EP. 7- LinkedIn HACKS Influencers Don’t Want You To Know l Jay’s Scoop

Foreign welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this.

Not that I'm excited for the solo episode here today about LinkedIn engagement. And I'm going to share things that I'm literally not supposed to share, but I'm going to do it anyway.

And I hope when you're done with this, you really will be able to amp up your engagement on LinkedIn, because I'm going to give you some specific, very specific things that you could do that actually will make a significant difference. At the end, I'll talk about some nonsense in my life. I don't know what that is yet, but we'll get there. So LinkedIn.

The first thing to think about LinkedIn, before we get into the tips, I want to talk about big picture on LinkedIn and what works and what doesn't work. We are all very boring. We are. We're boring. What we all pretty much do on LinkedIn is we go on there and we'll share.

This is something great that my company is doing. This is a new piece of research from my company, or look at me, I'm doing something really cool.

I got some new accreditation of some kind and 90% of the content on there is I'm great or my company is great. And let me tell you how much other people care about that. A zero burger. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about the whatever greatness your company's doing.

Nobody cares whatever greatness you're doing. I'm sorry, they don't.

So before even get into the tips, the secret sauce of LinkedIn and of marketing in general, engagement, social media, for that matter, is the way Gary Vee puts it. What he says is give, give, give, and then ask. You need to share content that lets the person who's looking at it get smarter.

Maybe they laugh something that is for them. Here's a tip about whatever. And the person who sees it can try that tip and they get better about whatever they do for a living, okay?

Or you post a funny meme and they laugh and go, ha, ha ha. And they share that with their network. Okay? Anything that is not for you, Right. But it's for them. And you do that three times in a row.

And then that fourth time after people are starting to like your, your posts, you can post, hey, my company's great. We have a new piece of research. Check it out. If all you're posting is for you, about you and your company, you are wallpaper, you are useless.

And nobody is going to engage. No one's going to like it, no one's going to comment, certainly no one's going to share it. So it give, give, give, and then ask.

What I mean by ask is, hey, I'm asking you to check out this thing that's about my company or about me. All right, so now let's move on to the tips here.

Let's assume for now that you are not going to be epically boring and you're actually going to share stuff that people want to see. But the problem is you still need to get people to engage with it.

And even if it's great content, what you're generally doing is you're hoping, you're hoping that people start to like it and comment on it, and then you're hoping the algorithm picks up on what you're doing. Here is the secret to LinkedIn that I'm not supposed to share.

Okay, what you need to do is right out of the gate, the first hour of your post is going to determine, right?

The first 60 minutes is going to determine whether or not the LinkedIn algorithm decides to pick this thing up and to circulate it a lot and to get it wide exposure. If you're not getting a lot of engagement in those first 60 minutes, forget it. It's not going to get any better.

So what do the biggest influencers, right, on LinkedIn do? Here's what they do and here's what you need to do. You need to get a handful of friends, okay?

You need to get a handful of friends that have a decent sized network. At least a thousand connections. At least a thousand connections. And then when you put something on LinkedIn, here's what you got to do.

You're going to go onto the post that you just posted and you're going to go in the upper right hand corner where you see the three dots and you're going to click on that and it's going to say share and then you're going to click share. Now you're going to put that in a text message and you're going to send it to your four or five friends that you already have this set up with.

So the secret sauce is you get four or five friends that literally you guys have the same deal with each other every Time one of you posts or your company posts, you're going to have a text group and you're going to send it to this group and they know instantly that they're going to go on and like and comment on that post and you're going to do it for them as well. It's your little LinkedIn friend group. And why does this matter?

Because if you have those four or five friends with a decent sized network within the first hour, like and comment on every post that you do, it will teach the algorithm to start to spread your post more widely. Okay. And this is something that influencers do across the board.

They don't talk about it because it's kind of like, that's kind of gimmicky, whatever. But this is how you get the algorithm to kick into gear and really circulate that stuff. So that's one piece. All right?

The second piece is liking and commenting on posts in general on a daily basis. Every morning I do LinkedIn for 15 minutes and I like and comment on stuff.

If you like and comment on five posts, and commenting is key and not just one word, like a sentence. If you like and comment on 5 posts from different random people in your network, okay.

It will significantly increase how the algorithm circulates posts when you post something because you are helping LinkedIn to have more engagement and to generate more engagement. So you liking commenting every day. I don't care what the posts are, but at least five times doesn't take long. How long does it take?

Two minutes, Right? It will significantly increase the distribution of your posts. Okay. The third piece is when you want to connect with somebody on LinkedIn.

If you write a custom note instead of just saying connect, if you write a custom note, you will see on average about a 35% higher acceptance rate than if you just hit the connect button. And when you write the custom note, let's say it's somebody, you're, you're really aiming high.

You're trying to get connected with the CEO of whatever, the senior vice president of whatever, who cares? And you're like these people a little bit out of my wheelhouse. But I want to connect with them so I can talk to them.

When you write that note, what you want to do is you want to go to their page, their profile, look at some of their recent posts. Okay? Something they wrote, something, whatever. Because we all have an ego. We do, right?

And what you're going to do is you see a post that they wrote up about whatever topic, and then when you go to connect with them, you go to that. When you can write a custom note to connect, you say, hey, dude. You don't call them dude, but hey, dude.

I really loved what you had to say about blah blah. It really got me going. Would love to connect to learn more from you. Right? And the person gets that and they're like, oh, yeah, cool.

They want to learn from me. They like what I wrote. It plays to their ego. They say yes. So this is a really easy way to boost your high end connections, if you will.

So do those things. If you really want to see your LinkedIn engagement, whether it's for a company page or or for a personal page, same rules apply.

All right, so now we get to the segment of this thing called since you didn't ask. And since you didn't ask really comes from this newsletter that I write called scoop, where at the end of my newsletter I share ridiculous things.

I don't know anything that's going on my life tv, I'm watching food, I'm eating, what's going on on the planet. And so what is going on? Okay, so I'm gonna tell you what's going on. So I'm very into the Bachelorette season, which I know is super embarrassing.

I know people think I just watch a lot of reality tv, and I do. But there's something about it right now that really I don't understand how this functions.

So the Bachelorette, you know, the show on ABC, you got like 30 guys and there's one girl and they're all trying to get engaged at the end. But here's what happens. And this happens almost every season on the Bachelor and the Bachelorette. And I don't understand how it's humanly possible.

So. So you get to the end and let's. In this case, the Bachelorette, and there's like three or four guys left.

And then she goes on these dates, these very long overnight dates with each one. But the thing that I don't understand is that she tells multiple guys that she's in love with them.

So she goes on a date on one day, and the guy says, I'm in love with you. And then she goes, I'm in love with you too. You're like, oh, that's going to be the winner. That's going to be the winner.

Because she said, I love you. And then the next day they go on, she goes on a date with another guy, and the guy goes, I'm in love with you. And she goes, I'm in love with you too.

And I fall off my couch. I turn to my wife and I go, how is that possible? How? It's not. It's not a thing. And that's not. What is that?

That is when you know she'll get engaged to one of them, but three months from now, it's going to fall apart because it doesn't make any sense. Okay. I don't know. It bothers me. Why does that bother me? Why am I talking about this on my podcast? I don't know. All right. Who cares?

So the moral of today's story is you need a few friends to help you out with LinkedIn. Cool. Don't tell multiple people within 48 hours that you love them. That is weird. And please give this thing the likes and subscribe and whatever.

And thanks for checking out. Do this not you did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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