Latest / #ContentChat / 3/23/26 #ContentChat: LinkedIn Strategies for Business Growth

Transcript

3/23/26 #ContentChat: LinkedIn Strategies for Business Growth · #ContentChat

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: This year.
• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know why.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to content chat.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Erica Heald, and joining me today as a fellow allergy sufferer, enjoying this crazy March weather.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, as an aside here in Sacramento, it was in the 90s over the weekend, 90 degrees March.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Weird stuff.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: But joining me today is Neil Schaefer, and we're going to be talking all about LinkedIn.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: So, Neil, take a minute to introduce yourself and tell folks a little bit about who you are, what you do, and maybe flash your book.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, sure.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, my name is, and you can see it down there, Neil Schaefer.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: I am a fractional CMO, author, speaker, consultant, university educator.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: I launched my business really organically.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: My background is B2B sales and biz dev in Asia before that.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Long story.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: But I launched my business really uh taking part in a lot of networking meetings locally, getting really deep in LinkedIn, answering questions that people had about LinkedIn, launching a blog about LinkedIn, which I actually launched on LinkedIn for those that remember.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: They used to have these apps and they had a WordPress.com app.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and that really uh launched into a blog, which then became a book, which then led to speaking opportunities.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then in January 2010, the fork in the road, the job offer on one hand, and the ability to uh already had some consulting opportunities in the other hand.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I decided to launch the you know digital marketing consultancy back then, and I haven't looked back.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: So LinkedIn is my first social media love.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: I've written six books and three of them are on LinkedIn.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: My most recent one is this book called Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth, the second edition, which just came out January 1st of this year.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: And while everybody talks about TikTok and Instagram, I am just doubling down on LinkedIn.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's amazing because you know, so many social media platforms and publishing platforms have come and gone since you launched your consultancy.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so LinkedIn has been this constant for us, especially for B2B marketers.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yet, you know, it kind of gets overlooked because people think, oh, well, it's kind of old hat.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: We need to jump on to something new, but it still is the best place to meet uh B2B buyers where they are.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: It hasn't changed, just those that have discovered it have become more numerous.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then those internet marketers who tried their tactics on Instagram and moved to TikTok, and now they move to LinkedIn, and you're always going to have uh those people, but yeah, LinkedIn has really just offered more opportunities for businesses um to get discovered, and obviously for professionals, even more so.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I like to say where other platforms like you know, Meta or TikTok, their primary revenue generator are ads.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: LinkedIn has LinkedIn sales navigator, LinkedIn has talent solutions for recruiters, so they don't just rely on ads, meaning they can give a little bit more organic visibility to people's content.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we all realize when we compare our impressions and hopefully our clicks compared to other networks that LinkedIn is actually very generous uh in what we can receive.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: So uh yeah, it's uh for all those reasons, it's still strong.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: It hasn't, you know, if you're in B2B, a content marketer, uh, it is the place to be.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: And there's others that you can experiment with that you might have temporary success with, but I find those people, you know, there were the Snapchat for B2B and the TikTok for B2B.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, there's opportunities, but I I see those people still coming back to LinkedIn for a variety of reasons.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think one of the big ones is just the fact that on LinkedIn, people expect you to be talking about business.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: People expect you to be talking about what you're doing.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: People understand, you know, that the content is going to be beneficial to people in their work lives.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: So there isn't really the need to pretend that that's not the case or to be afraid to, you know, have a book and meeting kind of a call to action, et cetera, because literally this is where people are going to find resources for doing their jobs.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that alone is one of the reasons why it's just vastly different than the content you'll see other places.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a great point, Erica.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if you think about it, we in digital marketing think of okay, Pinterest is high intent because they're looking to get inspired, they'll click on an image, go to an e-commerce site, purchase.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: TikTok is like a search engine.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: But LinkedIn really is a place, as you said, people are looking to improve their professional career or improve their business.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: It really can be a highly converting platform for those marketers to do it right.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I think we all, you know, once again, it's all in the mind.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: We need to change our mindset.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: And once you realize the value that LinkedIn has, you just put a little bit more priority on it.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of, you know, maybe once in a while I'll post, you know, let's get in the habit of posting weekly.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get in the habit of engaging with others in our network, of connecting with others, of commenting.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's just those little things that can really help give you markedly uh improved presence there over the course of a few weeks or months.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: We'd love for us to kind of dive in a little bit and talk about some of the things that have really changed on LinkedIn in recent years.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one of the big ones that I want to start with is when we're talking about engagement happening and people um seeking out other like-minded professionals, that used to happen in LinkedIn groups.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: But now, even though you know I still am a member, whatever that means, of a variety of LinkedIn groups that I never go visit.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, what I'm seeing is people are following and interacting with people within their industry, just within the regular LinkedIn newsfeed versus going to a group.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you you nailed it, Erica.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: The news feed used to be one of the most boring, like why even post?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Why bother?
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, nobody was engaging with the news feed, they would lock to log into LinkedIn and immediately go somewhere else, like to groups or to their network.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: But that is that has changed, and it's a combination of devaluing uh where groups appear.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's really hard to find them now.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's also the fact that a lot of marketers have just spammed groups to the point where they're just very little value, unfortunately, right?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh there's also just more people.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: We have more digital natives that are now millennials that are now a majority of the workforce that grew up posting more content.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then you know, I would have to say Instagram and TikTok pushed more people to publish things like selfies or vertical videos.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: So now the feed is actually interesting in a different way than your Facebook feed, your Instagram or TikTok feed.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: But yes, definitely the engagement really all you need is your feed, and that should be a clue as to you should never have to be searching for ways to engage with people.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you're connected with the right people and you're following industry influencers, it's right there in your feed.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: 100%.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you get these notifications, and again, notifications used to be just, you know, okay, somebody followed you, somebody sent you a message, somebody commented on your content.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now your feed tells you what's interesting that you might want to go, you know, chime in on the same way that if you were um at a conference and you kind of were coming into a room for break time, and you see, you know, one of your friends over there talking to somebody and seeming like they're having a really great conversation, you might make a little beeline over there and listen in and join the conversation.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now, notifications do that same thing because they'll tell you somebody that you engage with a lot is talking about a topic you talk about with some other person that you don't know.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: So it's actually doing some of that matchmaking facilitation in a way that it just never did before.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, another way it does that, Erica, great point.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Another way is if you think about it, I mean, LinkedIn is being very selective as every social network copies every other social network.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: But LinkedIn has been very selective to maintain that professional environment.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: So for instance, on a meta platform, you might see a post that's not sponsored, but they assume you like the content, like TikTok style, just based on the algorithm.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: What LinkedIn does is they will they might push that content because they want to expand your not everybody in your network is posting all the time.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: So there might be some gaps in the posting, they want to introduce other content like that that you might be interested in, but they will always show it that a first degree connection liked that post or a first degree connection commented on that post, which I think is a very instead of like, why am I seeing this?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: They give it that professional context that also means that, hey, if you publish content and someone in your network likes or comments on it, it increases the chance of virality that that's going to go out to second-degree connections, which happens obviously with successful posts.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: So if you think about it, if you reverse engineer, there's a lot of reasons why LinkedIn is such an exciting place for content marketers.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd say another one of the reasons is you know what you see happening right now.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: We're live on LinkedIn as we're recording this.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: So we have a live audience, and from time to time, folks do ask questions during uh the recording of this podcast, which is why we do it as a LinkedIn live stream.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: So you can have that opportunity to ask people in your network questions, in those industry experts questions live, um, which, you know, I mean, that's pretty great.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's like having um a conference session at your desk while you're either eating lunch or having that coffee break in the afternoon.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: That is something too that I think is pretty unique for the platform.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, do you do a you could do a closed webinar where you want to obviously acquire email addresses, or you could do a live stream on LinkedIn to gather engagement to maybe get new followers, new connections, or you could do both, right?
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: You could actually live stream your webinar to LinkedIn.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and the technology has really caught up.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, Erica, you use StreamYard.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: I used to use StreamYard, I use Riverside.fm.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: There's Restream.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: I met someone, I'm gonna give a shout out to Timothy Hughes, who is also an author of a book on social selling.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: And he was talking about how at his company for employee advocacy, they use restream.io and they'll have their employees restream that present.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: So when they do a live stream, it's coming at you know, the LinkedIn audience from 10 different profiles.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: So they get a lot more coverage and visibility for their live stream content.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Just another bit of advice for those content marketers out there that might not have uh tapped their foot into live stream, but it, you know, Erica, the the one of the things I wanted to point out when you were talking about all the ways it's changed is that there are 12 distinct types of content that you can publish on LinkedIn.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I say this because most other platforms it is very, very limited.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, TikTok, yeah, you can do images, you can do like screenshows, but it's mainly video.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: But LinkedIn, I mean, there was a time when polls were the most viral type of content.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: You have live stream, you have carousels, which are not photo galleries, but PDFs and all these things.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of ways to get your message out there.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the algorithm is smart enough to know that people also engage with different content formats differently as well.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of A-B testing that the content marketers that are watching or listening should be doing to make sure they, you know, they measure their success.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: In my experience, Erica, my live streams did not do as well as other content formats.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I have not been doing them recently on LinkedIn.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: My vertical form videos don't do as well as some other people.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: So everybody's network is gonna be different.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: I had uh someone say, Hey, Neil, my audience are older executives.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think I should be doing horizontal videos, not vertical videos, because I think that's the format they're used to watching.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, don't try to replicate your set your success on top of someone else's.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Your audience is gonna be unique.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Your content and and you know, USP is unique as well.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: You need to find that perfect combination.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: The only way you do that is through testing, and the only way you can test is through actual execution.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: 100%.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what's so great, um, for me, the reason I really still love the live stream platform is LinkedIn will continue to promote the archive, the replay of that live stream to people in your network, in your guest network for like a month.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because if as long as it's not something that comes across as being um too, you know, tied to a specific moment in time, like you know, if we were doing a live stream about, you know, the day after the Oscars, maybe that wouldn't get the kind of you know, replay value.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: But realistically, for a consolid month, it is teeing up the content when it feels like it would be relevant to somebody.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: So it's sort of to me, it's probably because they don't have their own podcast network, but this is a way to kind of keep content like that in front of people in a in a in a way.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: Although now I'm like, I wonder if they're gonna come up with a podcast network next, Neil.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they do have, if you do some Google searches, they do have this media network where they're engaging with certain creators to create some videos that uh that companies can advertise on, um, creating that little network.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll see how much they expand that.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean, it's a great point that you bring up, Erica.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Note to self, try live stream again because the algorithm is always changing.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: We never know what they're gonna prioritize.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: But I also find that there's certain content that will continue to get pushed for weeks because you know, not everyone is not only not publishing content every day on LinkedIn, I don't publish content every day on LinkedIn, and I've written three books on the subject, but also a lot of people don't even log in every day.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: So when they log in, they might not have logged in for a week.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: LinkedIn will push your content, and that's why you're gonna see a lot of visibility for older content uh for that reason.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: And we have to remember that it's not a Facebook where everybody logs in every day.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's true.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions is people think, oh, you know, I got I have to post as much as possible.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: I have to post every day.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: I need to post a few times a day.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but really what I've seen for the entirety of my time on LinkedIn is that's a great way to cannibalize your audience because LinkedIn is not Twitter.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: It is not a place, you know.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there are people who have it open all day.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: If your audience is HR professionals, and I've certainly um back in the day when I was in-house, I had that as my, you know, community that I was speaking to.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they will have LinkedIn open on their desktop and be looking at it all day because they're doing recruiting and other um items like that.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: But everybody else is going to be setting aside that time to go to LinkedIn, or they're gonna go to LinkedIn because they got a really juicy push notification or an email newsletter sent to them.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but there isn't that kind of feeling that you need to be putting up three or four you need posts every day.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I, you know, if you're already doing a few a week, you're that's great.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I would say, and myself, I go through periods where I schedule content weeks in advance, and others where I have nothing to post.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, and that's you know, it it's it's not easy to maintain consistency.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: If you work at a company a little bit different, but if for a professional, so I would just say try to stick with one a week.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: And once you do that for a few weeks, go to two a week.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I it's not a network where you need to post daily or even I mean, definitely not multiple times a day, uh, or even daily to have success because it's not just in the feed, it's also the engagement, it's also expanding your network, it's also direct messages and all the other opportunities.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, 100%.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: You need to be out there and engaging with other people, not just talking at them.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: You want to actually have those conversations with them for for sure.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you know, we've we've known this just thinking holistically, we've known this about TikTok that if you just go in there and post videos without following or using the platform or engaging or priming the platform, as a lot of marketers will say, you just won't get a lot of visibility for your content, no matter how good it is.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: And LinkedIn, apparently, with we talked about this, uh Erica recently, um, with their algorithmic changes, they're also looking at that.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: They don't want people to just post content, they want to see that you engage.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the reason why you see a lot of that spam comments coming from second, third degree connections that you've never heard of.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also the reason that if you haven't been engaging enough, it really is in your best interest, not just for the algorithm, but obviously for content marketing, for networking, for business in general.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: But it is becoming more important.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a smart move.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you should be spending time on there authentically anyway.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this um your book is in its second edition.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: So that says to me that you know, you've definitely taken a look at what had been working and you've come up with some new strategies and had, you know, gained some insights from uh between, you know, publishing the first edition and this one.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I was hoping you could give me just sort of an overview of you know what's new and kind of um the overall premise of the book.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think we all want to do a better job on LinkedIn if we're listening to this or watching this uh live stream right now.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it's more of a general it's it's for the professionals, obviously, marketers, entrepreneurs, or professionals that really want to improve their personal branding and make the most out of the platform of giving them all the options and the best practices.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really how I launched my career back in 2009 because that book did not exist.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I wrote my second LinkedIn book back in 2011.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: I always had, because we're all content marketers listening, I had a lead magnet that was a free uh LinkedIn ebook.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it every year I would revise it and it went from 10 pages to 20 pages, and then it went to like 50 pages.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, you know what?
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: I could probably convert this into a bona fide ebook and put it up on Kindle as a book.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that is exactly what I did.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: I I obviously I filled in the gaps, and that became the first edition, which was published back on September 17, 2024.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what's changed since then, and what I added to the book, obviously AI, because back in 2024, we were still looking at these various AI apps before realizing wow, we can do all this inside of a Chat GPT or a Gemini or a cloud, right?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that was, and we can go beyond, we can get really, really sophisticated with how we use it.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: So obviously, a whole chapter on AI was completely rewritten, re-added.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: I also redid the content formats because that also changed.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: I talk about these 12 different formats, and the things that LinkedIn seemed to be prioritizing in 15 months had already changed.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: So just to give equal weight to things and to give my latest feedback, um, to give you a feel, I have actually found that newsletters, when we look at impressions, I definitely get the most visibility when I publish newsletters.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now I have 50,000 followers, I have maybe 8,000 newsletter subscribers, but and I don't publish every week, maybe every other week or every three weeks.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: But I definitely, when I do publish, that is the format that's working for me.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: And interestingly enough, the other day I was searching for something on Google and I found it was the second page, but it was actually a LinkedIn company newsletter.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a newsletter published by a LinkedIn company page.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then when I went to the company, I realized it was just the exact same blog post that they published on their own website.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, what we're finding, if you've been watching these data studies about how large language models source content, we're finding that there's a lot of content coming from LinkedIn long-form content, i.e.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: LinkedIn newsletters, right?
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: So that is another sort of uh, you know, it's not part of the book.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: We we've only found these studies like in the last uh three to six months, but we're definitely finding an additional advantage to being on LinkedIn is that there are an increasing number of LinkedIn citations, and those are in large language models, and those are primarily coming from newsletters, not from standard posts.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that's another um thing to look at.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: I also created a new chapter on on uh pay to play or use it for free.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: I have always been a proponent of use everything you can for free as much as you can.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: But it was really after I published that last book that someone said, Hey Neil, did you know that like I can't personalize my invite?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, what?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I realized that LinkedIn put this new restriction in 2024 that a lot of people don't realize that you can only send five personalized invites per month.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're doing networking and you want to expand your network and you meet people at conferences, but and you just want to put a sentence in there, say, hey, great meeting you at the conference, you can only do that for five people.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: That alone is a reason to pay to play, to actually upgrade to the pay, which I did, which I continue to do.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's other advantages, but that alone, if you're gonna be networking and expanding your network, that alone I believe is worth the price of admission.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I go in deep on that chapter.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: I also created a chapter on case studies of people that have actually implemented similar advice to what I give and the results that they've seen.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not like dramatic, you know, that one you know vertical video went viral.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's not, it's not, it's about, you know, the personal branding, it's about the consistency and content production.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's on brand, it's about engaging with others.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the the agency that uh generated a few million dollars in sales without a sales team, just by you know, a few employees being active on LinkedIn and offering advice.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the sort of thing that excites me about LinkedIn that I think is possible for all of you.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'd say those are the main areas that were updated.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, content format types, AI, pay-to-play, and case studies.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, one last thing that I did add now that I think of it.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: So it went from a 15,000 word book to a 30,000 word book.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: So now I actually have a paperback, a hardcover, and I'm about to start recording an AI audiobook, my first uh digitally narrated uh audio, which I can't wait for.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: But um, the other thing I added, it's something that I realized is, and this is maybe my sales background, but the LinkedIn inbox is not cool, right?
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you get flooded with like happy third anniversary or whatever, you get flooded with like 20 messages, and some important messages could just get lost.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so I found as I went back, and maybe I was, you know, um, you know, I wanted uh to do a business trip to somewhere.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd go back and look at my connections in that area, and I realized, oh my gosh, like you like there was a speaking opportunity, and I completely did not respond to that.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I realized that there needs to be a better way to control the LinkedIn inbox.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I found one tool.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: I talk about it in the book as well.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: We'll we'll share it here.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's a cool tool called Condo.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: I do have An affiliate link, but it's nealschafer.com slash condo k o ndo, or you can just do a search for condo.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: But I do find it is the best app because what it is, it is a skin that basically will that that you can feed your LinkedIn inbox into.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when you archive something there, you can actually tag conversations.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I can tag people and then I can actually do like a boomerang for Gmail.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: I can actually say, Hey, I want to follow up with this person in 30 days.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: It'll actually put that to the top of my inbox.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: I have saved responses.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, a few little things there.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: So for instance, one thing that I do is when someone subscribes to my newsletter, I will send them a connection request and I'll say, Hey, you know, thanks for subscribing to my newsletter.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: Would you be interested in a review copy of my new book?
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then what I can do is I can tag them saying that, you know, I sent them when they accept, right?
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because the message appears, I tag them as coming from my newsletter.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then if they say yes, I'd love to, then I tag them as a book review prospect.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then I put a reminder to follow up in 30 days.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, hope you enjoyed the book.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: What, you know, what do you think?
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: Would love a review, et cetera, et cetera.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: So that's an example of a book as a product.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure the content marketers with free trials and lead magnets, there's a lot of things you can do.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: The only tool I've found that does this is condo.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: There are CRMs you can use, but I highly recommend you check it out.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the uh the guy, the founder, he's in LA, he's from Singapore, real down to earth.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: He does a lot of one-on-one demos with new users.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: So definitely let them know that Neil sent you if you're gonna try that out.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: But that has kept uh that has helped me keep some sanity.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: But above and beyond that, Erica, I find that it is the follow-up.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just the fact that the emails get lost, it's that concept of following up with people, of keeping in touch with people.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a sales professional, that is like the you know, the the blood, the the lifeline of your business.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so, really, it's about the follow-up and about developing a personal CRM, not a sales force unless you have access to it, but something that any professional can use to make sure that they are better following up with people.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a few cool tools I talk about.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: There's something called Clay C L A Y that's out there.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's another one called Relatable that I'm currently experimenting with.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's some other CRMs that are very social media friendly, like Nimble.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: But at some point, if you really want to value your network and your connections, if you're a content marketer, engaging with lots of different people.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if if you if your company gives you a CRM, it's one thing.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're a professional, a solopreneur, what have you without a CRM, I think it's time to invest in a personal CRM.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I created a new chapter, Erica, getting back to your your question.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think the very, very final chapter was the follow-up and talking about you know condo as a tool, as well as just these processes you can put in place and the technology that will help you become better at following up with people and not missing out on the opportunities because your next opportunity just might already be in your LinkedIn inbox.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: That is a quote from the book.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it's so true.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think we've all had that experience because I know if I'm speaking at an event, you know, I'll get all sorts of um requests that I accept from people um who are in the audience or who didn't, you know, weren't in the audience and want to chat with me.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: But on a day-to-day basis, I get a lot of spammy invites from you know, their business development or they're just bots or what have you.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that can fill my notifications in my inbox, and I will completely miss a message that I would want to respond to.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um and even that's even with using a tool like Agora Pulse, where I'm getting, you know, inbox stuff in there.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because the thing is is you don't see every inbox um email that you get.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: You see ones that are sent to you directly outside of an invitation.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, yep.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: And and that was my issue with social media scheduling tools.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I I currently used uh Agora Pulse, great tool, great company, great people, right?
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um and what I found was like on, I mean, this goes beyond LinkedIn, like on Twitter, it wasn't showing threads.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I realized there was all these notifications and functionality that I couldn't access because I was just relying on the notifications in the social media dashboard, which is why I know I only use social media dashboards for scheduling content, but I go straight to each social media platform, not that efficient, but it's it's what you got to do.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: And LinkedIn was the first network where it's like I'm not even gonna schedule content outside, I'm gonna schedule it inside of LinkedIn because that's the most valuable network.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, that totally makes sense to me.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I know you said that there are 12 uh different content types um that are available to folks.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh oh, you're gonna test me, huh?
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, oh my gosh, 12.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm not gonna ask you to go through all of them, but I would love your thoughts on, you know, which of those types really seem to be great at generating engagement, like from your experience and and what you've seen with clients.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: There are some that do really well with videos.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: I have not found videos to be performing well on LinkedIn for me yet.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think that the highest performers are going to be newsletters, are gonna be single images, yeah, multiple images, or the PDF, which LinkedIn calls the carousel.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, images can be infographic type images, they could also be selfies.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think you know, galleries are really powerful because they display a few different images and people like to click through.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: Those to me are like the bread and butter.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like every week, if you could be publishing one newsletter around your company or industry, and I often will repurpose my podcast episodes to become my newsletter, and that's the way I share them.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and the other one would be an image post of some sort, whether it is an infographic, a selfie, or multiple photo gallery.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: You'll notice, and this is what surprises people, Erica.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: I publish four blog posts a week.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: I do not share them on LinkedIn.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: LinkedIn does not like people sharing links, and I know the first link in the comment, I would rather repurpose it and create a new infographic and talk about the concept from the blog post with the LinkedIn audience.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe I'll put a link, the first, you know, comment link.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: But I am not looking at social media as a place for traffic generation because it just does not work.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: And and I talk about it in the book, and I've been talking about it for a decade.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure you've seen it as well, Erica.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that engagement, what I did do though, is because of the way that SEO and large language models and everything works, I've replaced the you know, my URL, uh, my main URL, I've replaced that with a lead magnet.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: So uh there are things you can do to try to generate those leads, uh, obviously feature the featuring them in your featured pun intended uh posts and what have you.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: But just the link dropping posts, I think those days are long gone.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: You got to be a little bit more creative because if you're not gonna get engagement, it hurts every other.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: You have this batting average in baseball terms, and it just hurts that batting average.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: You want to you want to maintain that itchy row-like status.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: So um, that's you know, that's my advice there.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you're still like dropping links, of how do we make this more visual?
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: And the great thing is with AI, it's never been easier than ever before to hey, give me some visual ideas from this post that will engage people on LinkedIn, that this is my target audience, et cetera, et cetera.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: So that would be my advice for those content marketers that are struggling.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's going to get you more engagement, might get you a few link clicks, but um, I would focus more on generating traffic from large language models on LinkedIn, in all honesty.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh, today.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: It 100% makes sense.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: Because really, if you want to share, especially if you're talking about third-party content, like if I wanted to share an HBR article that I found to be really interesting, yeah, I might put the link in my newsletter because I have a section of the newsletter where it's like stuff I've read and things I think about them.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: But if I wanted to share that on LinkedIn because I got really excited about it, I would go to their company page, find where they shared it, and I would reshare it with my thoughts and I would probably, you know, write 500, 600 words about why I cared about that post versus ever trying to just drop a link.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I have done that.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'll have people, you know, tag me and I'll reshare.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: I often found that those reshares do really bad.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like the reshare looks good because you're you're taking on the numbers of the original post.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, if you look at your analytics, it really didn't offer that much visibility to the content.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, there's different ways of looking at it, obviously, um, by sharing it, giving your own perspective.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's not only about the engagement, it's also about your personal brand.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: And and uh, you know, for those people that come to your profile that see, oh, she's reading Harvard Harbor Business Review, that's on a different level than someone that's just sharing content from you know social media today.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing wrong with social media today, but it's it's obviously at a different level.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: It might it might appeal to different people differently, right?
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it gives that context so that way people understand at a glance, you know, where you're coming from, which I think is something that isn't always clear, because we do have so many people, um, so many people who look like they've used the the LinkedIn content generator, uh, the internet meme site, in order to hype up what they were doing.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: I know one of my um one of my contacts today had posted about how uh after running one of her uh daily accomplishments through that, it it noted that in addition that you know she was a uh what was it, a professional bird model was, you know, something that it came up with um after looking at you know what her like vacation photos or something.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just so funny because there is so much fluff.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of the you know self-aggrandizement um when it's not necessary.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody, you know, people see through it when you're overdoing it.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's funny because I do think people get so excited about chasing the algorithm and trying to copy something that they saw working for someone else that they can get away from being authentically who they are and sharing, you know, what they know about specifically, just to, you know, have some broetry or jump on some um meme creation.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, there are I I want to share this with you.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: It might be shocking to some people as it was to me, but there are several of these LinkedIn AI tools, and a lot of LinkedIn quote unquote influencers are using them, which gives them consistent content creation.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: In, you know, it basically reverse engineers what are the most viral content out there, and then it tries to replicate that style, that format.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we've all seen them.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll never forget talking to the founder of one of these tools, and it just completely, you know, generated a few weeks' worth of content for me without knowing me, right?
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because it bases the content on the topic, yeah.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then it would say things like, I have experiences that I've never told the AI had experiences about.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, are people publishing this as is?
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the founder said, you know, we found that about half of the people are publishing the content as is, and so it's it's it's really, really scary.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: I would never recommend you do that.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I know these AI tools are saying, Oh, but now you can inject your brand voice.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: But the best way to do it is just to do it on your own, right?
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, without a doubt, you can look at patterns, you know, textual patterns that you see that you think really might resonate with your audience that resonate with you, and take screenshots and upload those to your own, you know, create your own brain, your digital brain within whatever large language model you use.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing wrong with being inspired by those because we all are as marketers, we're constantly being inspired by everything around us, but you don't need a tool to tell you what to do, right?
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and tell you what experience you have when you never had it.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll I'll stop there.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm sure Erica, you can't stories to tell as well.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's so important, you know.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to start with your own experiences because that's what's valuable and that's what the AI doesn't have.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't have life experiences and work to work experiences.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's experience is working with you in that moment.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's it's life experience.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're starting with it telling you what to share with humans, you really need to take a step back.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: I I read a lot of nonfiction books or business books, and the first and I'll look at samples on Amazon.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the first tell you know, the first instance where you know this is AI generated, where it starts with Mary was tired of her job.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it it always starts with these analogies of people that never existed.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's no company names, there's no links, um, and there's no personal stories.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: There's not in my experience, or let me tell you about one of my customers with a customer name and a person and a title.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's no specificity, there's none of that.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: So don't become that person using AI.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and there are savvy ways.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: I go into, you know, in more detail in Maximizing LinkedIn for business growth, of how you can use AI to help you generate that content based on your own unique experiences, your own unique voice, your natural voice.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's always going to perform way better than anything that comes out of a tool, in my opinion.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's so much better, like especially if you're talking about building thought leadership, which is something I know you and I both work with a number of clients who are um either founders or um executives who want to become known around a specific topic and to gain speaking engagements, et cetera.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's so much better to start from a story that you want to share, an experience you want to share, and have that personal element.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then you can use AI to polish or to structure it in a different way, or to think about what you're forgetting or what you're assuming that the audience knows.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: I was gonna say it, you know, we forget.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: AI doesn't forget.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I'm working on some more, I'm working on a book that's gonna be AI related, Erica, and that there's an overlap with what you talk about, which I want to write about, which is that use it as a library of all of your stories.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: And whenever you think of a story, put it in there.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: That is gonna be gonna pay dividends going forward for any piece of content you create.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when I was in the business world, well, when I was in sales, I should say not the business world, I'm still in the business world, but when I was in sales, I always found that when I would work for a startup uh for you know eight or nine years, startup out of Ottawa, Canada.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: I was, you know, VP of Asia Sales based in Osaka, Japan.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: And when our CEO and founder came out to clients, first of all, by bringing the CEO to clients, I was able to meet someone higher up at the client, but he had all these stories that he he would tell the clients or the potential clients that always help convert that conversation into business.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm thinking, you know, all these founders have all these stories, but they never get out there unless you meet them in person and they remember to bring it up.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: Don't become that, right?
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: With AI, use it or I mean just a Google Doc, anything, but start to build a database of speakers have been doing this for a long time.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: I, as a speaker, will often build a database of stories that I can refer to when I'm looking for anecdotes to talk about during different speeches.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: This is the number one thing.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you take anything away from today's conversation on content chat with Erica Hill, it's it's this is build a database of stories in AI for your future.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, plagiarize from yourself.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's so helpful.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I obviously I started when I wrote my my book, Content Foundations.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned that, yeah.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: I, you know, I started with the recordings from the, you know, the two-hour workshops, the one hour sessions.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: I put all of that into my large language model and said, here's my outline of what I'm thinking about.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: What have I forgotten?
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: What did I talk about here that isn't reflected in my outline?
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it told me and it added two chapters that I hadn't thought about.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, well, duh, of course I should have these things there.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: So it kind of helped kept me honest and it reminded me of things I've forgotten.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it does that for me all the time because I have one that, you know, I always use it for reviewing my content.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, tell me what I should have put in here that you know I've talked about, you know, or that you know I've written about.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me what I should be including here.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it does.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll be like, oh yeah, I forgot about that.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: That makes sense.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: It acts, you know, as your third brain without you having to create a spreadsheet, which is how I used to have to uh create that same kind of, you know, remember all the things that I'm not gonna be able to remember uh so that way I can use them.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: I just think it's magical.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's so much more, I mean, it's more ethical and authentic than so many of the other AI use cases.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: Now, you were talking about how you know our founders, our CEOs, those high-level people with very little time, and certainly who feel like they have no time for content creation, when you get them one-on-one in front of your audience, they're able to convert sales like crazy.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: So, for me, what I have found when I've been working with founders is I will get them to do things.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like I had one startup founder who he was amazing for this.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: He had an hour and a half commute into the office.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: So on days when he was driving into the office, he would call in to my voicemail and leave me a long, rambling voicemail message.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: And he would do that every time.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: Anytime he had an idea or a story he wanted to share, he would call me or he would record a voice memo and send it to me.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I would plug that into Otter and get a transcript from it.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm even able to query otter when I would be wanting to write something for him.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: I would query Otter and say, Hey, can you find me that anecdote about whatever it was?
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd be able to just go pull it and start crafting something around it.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that to me is one of the really powerful things that we as marketers can do is we can, you know, take that raw material in whatever format they're able to give it to us, put it into a format that the AI can access, and then go back to it later, query it.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: But we can do the same thing by making sure that we see the comments that they're making on social, on LinkedIn, that are getting that engagement, those things that were just kind of a one-off that all of a sudden explodes with people being yes and.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, those are the kinds of things that you can start screenshotting them.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: You don't even have to, you know, copy paste, you can just screenshot it and again throw it into your LLM and it learns from that.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: It learns what content is actually going to resonate with your specific audience.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: I was gonna say I go one step further.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I know that Otter has a lot of AI functionality, but I'll copy and paste that, create a project in Claude, and then you could just create a, you know, if you're a consultant, just create a project for that consultant, uh for that client, and then everything related to that client, you could do this with Adobe Acrobat Spaces.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's a few different ways of doing it, but yeah, it just it it's you know, Erica, a few years from now, we're gonna be like, duh, because that's just work, work in life is just gonna be AI enabled.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because I think we're beginning to experience it.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: So for those that haven't, hopefully this conversation and hopefully my my book and and Erica's book as well will help accelerate that process for you.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: And again, it for me, it's not replacing anything that I would have purchased from anybody, it's not replacing me generating content myself.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: It is just enabling me to you know grab onto those fleeting ideas and things that you can push out of your brain with all the other stuff you have to remember and helping me do more with with the time that I have.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I love it.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: I will uh quote one of my favorite uh podcasters and authors.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: She's big in the the self-publishing space.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: Her name is Joanna Penn out of the UK.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, when I saw her speak, she said AI should be amplify intelligence.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly what you said, Erica, what I try to do as well.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: Amplify all those good things about your ideas and get them out to the world.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think that we've given folks a lot of great ideas for you know what they should be doing.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: But I always think it's important to talk about some of the things that we shouldn't be doing, those things that those mistakes that we keep seeing people engage in on LinkedIn.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna start with my least favorite thing that I see the most frequently, and that is when you have an executive who's created a piece of thought leadership, so like they've had, you know, done a presentation or they've had a really great interview that became an article in a leading industry publication, whatever it is, and it's posted, usually posted for them.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody scheduled it and posted it, or it's posted on the company page, and then that person whose name is on that byline or who is the subject of the interview doesn't share it.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: They don't comment on it, they don't reshare it.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's like it never happened.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness, when you talk about wasted opportunities, because when that happens, then everyone's like, oh well, the CEO didn't respond to this or share it, so I bet they didn't even write it or participate in it, or it's not really that good, or if it was good, they would share it.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I say that because I contrast it with when I was um, you know, I have one specific client who I remember I wrote a piece for uh for venture beat.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I sat down and I interviewed this client for like an hour to really just pull out all of those stories and the point.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then I wrote this amazing article when he shared it on social.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't say, here's what my ghostwriter, you know, put together for me, here's you know, whatever.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, he said, I am so excited about the article I wrote for Venture Beat because he did write it.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I was the editor uh and then the interviewer and the person who drew all of that out, structured it, but it was his story.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: I just helped him tell his story and he was so excited about it.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: He shared it, and that post did amazing for him absolutely amazing.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_01: The post Did really great for VentureBeat too because it had all of these founders and you know C level executives engaging with that content.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was such a huge win.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: But then you contrast it with equally great piece.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: The CEO just doesn't bother to share it.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_01: And you're like, oh my God, why did we spend any of our time and money with that content?
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, that's a great point, Eric.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, you know, I don't include it in this book.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think I've included it in some of my presentations.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: But when you think about, let's put an influencer lens on LinkedIn users, who are the most influential, they're the ones at the top of the totem pole, the CEOs, the founders, the executives.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: And those are the people that often are the least social, right?
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: So yes, you need to have a robust profile, but you know, every now and then you should go in and engage, especially if it's about you or your company, because that, you know, it's not just the fact that you're engaging and other people see that your employees see that as well.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, well, if our CEO is doing it, we got to do it as well.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: It creates, I believe, a very, very positive company culture.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_00: So uh yeah, that's but that that that is very true.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, if you want to have an assistant do it or you or you hire someone like Eric or myself, whatever, you you really need to have that coverage.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it doesn't need to be that often either, just a once a week check-in would be enough to catch that, make a comment to share it, you know?
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: Although that that reminds me of something else, um, which is funny because I've had I've worked with people on two on the two opposite, equally wrong-headed um area, um you know, parts of a spectrum, which is around who should be sharing company page content.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I know you and I have a similar perspective, which is company page content has its place, but it's not usually going to do as well as that personal content.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why, you know, when you're working with the leader who says every person in the company needs to share every company post to their LinkedIn network, or they can go find a new job somewhere else.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm only lightly paraphrasing the person um who I'm talking about here, that is so terrible because your company page content being engaged with people that are not your target audience will not help you at all.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's just getting reach, but it's not reaching the right people.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so then it also confuses the algorithm who then doesn't understand who is interested in your content.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: But on the opposite end of that, you can end up in that situation where your target audience is, let's say, head of IT, head of HR, yet the person in your company who has that role is not sharing any of the thought leadership you're sharing that is supposed to be targeted to that audience.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: That means that they're training the algorithm that your content is of 0% interest to them and anybody like them in their network.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: So it's the same problem, but it's the opposite ends of that spectrum, but they're both equally bad.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: Neither one of those things is going to help you at all.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, Erica, the point I like to make about that is it comes down to the content itself.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I actually did a study, I presented on this a content marketing world, I want to say 2022, 2023.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: You can find a video on YouTube, a summary, but I actually did a study.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, a enterprise software company commissioned me to do a study of what content was resonating from LinkedIn company pages.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the thing that resonates then, still resonates now, which is the most resonating type of content was content that had people's faces in them.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_00: So just having that, and it's not even a matter of tagging people, but obviously, when you talk about employees or when you talk about a CEO that's loved by the company because they're very charismatic, what have you, those types of things will be content that your employees will want to naturally share.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_00: Make content.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to get more of your employees engaged on LinkedIn, make content that they would actually share.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: Look at your analytics, bring in some of the people that are already sharing content, right?
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: Get their ideas.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, employ advocacy programs or employee influencer programs or employee engagement programs, whatever you want to call it, they need to be as inclusive as possible, bringing in multiple perspectives, diverse perspectives, and getting advice on on what they would like.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I think that's the number one problem I see.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you can publish a press release every week, but no one's gonna want to share that stuff on LinkedIn, right?
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_01: No, and no one's gonna read it if they do share it.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: So you it just ends up being instead of the rising tide that you know, the tide that um raises all boats, instead it's you know, you're sinking everybody with the algorithm.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_01: And no one wants that.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_00: True.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what are you you know, from your perspective in the last 10 minutes or so that we have here, you know, what are some easier things that people can do today to kind of take stock of what they're doing on LinkedIn and just come come out with a better strategy for you know the second for the second quarter?
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm a big fan of, you know, in in digital marketing, when we think about SEO, we think about keyword intent, we we look at what's out there, what's working.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_00: If we were going to analyze our own email, we'd look at the analytics of what's work, what hasn't, and why.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the same with social media analytics.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think with LinkedIn, if you are not confident in what you're doing is working, it really is taking a step back and looking at the market, looking at other people out there, starting with a search for how you want to be found.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: Look at the people that are found.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_00: Had this conversation today in my mastermind.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_00: Someone uh is a digital accessibility consultant, but on their LinkedIn headline, they had online accessibility.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: And lo and behold, I did a search for online accessibility on LinkedIn.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: All the results were digital.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there were no results for online accessibility, they were a number for digital accessibility, right?
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so little things like that can give you some clues as to not just your professional headline, but who's coming up.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: Look at a lot of profiles, just like you want to consume a lot of content.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_00: Look at a lot of profiles, look at that headline image, look at that professional headline, look at the summary, look at the featured.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the four key things.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's how you're gonna get found.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when people find you, the content they're gonna consume first on your profile, that is absolutely where you want to start and make sure that you're properly aligned.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_00: And guess what?
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's easier than ever to redo those things with the power of AI, including image creation for that cover image uh that that's at the top of your profile.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm hoping because if you're listening to Erica's content chat or you're watching this live stream, you're actually pretty savvy.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_00: But so I assume you already have a cover image, but if you don't, that's the number one thing you can do right now is to and I assume you already have a featured section, but if not, those are the two things you can do.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_00: Go to your headline, go to your about section.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think it comes to the content strategy, right?
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: You can actually, you know, the LinkedIn search engine has gotten better.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, you know, raise your hand if you remember LinkedIn Signal.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: LinkedIn actually had a yeah, they had a little social listening tool that was built in that was free.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: That was a brilliant tool that allowed you to find conversations in any topic on LinkedIn.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: Then they removed it.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't know if you've noticed in LinkedIn searches now, you can actually filter for posts.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, whatever you know, keywords are important to your company, do a search for do a search, uh, uh do a keyword search for post for that keyword.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: Look at the content that's getting a lot of engagement, and once again, use that as a guide to help you craft your own content and then come up with your engagement plan, right?
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: Every day be commenting, be liking, be engaging, adding your network.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_00: I call this and I I talk about it in the book, but it is a playbook that you create that says, okay, every day, you know, Monday through Friday, I'm gonna log in and I am going to engage with X number of people or like posts or comment posts or at, you know, add connections, follow up with people.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's little things like that that if you consistently continue doing that that reap the big results.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_00: But for the content, start with once a week.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_00: You want to be able to maintain consistency.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, remembering that there are 12 types of content formats that you can use.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, start to do some A-B testing, look at what's working in your feed, which is often a really, really great reminder of the content that the algorithm is pushing, is what appears in front of you.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_00: And just take all that data and slowly, you know, a lot of YouTubers will say, Hey, I just want to create a video today that was better than my previous video.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_00: Use that same approach, right, with your content on LinkedIn.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_00: Just create something that was better that gets more visibility engagement than your last piece of content.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in a nutshell, I know that that was you'll have to listen to that again at like 0.75 speed, but in a nutshell, right, it's the profile optimization, it's the content optimization, it's the engagement, the follow-up, and putting this all in a playbook, right?
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: That you follow on a day-to-day basis or on a weekly basis if you don't have a lot of time.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm gonna put you in the hot seat because I do want to ask one follow-up question related to something you just shared.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm still seeing there's like two different formats that you're seeing for the way people are tackling their professional headline.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_01: There's the way that a lot of folks that we know are doing it, which is you know, I help consultant author, blah, blah, blah.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's the I'm a experienced librarian who has enthusiasm for and it's a whole paragraph.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I look at that and I just think, oh my lord, because on the flip side, I do tell people make sure you have a headline.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_01: You don't want it just to pick up whatever your latest job title is at the company you work for because you don't want your whole identity to be tied to a job that you have no control over.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's silly.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_01: But does that work?
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: Does it work to have a pair of one paragraph title like that?
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that when people do that, so there's two different things going on, or I said two places where your LinkedIn profile will often be seen.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, three different places.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: So number one is in the search results, yeah.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea, I think that those people, it's maybe not the librarian, but the ones that I see that are like that, they're blatant sales pitches.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so they assume that if you look at that headline and you go to their profile that you're interested in doing business with them.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_00: Or if they, you know, um, if you if you connect with them, they'll send you that direct message that goes, oh, we he, you know, they connected with me and I had this in my headline.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: They must want to do business with me.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I I absolutely abhor those headlines that look like sales pitches.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: So the headline should be about branding, it should be about your expertise and authority, it should be SEO optimized to some extent, like that digital accessibility versus online accessibility.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, those keywords that you want to be found for.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, part of branding is also differentiation.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I will often add, you know, something in Japanese or fluent in Japanese, or for a while I had like marketing as fun.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, whatever it is, you got to differentiate yourself.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_00: You also I do believe you need to make it clear how your business helps people or how you help people, but don't make it look like a sales pitch.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where, and I, you know, it's a section in my book where I talk about this is where AI can give you 10 different variations, right?
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and once again, as you go through those profiles of people in your industry that appear for your keyword, what are the headlines that you see that you like?
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_00: Right, yeah, and and you know, take screenshots, add them into AI and say, Hey, I I really like the way these work.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_00: Can you help revise what I currently have um with some ideas stemming from you know what I see here?
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you were gonna redesign your website, your website designer would say, Hey, tell me some websites that you like the design of.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same thing, right?
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so do that, and I think you're gonna get a much better uh headline.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, hopefully that answers your question, Erica.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_01: It totally does, and I think that's great advice for folks because honestly, sometimes I think people write those kinds of long rambling titles because they're not sure how to represent themselves, but you can take that long, rambly run-on sentence and you can put it in AI and it will give you some ideas.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that it'll end up then working a lot better for you and aligning with whatever your objectives are for being on LinkedIn than having something that's going to be too long and cut off in any kind of search results.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I agree a thousand percent.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_01: So, Neil, we're at the end of our time today.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_01: Where can folks find more from you?
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I am the real Neil, Neil Schaefer.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there's obviously a few Schaeffers out there in social media as well.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I am Neil Schaefer everywhere on social media.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_00: My website, neilshafer.com, N-E-A L-S-C-A-F-F-E-R, those listening to a podcast.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, my I also have a podcast called Your Digital Marketing Coach.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, this is my latest book, Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth, which you can find on Amazon, together with the book I published before that digital threads, which is a modern digital marketing playbook.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_00: So wherever you uh buy books, listen to podcasts, or browse on the web or browse on social, uh, hopefully you can find me there that way.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: Positively love it.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll put in a plug.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: You can find the archive from uh Neil's conversation with me about digital threads on EricaHeel.com because we do have um we spent some time with him digging in um with his last book as well.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_01: So, Neil, thank you so much for joining me today.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I hope that I'll be seeing you at a conference later this year.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Erica.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_00: I hope so as well.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: And everybody else, we'll see you back here next week for the next edition of Content Chat.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: Bye, everyone.