, for example.
Next is lives. so, I’m doing this as a LinkedIn Live as well as my podcast, The Disruptive Entrepreneur. Not many people have the live functionality, but I am hearing more and more people getting it. Now, with LinkedIn Lives, I found that I was doing 2 or 3 a week. I was getting a bit of resistance, because the way it notifies people on LinkedIn is quite invasive compared to other social media platforms. Obviously, it’s new, and they’re testing it. People like myself using it. A lot of people had been trying to get it for months, and couldn’t get it.
I’ve found once to twice a week was about the optimum. In fact, I’d even ask my followers on LinkedIn, I have what, 73,000 with my connections and followers. I asked them how many would be ideal, and they said between one and 2 a week. Now, I would do more, if the engagement went up significantly. But at one point, I was losing 100 to 200 followers per live, because it’s a new functionality. So, obviously, it was a little bit invasive for people. So, I’ve kind of calmed it down now to one or 2 a week. That’s seems to be about an optimum number.
Keep pushing to get the functionality, because I know people are pushing, and they’re getting it. What is a bit frustrating for me, is, the reach. It’s not as good as it was. It’s probably gone down by two-thirds. I haven’t been able to have a chance to look at this video yet, because the switcher app doesn’t let me see all the comments. Because it’s still very new lives on LinkedIn. I’m certainly not giving up on it. But I think the functionality needs to improve. I think the reach needs to improve. So, I’ve got a bit of beginner’s luck, or at least they were giving me really good reach to start, because I was one of the very few people at the start to have a LinkedIn Live functionality.
Next then, is, recommendations on LinkedIn. Focus on getting and giving recommendations. The great thing about recommendations on LinkedIn, is, if you give one, it’ll private message them saying they’ve got one. So, they’re likely then to maybe, give you one back or at least the law of reciprocity would state that you think that they maybe would do that. So, go around, giving recommendations for people you really trust, respect, admire, and follow their work, and have used their services on LinkedIn. And over time you’ll get good recommendations.
I have thousands of reviews on my books, thousands of reviews on say, Trustpilot and Facebook, and everywhere else. It can sometimes get a bit like, ah, I need more reviews. I need more reviews. Well, I think once you get to 100 on any of those platforms, you’re probably all right. But if you have 2 recommendations on LinkedIn, it’s kind of not really good social proof. So, you’d definitely want to increase that.
SSI, so the social selling index, I think it’s a bit of a gamification. It’s the way that LinkedIn score you. I guess, the high the score, the higher LinkedIn rank. So, therefore, it’s probably going to be good for your reach and the quality. I’m not going into detail about a lot of that. People know a lot more about that than I do. On 3 of the scores, I’m pretty high up. But the one I’m the lowest on, is, the one where it’s essentially engaging with others. And on LinkedIn, because I find the feed a little bit more clunky compared to Facebook, because it was like put a post up, which someone else has liked. I don’t think you should be doing that. I think you should clean it.
But I’m spending more time now scrolling on LinkedIn, and replying and commenting on other people’s posts, not just on my own, because that will be good for my engagement score. Of course, the more people you comment on, the algorithm is probably going to show your stuff in their feed, I’d say probably, because you’ll never know.
Then finally, adding connections properly. So, don’t just add connections willy-nilly. You can search via demographic niche, job title, et cetera on LinkedIn. So, I could search CEO, Co-Founder, Founder, entrepreneur, investor, start-up, and all those words that are of my niche and demographic. I could search those on LinkedIn. I would then find all the people who are those.
It’s wise for me to only add connections who are of that niche. Why for me, only to accept connections of that niche? Because in the early days of social media platforms, we all just add, add, add, accept, accept, accept. But once you max out in your connections, then you have a problem. And I had maxed out on my 30,000 connections years ago. I had like thousands of requests that I couldn’t accept. And a lot of those would have been people that would have been good for me to be connected with.
I’ve done a big purge cleanse, where I have sort of un-unconnected with people who are clearly not in my demographic, where there’s nothing in common with us. It doesn’t notify them so you can do that. And I’m going to keep it maybe, 50 or 100 under 30,000. So, when the right people connect with me, because you might get the big influencers connect with you, then you can accept the connection. So, it’s not just the vanity thing. Make sure, I don’t know why this is, actually. Hopefully, someone can answer this in the thread.
But if you look on some people’s profile, they don’t have followers, and others they do have followers. And I wonder, if there is a way that you switch the follower function on. I don’t know. Or, it’s some people get it and some people don’t. But once you max your connections out, or even before that, people can follow you. That’s obviously a good way to follow big influencers. As you get bigger on LinkedIn, it’s a good way for people to follow. It means they see your post, but you don’t see theirs.
Okay, so, if you’ve got any questions at all about LinkedIn, please post in the comments below. I’m not a LinkedIn trainer, or guru, or anything like that. I’m just doing well on LinkedIn. I know many very well-known LinkedIn trainers use me as their case studies. So, they must think I’m doing something right. I’m always testing, by the way. I make mistakes like everybody else. But because I have a continual testing mindset, I usually figure things out. I’m also investing a lot of money and time at the moment on even more training on LinkedIn, et cetera to leverage it to the best capacity.
Now, one thing I don’t really do, which a lot of people do, and I only don’t do it, because I don’t need to do it, is, I don’t really sell on LinkedIn. And I probably should do that more, because when I did on January 4th, I generated one-third of 350 grand via LinkedIn. So, well over 100 grand basically in one video post and one text post.
It definitely does work, and works, I think, a lot more than other platforms. Because I think, people are more ready to buy on LinkedIn. It’s normal to sell and be sold on LinkedIn compared to other social media platforms. And of course, it’s more business focussed. When the Cambridge Analytica Scandal came out, and this came out what? Oh, February 4th last that came out, let’s say, 22 months ago, nearly 2 years now. Immediately, I saw something changed on LinkedIn. So, that was, by the way, it’s only then that I started posting a lot more on LinkedIn. Well, in fact, I was hardly posting at all. And occasionally, my outsourcer would just copy-paste posts from Facebook or something like that.
Literally, on the day of the Scandal, I remember, because I was running the Speaker Bootcamp in Tenerife, my VA emailed me, and he went, mate, have you seen what’s going on your LinkedIn? You’re getting 200 plus organic followers a day. Something has changed. We should go and figure this out. And literally, the connections were just coming in, and in, and in. People were following me left, right, and centre. I wasn’t doing anything at all. I just let it sort of, my account’s set dormant for 10 years. So, clearly, they’d changed something in the algorithm when a lot of people left Facebook, because of the Cambridge Analytica Scandal. Then obviously, if you look at their feed now, it’s way much more like Facebook, and there’s continual scroll, which is, common on most of the social media platforms now.
Certainly, LinkedIn has dramatically up their game. It’s a brilliant platform. And I’m going to be spending a lot more time on it. So, if you’re listening to my Disruptive Entrepreneur Podcast, I’m pointing, because here is my Zoom H1, make sure you follow me on LinkedIn. I think, it’s robmooreprogressive1979, or it’s robprogressive1979. But you can find me by searching my name Rob Moore. Because I’m going to be doing a lot more content on LinkedIn, specific content on LinkedIn that won’t be on any other platform. Obviously, I do LinkedIn Lives just on LinkedIn. I don’t share them anywhere else. I’m doing a couple of them a week.
And of course, if you’re watching this live, make sure you listen to my podcast, The Disruptive Entrepreneur. I’m doing 3 episodes a week now. If you want any help, and support, and knowledge, and information, and inspiration on starting and scaling your business, if you’re at sort of zero to 20 million, it’s probably the right podcast for you.
