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Q&A on Social Selling on LinkedIn Ep 135

• Brenda Meller • Season 1 • Episode 135

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In this episode, I answered questions about LinkedIn and social selling. 

  • How many unique users are on LinkedIn compared to other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram?

  • What is the difference between connecting and following on LinkedIn?

  • What is the ideal number of hashtags to use on a LinkedIn post?

  • Are LinkedIn polls as effective as they used to be?

  • How can I identify people who have viewed my LinkedIn posts but haven't interacted with them?

  • Why are LinkedIn ads more expensive than Google Ads?

  • What is the minimum amount of LinkedIn activity to look for in a potential prospect?

  • How can I effectively grow my LinkedIn network after a hiatus?

  • What are the best practices for using LinkedIn to promote speaking opportunities?





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My name is Brenda Meller. I'm a LinkedIn coach, consultant, speaker, and author. My company is Meller Marketing and I help business professionals get a bigger slice of the LinkedIn pie.

Visit mellermarketing.com

Let's connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brendameller
(click MORE to invite me to connect and mention you listened to my podcast)

Speaker 1:

So today we're going to be talking about social selling on LinkedIn, and this is a bit of an introduction to my program, which I call the recipe for social selling on LinkedIn as well. So I'll be doing some Q&A questions that have come up about LinkedIn as well as about the program over the past week when I've been doing my launch webinars. If you ever have any LinkedIn questions, feel free to reach out to me. If we're connected on LinkedIn, you can send the questions to me in a direct message. If you're connected on LinkedIn, you can send the questions to me in a direct message. If you're not connected, you can email me your questions and just email them to brenda at mellormarketingcom. Okay, and what I try to do is, instead of just responding to one person, if Jeff were to email me and ask me a question instead of just replying back to Jeff, you know what I do. I go on to LinkedIn and I do a featured Q&A. Now we know the LinkedIn algorithm. Rules are such that you'll get the best amount of reach and impressions if you only post once a day or once within every 18 hours. So if I've already posted once for the day on my personal profile, then I'll go on my company page for Mellor Marketing and I'll do my featured Q&A there. Okay, so that's how things are going to work.

Speaker 1:

Here today I'm going to be answering some questions that have come in recently about LinkedIn, about this whole concept of social selling and about my recipe program, so I'm letting you know. The reason I'm looking off to the side is because I am looking at the list of questions. Carol Dorsey helped me out on my webinars this week. Shout out to Carol Dorsey and she's a really great virtual assistant if you're looking for one. By the way, she helped me with chat to collect the questions and put them in a Google Doc, so I'm reading them off on here Now. There's a few things that we covered in this week's webinar and, like the question is only going to make sense if you were on the webinar. So I'm actually going to do some screen share to illustrate some of these points as we're going throughout the day.

Speaker 1:

And one thing I want to start with is someone asked a question about statistics about unique users on LinkedIn versus other networks. Now, I was on a LinkedIn webinar and it was delivered by LinkedIn employees and they were sharing the value of using LinkedIn and some different statistics related to that, and the question that I got asked on the webinar is on the only on LinkedIn slide, do you have stats for X, aka Twitter? So let me share with you the slide that they are referring to. On my webinar, I shared this stat and this was something that was put together by the LinkedIn team and they were talking about supercharging your page best practices for organic and paid growth on LinkedIn. It was actually in June of 2023. I cited my sources in here and you're going to see here that LinkedIn can help you to reach unique audiences that are not on some of the other platforms. So if you are using Facebook, for example, 15% of LinkedIn's 1 billion members never visit Facebook, so you're missing out on them as an opportunity. The other stat I shared, with the yellow arrow next to it, is 47% of LinkedIn users never visit Instagram. So if you're using Instagram to promote your business, if you're watching this on Instagram here today and I love Instagram, by the way, I see there's a few folks that are watching on Instagram right now but I wanna let you know that if you're only using Instagram as a way of promoting your business, you're missing out on a huge opportunity, because 47% of LinkedIn's 1 billion members never visit Instagram.

Speaker 1:

Now the question I received from the person was do you have the stats for X, aka Twitter, by the way? Do you call it X or do you call it Twitter? Let me know in chat if you can. I still call it Twitter. I only know of one person who calls it X and everyone else seems to call it Twitter, and I'm not using it as heavily as I used to, I will admit, but I still call it Twitter. Now, the stat that LinkedIn provided was that 48%. I'm putting my little mouse in the middle here 48% of LinkedIn's members never visit Twitter. Now, this data was as of 2023. It's probably changed a little bit since then, but something to keep in mind that you can reach people who are only on LinkedIn, who are not on some of the other platforms. I think that's the key takeaway from that. Okay, so that was the very first question.

Speaker 1:

So the second question is what's the difference between connecting and following, or what are the benefits of connecting versus following? I always like to tell people that connecting is a two-way action. So, on LinkedIn and this is something that's really unique to LinkedIn not on the other social networks On LinkedIn, when you connect with someone, one person initiates the invitation to connect. They may or may not add a note, keeping their fingers crossed. I like to add a note myself and if the other person, who's the recipient of that invitation, accepts it, then they become directly connected. Okay, and on LinkedIn you might see next to a person's name, Brenda Meller first, or Jeff Young second. It might mean that second means you're not directly connected, but you share a common connection, ie Brenda M Miller in that instance. Right. So LinkedIn, we go up to three levels deep. It's like that, Kevin Bacon, seven degrees of separation.

Speaker 1:

Right Now, when you connect with a person on LinkedIn, that invitation is accepted by the other party, so it's a two-way action. Then what happens is both of you will see the first next to your name when you look at each other's profiles. You'll both have the ability to message each other back and forth. And I think what's inherent with that is that you have permission to message them. And right, and there's this whole concept. Years ago there was this focus on permission based marketing, getting people's permission to market to them. Then they're more apt and receptive to those messages. So if you're looking to sell to people, to find clients, to get high quality clients, through LinkedIn. I think it's better to connect with your ideal clients, your prospects, if you will, than it is to follow them. Okay, so connection is a two-way action. You get the ability to message them, you get the permission to message them. You also get the ability to see all of their contact info that they've chosen to make accessible, and you will potentially see their posts in your homepage feed. They will potentially see your posts in the homepage feed, which brings me to the second part.

Speaker 1:

What is a follower? Now, a follower action is a one-way action. You can go to my profile right now on LinkedIn. If we're not connected, you'll see the follow button on there. If you click on follow, I don't have to do anything. When you follow me, you'll start to see my posts and updates in your homepage feed. You can't message me. You don't have permission to message me. You don't have that opened up yet, and if my contact info is not all public, you can only see what I choose to share with you. For example, you're not going to see my email address in the contact info section. So that's the recommendation there. And just so you're aware, connections we have a limit on LinkedIn of 30,000, whereas followers are really unlimited. But really, if you look at, there's 1 billion LinkedIn members. You can get up to 1 billion followers. Is how I look at it. You probably won't, but there is a ceiling. It's just the potential of the LinkedIn universe. Okay, Another question how many hashtags are recommended to add to your posts? Is there an ideal number?

Speaker 1:

Someone else said hashtags are no longer as powerful as they used to be. That person was correct in that hashtags are no longer as powerful as they used to be and LinkedIn even seems to have stepped back from the use of hashtags on the platform. So what I will say is everything I'm reading right now seems to indicate that if you want to use hashtags, you can. You seem to reach people who are following those hashtags. I don't know if they're pushing them out to the homepage feed as much as they used to, but the ideal number is three to five. Now I did just see an email from Richard Vanderblom. He published the latest algorithm report on LinkedIn and I believe in there. There's a huge decline in the impressions generated by use of hashtags and posts as a result of the report. I haven't purchased the report and downloaded and digested it yet, but what he is saying in there is backing up my own personal experience on this. I will say, generally speaking, the biggest question I get about hashtags on LinkedIn from my clients is what's a hashtag which tells me that people on the whole just don't understand. They're not using them. So if you're comfortable using hashtags, three to five is a good number, and it doesn't seem that they are as powerful in terms of helping you with reach as they used to be. I would agree with that. Okay.

Speaker 1:

Another question regarding LinkedIn polls don't appear as often as they used to. Has they noticed that? Has there been a shift? And that's a great question. Polls used to be huge. When they first came out, they got enormous amounts of reach, so all of us were using them almost daily, right, and we all got sick of them and then everybody stopped using them. I've noticed that when I do a poll, I tend to get really good reach still, but you have to make it conversation worthy, almost like water cooler talk, get people into the questions, Like for tomorrow, for example, it's Halloween here in the United States and I might say what's your favorite Halloween candy Peanut butter cups, Butterfingers, Starburst or other? Comment below. If I do a post like that, people will respond because it's conversational, water cooler talk. If you can create a poll that's related to your business, even slightly, even better. But do keep in mind nobody's going to answer a question like what keeps you up late at night as it relates to your finances. Nobody's going to answer that, Okay. So try to use polls strategically to create conversations, keeping in mind that a portion of people reading that poll, participating in that poll, are going to click to come back to your profile to learn more about you. Okay, All right.

Speaker 1:

Is there another way? Is there a way to take another step to connect with impressions? And this is something I talked about in my webinar the fact that you can't see who looks at your post. But they were saying how do we figure out who those people are to connect with those individuals? And I look at the people that are counted. Impressions are readers. I like to call them readers because they're reading LinkedIn. They're not stalkers or lurkers. That sounds negative. They're reading, which is really what LinkedIn was designed for to provide you with information. So we don't know who they are and thus they self-identify by either liking, reacting, commenting, replying, sending you a direct message inviting you to connect. So they appear in impressions in the count, like a car driving by a billboard on the side of a highway but we don't know who's inside the car, right?

Speaker 1:

So what I would encourage you to do if you want to try to connect to more people who are counted in your impressions, invite them into your posts, Like, for example, this live stream. Right now I am inviting people into the chat. I'm saying example this live stream. Right now I am inviting people into the chat. I'm saying go into chat and say hello, I'm inviting you in. When we do, then I can see people like Royce and like Jeff I'm rotating a couple of these comments up on screen and you can see people like Jen as well. So when you invite people into the comments, we can see who they are and then I could invite them to connect with me.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and Jen comments on hashtags. She says the only time I search by hashtags is when I'm looking for some to put on my post. Right, so there are some people that are hashtag users. They will click and search for posts by hashtags. I don't know if following a hashtag brings those hashtags into your post as much as it used to, so use it or not. Okay, and that's that question. Okay, I'm going to pull up a couple of questions that I'm getting from the audience in here as well. This one, this first one. It says LinkedIn user, which either means you don't have your privacy settings set to public or your public profile settings set to public, or your third party stream is not set to show us who you are. I have a blog on that. If you're interested, comment and say yes, send me the blog, and I'll do that afterwards later on today.

Speaker 1:

Why are LinkedIn ads so expensive compared to, say, Google ads? Great question and full disclaimer. I do not work for LinkedIn. I am an independent marketing consultant. What I will be sharing with you is from the point of view of a former corporate marketer. My organization used to spend tens of thousands of dollars in LinkedIn ads every quarter, and when I became independent, I also managed ads on behalf of your organizations, and I've worked with other people who are really experts in LinkedIn ads, For example, AJ Wilcox. He's the guy you want to go to His agency. That's all they do is they run LinkedIn ads? But all of the people that are experienced with using LinkedIn ads will say the same thing.

Speaker 1:

Yes, they are expensive. You definitely get a higher quality clientele on LinkedIn, and this was actually something that I shared in my presentation this week, and let me see if I can find it real quick because I'm going to show you this. Yes, I can find it. This was a stat that was shared on another LinkedIn webinar by the team at LinkedIn. So I always say, when you look at data points, consider the source. Is it an independent third party or do they have a vested interest? They might be inflating this slightly is what I'm saying, so just be careful of using this. But LinkedIn is saying that LinkedIn audiences have two times the amount of buying power compared to the average web audience, and I look at that as like Google ads right, so people that are seeing your Google ads may not have as much budget to spend as the average person who's using LinkedIn. Does that make sense? So that's how I equalize that in my brain when I'm thinking about LinkedIn.

Speaker 1:

Ads are being so expensive and the buying power. So why are they so expensive? Because you get higher quality people. You have an audience that's going onto LinkedIn, and it's almost like when we go onto LinkedIn, we have our blinders on and we're more open and receptive to messages that we're seeing in our homepage feed, and a part of those messages are sponsored ads. Have you noticed that? You'll see, like a post, a sponsored ad, a couple more posts, another sponsored ad? On your right-hand side you'll see sponsored ad. You can do in-mails that get into your direct messages and sometimes they get mixed up with real people messages, so you'll read them, you stumble upon them. So it's just a higher quality of clientele that you can reach with LinkedIn ads, and LinkedIn knows that supply and demand. They price their ads accordingly. Okay, Now, there are ways that you can reduce the cost of your ads, but on the whole, what I will share with you and if you talk to AJ Wilcox or others, they'll agree with the same sentiment your product or service should have a pretty high dollar value.

Speaker 1:

I've seen that anywhere from $9,000 to $25,000 plus. So if you're selling a book for $30, it doesn't make sense to run LinkedIn ads. Does that make sense? Okay? And then the other thing is a lot of people nowadays are like here's a hundred dollar LinkedIn ads credit. Linkedin might give it to you. You might have somebody who's like a celebrity who's here. Use my a hundred dollar ad ads credit, LinkedIn might give it to you. You might have somebody who's like a celebrity, who's here, use my a hundred dollar ad credit and you're like, okay, I'll pay a hundred dollars for them and I'll put my own a hundred dollars in. You basically just thrown away money by throwing a hundred dollars at LinkedIn.

Speaker 1:

If you want to get results using LinkedIn ads, you should be prepared to invest in LinkedIn ads and LinkedIn marketing solutions on an ongoing basis for multiple months, three to six months plus, if not annually. You should be spending a minimum and I've heard it anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000 per month in LinkedIn ads. Okay, so why are they so expensive? Quality reach but again, it's not for everyone, it's only for individuals. Have a product or service that's a higher price point and, I would say, combined with that, your employees should have optimized profile. Your sales team should be used trained on using social selling principles. Your company page should be actively posting. There's a lot of things that I would recommend that you do before you pay money for LinkedIn ads. I don't wanna see you wasting your money. I wanna see you get the best out of that investment if you do go that route. So hopefully that helps you out.

Speaker 1:

All right, we got about five minutes left, so I will go through your questions and then we're gonna start to wrap this up here. Royce is saying what's the minimum amount of LinkedIn activity do you look for in a prospect? That's a great question. So I wanna break the two questions apart in here minimum amount of LinkedIn activity and then prospect. So let me start with prospect. So each of us Royce has different definitions of what a prospective ideal target audience is or a prospect For me.

Speaker 1:

I'll just say, for example, I do LinkedIn team training. So my prospect for LinkedIn team training the person I will talk to, the decision maker, so to speak is usually a VP of marketing or business development or a director in one of those roles who is working for a large organization with a certain amount of revenue I'll just say 10 to 25 million plus million, typically minimum revenue. They are typically located inside the United States and there might be other criteria in there as well. So think about your prospect. You have some specific criteria that you're looking for, right, and some of the people are readers, so they're not going to be super active on LinkedIn. So if I am looking to connect to someone that might be a prospect for team training.

Speaker 1:

When you say minimum amount of LinkedIn activity, I'm going to address it from the profile perspective, which includes activity. I want to make sure that they have 500 plus connections. For me, there might be certain criteria that help me to go. Okay, they need this. That person might have a branded header on their profile, but if I look at their company page and I look at their other employees, it's hit or miss. They don't all have LinkedIn page header. So I know they have a header image library, but people aren't using it, so to me that's a flag. So that's something I can look at from their activity.

Speaker 1:

Now, if you're trying to Royce determine who to invite to connect based on are they active or not on LinkedIn, I would look for people who have 500 plus connections, look in their activity section and see how long ago, if at all, they have ever posted, commented, replied, clicked on reaction, like anything. If there's no activity in there, they are probably a reader. They may or may not connect, but if they have 500 plus connections, if I were you, I'd look at a common connection and request an introduction first, especially if they don't have any activity. Okay, hey, Brenda, I see that you're connected with Heather Doran, Could you introduce us? And then I give Heather a heads up Heather, my friend Royce wants to connect with you. Would it be okay if I introduced you? I get permission from Heather, she says yes, Then I do a LinkedIn DM with both of you and then I say I'll let you take it from here. And then you say hey, Heather, I'll follow up you and invite you to connect. So there's some things that I do from a strategic standpoint when I think about leveraging the concepts of social selling, that I do differently and this is all covered in my program, the Recipe for Social Selling, but it's the approach that I've taken myself to grow my business strategically. So thank you so much for being on and I hope that helps to answer you.

Speaker 1:

On there, Heather says I'm back on LinkedIn after five years avoiding it. Why, Heather? We're great here. I've updated my profile. Where is the next best place I should start so I can grow my network for connections or speaking ops, Okay? So, Heather, I've got a checklist. If you go to mellormarketingcom slash checklist it's LinkedIn for speakers and I walk you through different areas of optimizing your profile and your activity to help you to get more paid speaking gigs, Okay. So again, mellormarketingcom slash checklist. Go to that.

Speaker 1:

I would say for you, though, Heather, start by spending 15 minutes a day in the homepage, start interacting with people regularly and then post once a week. Those are the two things I'm going to give you as a homework assignment Actually, three Download my checklist, spend 15 minutes a day in the homepage, feed and post once a week. Now, if I were you, Heather, when you go to events, post pictures of other speakers, so I'm going to take this off the screen. If you want to post this on screen today, grab a screen capture and go on LinkedIn and say today I attended a great LinkedIn live event hosted by at Brenda Meller. Tag me in the post, and I learned some techniques to help me as I'm ramping my speaking business up here on LinkedIn. Here are a few of my key takeaways and summarize a few of the things Download Brenda's checklist.

Speaker 1:

Make sure that you're active on LinkedIn. Post weekly. It's a really great way of. The primary goal for those posts is sharing the knowledge, right. The secondary is book me as a speaker, but you're letting people discover that on their own. You're not like screaming in their face book me as a speaker, but you're letting people discover that on their own. You're not like screaming in their face book me as a speaker. Does that make sense? So this is like this social selling approach. We're building relationships, we're building trust with people, and these are just a few of the concepts that I teach inside my program, which is called the Recipe for Social Selling on LinkedIn. So hopefully that helps you out and thank you so much for doing that.

Speaker 1:

Heather, the best way to get to 500 connections is twofold. One is send out invitations every single week. If you've got the free basic version of LinkedIn, you can only include a note with five of them. If you're using premium, you can include a personal note with all of them and I believe you can still send up to 100 invitations per week. That's one way actively reaching out and inviting people to connect. The other way is accepting invitations that have been sent to you. Heather, if you have an email list. What I would do if I were you send out an email to your full email list and say, hey, are we connected yet on LinkedIn? And drive them to your profile and ask them to invite you to connect If you have an email list of over 500 plus. I'm guessing you might have a couple thousand on there. You can easily get to 500 plus just like that. The other thing you could do is you could post on other networks. If you're active on Instagram or Facebook because you've taken a pause on LinkedIn, you've probably been active other places on YouTube. Wherever you are, encourage people to come over to LinkedIn to invite you to connect you to come over to LinkedIn to invite you to connect. You can get to 500 plus fairly quickly with that.

Speaker 1:

Okay, All right, I think I'm going to scroll through the chat one last time. I want to make sure I pulled up everybody who is on screen here. And finally, we will end here with Elizabeth who says thank you for the great tips today. I really enjoyed LinkedIn, the contacts and the readers. It is a fabulous source to connect. I agree with you wholeheartedly on that and thank you so much, Elizabeth, for watching. All right, With that said, I hope you enjoyed today's broadcast. This was a very impromptu session, just to give you a bit of an overview of the expertise I share with my audience, both on LinkedIn. If you're following me on LinkedIn, you'll get these gems all the time. Also, if you come into my VIP email list, go to mellormarketingcom slash subscribe. You'll get some things occasionally sent to your inbox. With that said, have a wonderful day, and thank you all so much for watching.

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