In this episode of the Social Selling Show, Will and Daniel talk about some of the new and exciting features on LinkedIn and how you can effectively use them.
Featured on this episode:
Resources:
- The Daily Sales LinkedIn Page
- The Million Pound LinkedIn Message by Daniel Disney
- StreamYard – a live streaming studio in your browser.
- Restream – a cloud multistreaming service
Transcript
Will Barron:
This episode of the show is brought to you from the Salesman.org, HubSpot Studio. Welcome to the Social Selling Show with myself Will Barron founder of Sales.org and the King of Social Selling, Daniel Disney. Daniel, how’s it going?
Daniel Disney:
I’m very good Will excited to be back. And once again, a very good topic today, a little bit lighter than I think our last conversation. But I’m excited to talk about some of the new features on LinkedIn and highlight some of the great opportunities that are up and coming.
Who Needs to Start Going Live on LinkedIn? · [00:34]
Will Barron:
For sure. We’re going to get into LinkedIn Live, LinkedIn Stories, Newsletters, Polls, company pages and a whole lot more. So with that said let’s start with the Live side of things because I’ve just done a few LinkedIn Lives. And hopefully if you’ve listened to this show, the Social Selling Show five episodes ago, you’ll have heard me saying I was going to apply for Live. I got literally the connection request or the ability to go live a week later, just before we jumped on the next show so you might have been following this journey. I’ve gone live a few times on LinkedIn now and I’m really enjoying it. I think there’s a tonne of opportunity with LinkedIn Live, Daniel. I guess, the starting point is who should be if the audience are B2B salespeople, mainly B2B sales leaders, who should be going live on LinkedIn, is it appropriate for our audience?
Daniel Disney:
I genuinely think it is, obviously, it’s different for people like you and I will who broadcast content to give out the value that we do. But imagine if you were a sales rep, imagine you’re an SDR, you could do a live interview with a product expert, with an industry expert, with an author that can give so much value to your audience. So I think there’s a tonne of opportunities for any person of any level within a business to build and create credible live content. And I think it worked great. We talk about lots of the SDR personal brands being built in the industry. All of them could do great live content on their own sharing their stories and knowledge and experiences, but also interviewing other people as well. So I think it’s something that’s applicable to anyone.
Will Barron:
Yep. And last week’s show we covered how to spots BSs. People who are saying one thing, delivering another, people who claim that they’re experts but there maybe a lack of expertise in the conversations that they’re actually having. Live is a great opportunity for you to show your true expertise in a subject. Because unlike a prerecorded YouTube video or like this show, we never cut anything out this but we could chop and change it and if we have mistakes we could easily cover it up. Live, if you’re talking nonsense, you look like an idiot.
How to Use LinkedIn Lives to Cement Your Credibility as an Industry Expert · [02:34]
Will Barron:
And I’ve been there, I’ve looked stupid on live chats before and live podcast interviews. You can’t undo it, once it’s on the internet it’s there forever, so I don’t want to scare people away. But if you are truly an expert in your subject, there’s nothing other than a customer testimonial or a customer conversation with a prospect. There’s probably nothing other than just a live chat, a Q&A session that allows you to show your expertise. Is there anything more effective than that for someone to show their expertise in a subject?
“There is nothing more authentic and real than live content.” – Daniel Disney · [03:31]
Daniel Disney:
No, it’s the next best thing to face-to-face Will, this is similar to getting on stage in front of an audience who are just doing it virtually which is something that we’ve become so accustomed to now, but you’re absolutely right. And it’s not to scare people away. I think the key thing is you don’t have to be an expert to deliver a LinkedIn live. You can share a story, you can share a challenge. You could be an SDR talking about the 100 calls you made yesterday and the lessons you learned from it, the successes you had, the failures you had. Again, you’re not an expert, you’re sharing real insights. And if you’re not an expert, you can bring in experts and interview them as well. So you don’t have to be an expert to do a LinkedIn Live, but you’re absolutely right there is that full transparency, which people like there is nothing more authentic and real than live content.
Will Barron:
And what you’re describing there is the Salesman Podcast, I have on people all the time that have far more expertise than what I have. Yesterday, I had on a attorney, she just specialises in contracts, to talk about whether salespeople should be signing contracts, how to sign a contract. I don’t know if you’ve ever pondered on this Daniel, but she was saying that if you sign a contract on behalf of a company, you should always write your name comma representative of XYZ company. And that covers you then in case the contract goes south, the company gets sued. It takes you off the line because you’re forcing that language into the contract. I’ve never done that. I would never even have thought to do that until I had this expert on the Salesman Podcast. And that’s why I do go out of my way to people who are far smarter and more intelligent than me.
Will Barron:
So if you are new to sales, perhaps you’ve got a smaller audience, perhaps you’re tenured in sales but you want to move into marketing or social selling or whatever it is. Having these people on a live chat is a good opportunity to get selfish with some of this of, you’re showing things to the audience, your audience, so the guest is more than happy to come on and speak with you. But you get to suck all of this out of the guest and have a chat with them at the same time.
How to Apply and Get Approved For LinkedIn Live · [05:11]
Will Barron:
And I’ve spoken to people on the Salesman Podcast, Formula One racing drivers, NASCAR drivers and astronauts, Olympic athletes, all these individuals, that if I was like, “Hey, can I just jump on the phone for a second?” They’d be like, “Who is this?” And the call would be ended. So there’s multiple layers to this but I think Live might be the most exciting part of LinkedIn right now. And obviously I’m biassed because I’m a broadcaster, we’re creating content, so that sways into things. But Daniel, how do we get on Live because it’s not as simple as just creating a post and pushing it out there is it?
Daniel Disney:
No, it is very different to platforms like Facebook, where you automatically have it and you click a button and you’re live. With LinkedIn and we’ve talked about this in previous episodes, you have to apply for it, you go through an application process. Sometimes it takes five, six applications before you get approved. And Will you obviously got approved quickly, probably a large part through to the fact you’ve done so much video content in the past. They do ask for you to link in examples of video content. So if you haven’t done one, maybe try and do a live video with someone else who has it, or do create some video content that you can link in. However, what I have heard is that they are opening the flood gates a bit more now to let more people into Live, so it is a lot easier than it used to.
Daniel Disney:
You apply, hopefully, you get approved at some point, you then have to find a third-party platform. So I use a platform called StreamYard and Will I know you use Restream. And actually, I’m probably going to move across to Restream I’ve heard it offers quite a lot more than what StreamYard does. But anyway, LinkedIn gives you advice, they send you eight to 10 different platforms you can use. You go on to that platform and it essentially streams then through LinkedIn and other networks. So it’s a bit of a process, but as I’m sure you can testify for Will once you’ve got that process set up, it’s very easy.
Will Barron:
Now I’ve got it setup… We talked about this before we clicked record. I’m doing things in hardware like physical switches and cameras in the studio that the average person, I don’t say average in a negative way. The person who isn’t trying to create media that’s going to be shared on other platforms and repurposed, for example, doesn’t need to do. If you are wanting to just get on to LinkedIn, have a live Q&A with an audience that you’ve already built on there. You jump into Restream, you log in, literally just one click it’ll connect to your LinkedIn account. You can connect to other accounts as well, if you want a stream on Facebook, other places, and then it connects through your webcam microphone and you’re done. You’re on there, it’s dead simple. You can very much like Zoom and Skype, send someone a link and then they can jump in the conversation as well.
Why LinkedIn Uses Other Streaming Platforms for Streaming Lives · [07:47]
Will Barron:
And you probably need, I would advise people that it’s probably worth having two screens to do this if possible, the desktop setup so that you can have the chat on one screen, you can see yourself and the guest or just yourself if it’s a Q&A on your own on other screen and you can monitor things a little bit more easily. You could do it side-by-side on a smaller screen, on a laptop, but I feel like a small investment in a second monitor will help your productivity in general and may help with this as well. I don’t know. We might be getting too technical here, but do you know why they don’t allow direct connections? Do you know why they have to suggest you go through or force you to go through a third party whereas other platforms don’t?
Daniel Disney:
Will, I really don’t and it baffles me given that obviously LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, you’d think if of any company was going to be able to do it, it would be them. I can imagine there must’ve been some logical reason for it but I certainly don’t know the answer, given how Facebook have made it 10 times easier to stream directly through it. I don’t know.
Will Barron:
I don’t know either anyone who’s technical may be able to offer some guidance and maybe they want to work with specific partners so that they can manage three or four relationships rather than dealing with every different type of Mac, every different type of iPhone and before it rolls out more prominently. Okay. So that is LinkedIn Live. Anything else to add Daniel before we move on to stories?
Daniel Disney:
No, just if you haven’t already applied it’s probably worth applying you don’t have to be ready to do it yet, but at least get your application in. So whether it takes three, four or five attempts, at least your way into that journey through that time you can then start to plan what software you’re going to use, what you’re going to talk about, et cetera. But in case it takes a little bit of a might as well stop applying.
How to Effectively Use LinkedIn Stories · [08:58]
Will Barron:
Yep. For sure. Okay. Stories. I promised you a few weeks ago on a previous recording that I was going to download the LinkedIn app and I was going to start experimenting with stories and I’ve broken that promise. What I’m going to do you can watch it live, I’m going to put me phone at the end of the table now and that will now remind me before I leave the studio when we wrap up, I will download the app and I’ll do it. Part of the problem is I use a password manager to manage all my passwords so it’s just gobbledygook. So I can’t just log in quickly on the app, I’ve got to log into the laptop and sort out what this password is. So that’s my excuse, I’m sticking with it Daniel. But stories, are they just the same as Instagram Stories? Is that a perfect kind of metaphor of what they’re doing on LinkedIn?
Daniel Disney:
Will, they’re exactly like Instagram Stories. They had a bit of a spike when they first came out and some people hated them, but quite a lot of people were using them and I feel it’s died down quite a lot, actually a significant amount. People are still using them. It’s just going to align to the type of people that were probably using them on Instagram and Facebook a lot. The benefit I’ll give them that they’re not a bad form of content. The beauty of it is, well, we’ve obviously covered content.
Daniel Disney:
I would certainly personally recommend you don’t post more than once a day. LinkedIn has given similar advice to be fair, but with a story it’s micro content. So you can post three, four, five even more micro stories and it does allow you to share quite a lot more content in a single sitting. So there are benefits to it, but I would say it’s quite a small percentage of LinkedIn users that are consuming it. So you will be reaching a far smaller audience than say posting directly to the platform. But if you are a story poster on other platforms then absolutely utilise it on LinkedIn.
What are LinkedIn Newsletters and How Can Salespeople Get the Most Out of Them? · [10:55]
Will Barron:
Sure. If you’re doing this on Instagram and maybe it’s slightly less congruent because you captioned it once and then you probably faked the excitement the second time round with the same content that you’re going to create. But it makes sense to just double up on this, but as I said, I’ll experiment with it and I’ll report back. Okay. Newsletter. Now one, are you on this newsletter thing yet? And if you are, how the heck do I get on it because it seems to be blowing up.
Daniel Disney:
Will, I’m not. And I hope you hear the frustration in my tone. I grew up on LinkedIn with articles. I love creating blogs and articles on LinkedIn. And a newsletter is articles that people can subscribe to it is everything that I could possibly dream off of for LinkedIn. They’re essentially re elevating articles back on the platform. It is very selective who they’re picking to choose it. I have written to them quite a few times, trying to get newsletters unlocked for my profile is not happened yet. I will keep banging that door down Will until it eventually opens up, but the people that are using it, I’ve seen people now grow bigger audiences through their newsletter subscribers than they have LinkedIn followers.
Daniel Disney:
People are really tapping this up, which goes to show how many people Will, I don’t know if you’ve seen, I’ve seen so many people trying to say articles are dead on LinkedIn. I think this is evidence enough that they very clearly are not dead on LinkedIn. And if anything, people want more than they want to be that connected and directly subscribed to it. So I’m excited for when it does get rolled out. Hopefully, it’s something I’ll be able to get soon or you’ll get to get sooner and we can provide some better insights. But from an outside perspective looking at the people that are publishing them they’re looking very successful.
The Argument Behind LinkedIn Not Completely Rolling Out The New Newsletter Feature · [14:12]
Will Barron:
Can you just share with us actually I jumped the gun slightly there, but what are they and what do they look like in the feed? Because I’ve had lots of notifications on LinkedIn of people who I’ve got this feature who are asking me to join their newsletter. Now, as soon as this widens out they’ll get rid of that ability to spam your audience and get people to sign up because obviously people’s notifications will be full. But what happens when you do sign up to someone’s newsletter? How does the content hit your feed or notifications?
Daniel Disney:
So it comes through as an email notification and it will ping as a standard notification on your LinkedIn homepage. It’s no different to subscribing to an email newsletter, it comes through in your email and then you’ll read it, it’s very much written like blog content. You write it within the article platform. I’ve been doing some reading on how it actually works. You go into writing an article, but you just publish it through to your newsletter and people will just subscribe to it. Newsletters, email newsletters are a massively successful marketing tool and LinkedIn baking it into their profiles is a brilliant idea.
Daniel Disney:
They’re just taking a little bit longer than usual to roll this out. And they’re being more selective than usual in that rollout period, so there has been some rumours Will that is not going to be rolled out. So I have seen a few people saying that LinkedIn are apparently not rolling it out, but there are just as many people saying they are. So at the moment grey area but hopefully within a future episode we’ll have some more clarity on it.
Will Barron:
I guess some of the problem… As you say that some of the problem is it could massively cannibalise the LinkedIn Newsfeed. So we talked about it in this show before, I have a… I can’t remember the plugin for Google Chrome, but it basically removes the newsfeed from LinkedIn because it’s too distracting. I want to get in, I want to get notifications, I want to post, I want to get out before I get suckered into some content or training or whatever it is and I lose 15 minutes of my life. Now, if people are posting directly to the user base and there’s opportunity for longer form content which could be more persuasive and more valuable, you may see people posting less in the newsfeed. Now if everyone who doesn’t block the newsfeed, clearly LinkedIn is making a tonne of revenue and will make even more revenue over time from advertisements within the newsfeed.
Will Barron:
So maybe they know that someone’s scrolling for 10 minutes and consuming content consumes 50 ads versus someone getting a notification reading one long form post, where they only consume two ads and so they’re going to cannibalise their own ad revenue by implementing the new feature. Now long-term that’s not a smart approach because you want people’s attention on the platform, you can find out ways to monetize it. But who am I to tell Microsoft and LinkedIn what to do, right? But that might be why, they might’ve just seen from the data, they get way less ads in the amount of time that people are spending on the platform via articles, via newsletters, versus just getting people to scroll endlessly for a newsfeed. So it does make sense if their treating it as an experiment as opposed to a new feature that’s definitely rolling out.
Daniel Disney:
No, I completely agree Will and that could absolutely be the results that might put them off rolling out, that’s why they test these things. They test it first to see the impact positive and or negative and then determine whether it’s going to be rolled out to the network. So personally, I can see the potential damages but I think there’s a lot of potential in it. So fingers crossed it does come out Will because I think it could be a great opportunity.
LinkedIn’s Feature Application and Selection Criteria · [16:10]
Will Barron:
And the point of me saying… I didn’t finish up the story there, but the point of me saying that I don’t consume the content in the newsfeed because I’m not really in control of it. But if I could subscribe to Daniel Disney, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett and their newsletters hit me. I would then consume that content and I would scrap everything else off. I’d spend more time on LinkedIn if I could curate better the content that hits me, so it would become a more viable platform to me. So there’s definitely something to this. And let me ask you this before we move on to polls and then company pages. How does LinkedIn… You’ve got a massive audience on your own personal page, massive audience on your business page. I guess the main page that you post memes and that side of things on and content.
Will Barron:
How does LinkedIn choose… I’m thinking of one individual, who’s a social selling trainer who has access to this feature, but she’s got a way smaller audience than yourself. How does LinkedIn choose who gets these features? Now for Live you apply to it, you get it or you don’t. But similarly for newsletters and other things, this individuals in the UK as well so it’s not even like location-based that’s separating it. It seems like you have way more content and adding way more… I like this other person as well, but you’re potentially way more value. You’re certainly posting way more than this individual is on LinkedIn. You’ve got way bigger audiences, yet she has this and you don’t, how is LinkedIn choosing this?
Daniel Disney:
So I see this with a lot of various things that LinkedIn does, how they feature, how they choose their top voices. A lot of it tends to, from my perspective, boil down to who they know and the relationships they might have with other people. I don’t know Will, ultimately I am all game for anything LinkedIn. They approached me last week and asked me to support them with International Women’s Day, it’s one of the first times they’ve actually come to me and asked me to work with them on something. We did a few things a few years ago.
Daniel Disney:
Some of it, I imagine boils down to relationships and who they see on their feeds, who they’re aware of on their radar. They can’t see everyone. It’s not going to long and they’re going to have a billion users, it is impossible for anyone working within LinkedIn to know every single user and what they’re doing. A lot of it probably boils down to previous relationships but if anyone from LinkedIn is watching or listening to this episode and they want any help testing features, I’m here.
LinkedIn Polls and Why They’re So Effective in Driving Engagement · [18:21]
Will Barron:
Definitely go to Daniel because they asked me to get involved with the LinkedIn Learning training content for sales. And I told them to get stuffed because we’ve got our own platform and I never heard after from them again. So there’s a lesson there for the audience of relationships do matter in some of these things. Giving it a bit up front perhaps it is useful for longer term, if you want to get a bit more from these platformed business relationships and deals and whatever it is. So polls, there’re not new but you were saying before we clicked record Daniel that they are becoming effective.
Daniel Disney:
So they are a newer feature. I would probably say maybe a year and a half now. So it’s still technically a new feature than most of the common ones, but they are on the rise. They landed quite popular. They were doing well, they plateaued out a bit as other features like Live and that came out. But there’s just been this huge rise in the engagement levels that polls are driving. And a big part of it is actually people writing good polls. So actually putting engaging questions and engaging options, but the way LinkedIn’s designed it, I think is genius in that to see the results of a poll you have to vote. And that’s brilliant because it’s just encouraging more and more people to vote.
Daniel Disney:
Polls are doing really well. They’re a great way for salespeople, for businesses to data capture, to get insights into their audience, into their customer’s, data that they can use in future content. And it’s a great way to drive engagement into your audience. So polls are doing really well. If you haven’t done a poll yet, they’re pretty easy to do, they’re easy to set up. You don’t have to apply for anything, but they’re a very good form of content and again on the rise at the moment.
Will and Daniel Try Out A Good Example of an Engaging LinkedIn Poll · [19:30]
Will Barron:
I’m going to put you on the spot, Daniel, and we’re going to do a poll right now on LinkedIn.
Daniel Disney:
Love it.
Will Barron:
It would be useful for the audience here to understand what a good poll is. So my audience similar to your audience B2B salespeople. Using LinkedIn to prospect and hopefully I’m adding some value to them. What would be a good example of a poll question that me and you could ask to our audience right now?
Daniel Disney:
Well, if we do a social selling one obviously aligned to the Social Selling Show we could do lots of sales focused polls as well. But maybe a good one for a social selling type poll is maybe what is your favourite type of content on LinkedIn? And the options could be a text post, could be an image, maybe we then do a video and then the last one could be a LinkedIn Poll and we could see what people vote for.
Will Barron:
I’m typing it as we go along here. What is your favourite social selling content on LinkedIn? Go through those results again, please Daniel.
Daniel Disney:
So a text post, option one, option two, an image, option three, video-
Will Barron:
Video.
Daniel Disney:
… and then option four a LinkedIn Poll.
Factors That Determine the Success of a LinkedIn Poll · [21:20]
Will Barron:
LinkedIn Poll. It’s a shame we’re not recording for another few hours here. If the show was three hours long, we could report back at the poll results and it would probably tell us LinkedIn Poll would be either massive or a massive disappointment. We could prove ourselves right or wrong with the content of the poll that would suggest whether the poll is good or bad, but I will post that in a second and we’ll get some results in from there. We’ll probably talk about it next week. I love doing these things live and as practical as we can, I think there’s real value in that for the audience. Now let me pull up the doc backup. Anything else to add on polls, other than it may be something to consider if they’re becoming more effective and getting more attention on the platform.
“A poll will be successful if it’s an interesting poll. I’ve seen plenty of bland polls like what did you have for breakfast this morning? But it has to be something that’s valuable to your audience where either they feel compelled to contribute their answer or they’re compelled to vote to see what other people are saying.” – Daniel Disney · [21:30]
Daniel Disney:
Yeah. Again, the last bit, I’ll just echo this again. A poll will be successful if it’s an interesting poll. I’ve seen plenty of bland polls like what did you have for breakfast this morning? But it has to be something that’s valuable to your audience where either they feel compelled to contribute their answer or they’re compelled to vote to see what other people are saying. They need to be engaging. So just think about it. There is a tonne of engaging things you could do. I’m going to give you some sales ones Will, it could be what’s generating the most leads right now. The phone, email, LinkedIn, video messages and people will be interested to see what other people are generating results from. There’s a whole host you could do. So make them engaging is my final thought.
The Number of LinkedIn Polls We Should Be Doing Per Week · [22:05]
Will Barron:
And how many a week should we be doing, assuming that we’re not doing a poll every single day?
Daniel Disney:
I’d say no more than one a week Will.
How to Use and Get the Most Out of LinkedIn Company Pages · [22:16]
Will Barron:
That makes sense. Okay. So company pages, so this may be applicable for some of the audience, it may not be applicable for some of the audience. I know that for a fact because we’ve had a bunch of questions come in over the past few months from marketers, who are using social selling and essentially doing social selling and trying to feed that back into the sales streams. And trying to build this feedback loop of content being created, that they then reshare on their own company profiles and bring it back and forth to make the company profiles more human. Another layer of individual expertise as opposed to the usual corporate, just pretty graphics and no substance behind them. So with that said, Daniel, what’s happening with company pages for those individuals who have access to them, what changes are ahead? What do we have to look forward to with regards to company pages?
Daniel Disney:
So LinkedIn are essentially expanding the options that company pages have. So one of the things they’re now adding in are more feature pages. So you’ll have your main company page, but then you’ll be able to have almost multiple web pages where you can start to promote products and services in a lot more detail. So essentially your company page is going to become a micro website. So that’s really exciting, it’s going to allow you to go a lot more in depth. Whereas at the moment you go on a company page, you can find out about the company in a bit of text and a link to the website and then you’ve got their activity feed. Well, now you’re going to have the ability to have multiple pages. And then the other feature, which I think there’s been a few ways that this has already been out for a while, but I think they’re expanding it again is the ability for company pages to comment on content.
Daniel Disney:
Now, a company page has always been able to reply to comments on its own posts. So if I post something through a company page, I can reply to people’s comments as the company page. But now you’re able to comment on anyone’s post, user, company page as that company and it’s essentially giving companies a voice. And I don’t know if you saw this Will, it was a post that actually shared it and it went viral on LinkedIn. The whole beans on Weetabix, where it was this whole feed of all these brands commenting and it went nuts and it was so amazing.
Daniel Disney:
Well, LinkedIn is now essentially giving their company pages, their corporate brands, the opportunity to have a voice and people love it. Again, I don’t know if you saw the Burger King one for International Women’s Day, which was Women Belong in the Kitchen and they were using it to explain that actually there are less women in chef roles and things like that. And they’re going to try and support that and contribute to that. But again, giving brands a more human voice is becoming a very powerful marketing activity.
Will Barron:
For sure. I’m on our company page at Salesman.org and I probably am a super admin, not just an admin I’m a super admin. Now there’s a big massive button in the right-hand corner it says new and admin tools. And interesting, as we talk about sponsorships and paid advertising within LinkedIn, there’s a massive button that says, “Would you like to sponsor an update?” So their going down clearly the Facebook route eventually of boosted posts, sponsored posts within a newsfeed that will become a… As organic reach starts to shrink they’re reducing organic reach to push paid content, but it allows me to add admins.
Will Barron:
And this is important if you work for a small, medium size company and you work in sales and perhaps you are the only sales person, especially if it’s a startup. Maybe you want to be an admin on the LinkedIn page of the organisation and you start posting content on there, even if you’re only liking and resharing your own content that could be a hack to drive… not even a hack, a strategy to drive more likes and subscribers to your own content. What else do we have, create a showcase page. I’m going to click this. So this creates a page name, linkedin.com/showcase and then a URL. And then I assume if I click create page we’re essentially creating some kind of article that you’ll be able to see on the main page, is that correct?
Daniel Disney:
It’s a page that’s attached to your company page.
How Do LinkedIn Credits Work and Should Companies be Using Them? · [26:13]
Will Barron:
Cool. That makes sense. And the other ever think I’ve never even noticed. I’ve got a hundred credits to invite people to follow people in my organisation. Should I be using these credits Daniel?
Daniel Disney:
Personally, Will, I’m not a fan unless you’re going to genuinely send them to qualified people. So I get tonnes of messages from people inviting me to follow their company pages. 99% of them are company pages I’m going to get no value from, and to be fair just from an honest feedback perspective, I find it quite an aggressive way to ask for something. It’s the same principle Will, you can send someone a message through LinkedIn asking for them to give you a recommendation, but if you do it automatically through LinkedIn it just comes as a really bland message, “Daniel would like you to recommend them.” And I think that’s quite… That’s not a nice way to ask for something.
“If you want someone to follow your company page, first of all, create valuable content so people actually want to follow it themselves. But if you’re going to ask for someone to follow it, make sure you either have some relationship with them or you do think it’s going to be valuable.” – Daniel Disney · [26:57]
Daniel Disney:
If you want someone to follow your company page, first of all, create valuable content so people actually want to follow it themselves. But if you’re going to ask for someone to follow it, make sure you either have some relationship with them or you do think it’s going to be valuable. Again, a lot of people just think by spamming those out, they’re going to increase their followers significantly, those shortcuts don’t work.
Should Individuals Be Creating Professional Company Pages? · [27:25]
Will Barron:
Okay. And final thing on this before we move on to perhaps some rumours anything that’s hopefully coming in the future. Should salespeople, should marketers, whoever it is, go down the Jay-Z route of things where he’s quoted as saying, “I am the business.” Should they create their own company page, which is essentially a professional page for them. So we see this with keynote speakers individually like this where the individual is the business. Should we have a personal page where we share relevant, timely, useful content. Should we also create a company page for ourselves and post content on there as well? Or are we just diluting the content that we’re going to have to put out there by doing that?
Daniel Disney:
If you’re a sales person working for business I personally wouldn’t recommend it. I do have a company that, again, if you’re a speaker, if you are the product, if you’re a speaker, trainer, whatever you may be then absolutely. I’ll be honest, Will, I set this up maybe a year and a half ago, two years ago, purely for the fact that having me work for me. If you don’t have a company page, it has that bland blank box on your profile, which is horrible. And I just wanted to have a more corporate logo thing on there, so I set up a company page. Now I haven’t shared a single bit of content through that page, but I’ve grown an audience of nearly 900 followers, zero content shared. I don’t know how they’re finding it or following it, but they must go through my profile and find it.
Daniel Disney:
So if you’re the product, absolutely. The only thing that would make me lean on that is if you’re starting to build a big brand. So your Sarah Braziers, you’re Tom Boston’s, your sales reps, your SDRs, your account executives that are building big brands then there absolutely could be credibility in them doing that. And if you’re a business owner, support them in doing it. It will keep them with you for longer if you support and help them grow it instead of trying to force it to something they do on their own, because they will do it on their own and then they’ll go. So I would support them in doing that, but only when you’re growing a really big brand like they are.
Exciting New LinkedIn Features Rumoured to Be in The Works · [29:44]
Will Barron:
Okay. That makes sense. And maybe that’s an aspirational goal for some of the audience. Maybe some of the audience just want to go to work, get leads, crush their quota and then get away from LinkedIn and F-ing else in the time out of working out of sales. But there will be some people listening who want to build that personal brand, that personal brand has value over the one to five years that you building it and it will help you get jobs, it will you become unsackable. We talked about it on the show, there is value in building that brand so I love that advice. Okay, Daniel, before we wrap up, is there anything that’s rumoured to come out as we record this episode? Is there anything that you think is exciting that might be coming to the platform? Is there anything that’s been removed? What should we look forward to or be excited about on LinkedIn moving forward?
Daniel Disney:
So there are two rumours Will that are exciting, one significantly more than the other, the first rumour and this is something LinkedIn’s been saying for the last two years now, they keep talking about reviving groups. Groups are terrible on LinkedIn, they used to be amazing many, many years ago, they died out. And LinkedIn does keep teasing that they’re going to reinvigorate them, redesign them, bring them back to the forefront of the platform, which I think they should do and I think it would be exciting to bring that component back. That’s pretty cool. But what I heard last week that’s got me very excited, which I really hope-
Will Barron:
Hold on. Hold on a second. I can see, the audience can probably see as well, you genuinely look excited about this. You go through the whole show being charismatic, putting across that good energy, it’s entertaining. You just turned then, something switched in you Daniel, this is genuine. I’m building that anticipation but tell us what it is.
Daniel Disney:
You’re going to know as soon as I tell you what this is, you’re going to know why I’m excited about it. But I think this is a lot of potential, both for me, obviously, as a content creator on LinkedIn. There has been some rumours, they are apparently hiring for a person that is going to be in a creative content creation management role. That essentially when people have hired like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram have hired into those roles, the essential longterm opportunity is that they’re going to start paying content creators on the platform.
Daniel Disney:
So people that have audiences, people that are creating content on a regular basis, they’re going to make those direct connections with ads like YouTube does where then a content creator will start to be able to directly earn revenue from the platform, from the ads that they use through their content. Which for heavy content creators like me, well, it’s a very exciting opportunity. And as someone who I think sponsored ads are good, I like it when I go on social media and they promote products that I am actually going to be interested in, I think it’s a win-win. And I think as LinkedIn grows and becomes a big player as it is doing in the social media, it is growing to be alongside your Facebooks, your Twitters, your Instagrams. I think this is a smart move for them. And a very good way to incentivize and reward the people that are putting time and creating good engaging content for their users.
Will Barron:
So two things on this… One, shit, I’ve got to start making more of an effort with LinkedIn, that’s the one. Two, just for context for the audience, we’ve got 45,000 subscribers on YouTube. We do anywhere monthly like a 100,000 to 200,000 views, depending on what videos pop and what works and what doesn’t. And we get paid via YouTube ads via Google AdSense, about two grand a month. We touched about this on the show before, but that pays our bills, pays the rent and stuff and it just comes in. Dead easy. I create the content anyway. It’s really just that extra top up of cash in a business each month. And so that could literally be game changing for someone who is on LinkedIn, like yourself, you do it more than that because you get way more attention and drive more attention on YouTube than what we do… You drive more attention on LinkedIn than the attention we drive on YouTube.
Will Barron:
So hopefully for you Daniel it’ll be multiple values of that but for stories in a B2B sales role, having an extra grand or two a month could be the difference between, “I have to do this job because I can’t quit because I don’t have a safety net.” And, “Hey, this has become a little bit of a side hustle. I’m adding value to a community and things are starting to take off here. Maybe I can do this full time. Maybe I can change jobs. Maybe I’ve got more flexibility.” So that’s really valuable for what is a very much distributed audience on LinkedIn.
Is LinkedIn About to Start Paying Content Creators? · [33:57]
Will Barron:
There’s very few people on LinkedIn who have that multiple million followers like you do have on YouTube, just because the platforms evolving over time, YouTube has been a bit more established for a longer period but that’s really exciting. Clearly this is rumours. LinkedIn could hire someone, fire someone the next week, say they’re not going to go forward with it. But if I had to put the pressure on Daniel, the gun to head, what’s the timeline for LinkedIn starting to pay you for all the free content that we’re generating.
Daniel Disney:
If I was to harbour a guess, I would probably say the earliest by the end of next year, at the end of 2022. I reckon we’re looking at least two years for them, but they’ll probably start testing it next year. If they hire someone pre summer this year, settling the role, brainstorm ideas, it’ll probably be early next year that they start to come up with some processes for it. They’ve got to create the systems behind the scenes to be able to facilitate it. Then it will be the early adopters, probably late next year. It would be awhile before it’s rolled out. But as you’ve just highlighted Will, for anyone using LinkedIn regardless of whether it happens I generate a lot of business from LinkedIn without things like that.
Daniel Disney:
This would be just a total gravy bit on top regardless there’s still an amazing opportunity on LinkedIn to start building a brand, growing a following and creating good content, that’s going to help you in your role regardless of whether LinkedIn pays you to do so. But if it is something that’s going to come up in the next couple of years you’ve got a couple of years head start now to potentially start building it. So when it does come, you’re at an advantage to everyone who’s then going to start jumping on it when it comes out.
Will Barron:
Love it. Love it. Okay, well, we’ll wrap up with that. We’ll wrap up the excitement from yourself. That was literally just a change in pace of tone there, so I appreciate that Daniel. That was Daniel Disney, the King of Social Sales my name is Will Barron founder over at Salesman.org. That was the Social Selling Show and we’ll speak to you again next week.
Daniel Disney:
See you next time.
