Enthusiastically Self-Employed: business tips, marketing tips, and LinkedIn tips for coaches, consultants, speakers, authors, solopreneurs & small business owners

LinkedIn Questions Answered: From Invitations to CRMs Ep 157

• Brenda Meller • Season 1 • Episode 157

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Answering Your Top LinkedIn Marketing and Profile Optimization Questions

In this episode, I introduce a new series where I answer your questions about LinkedIn, marketing, and my work. 

Topics covered include recent LinkedIn invitation limits, revising my book 'Social Media Pie,' understanding LinkedIn invitations, expectations for my coaching cohorts, Sales Navigator usage, tips on optimizing personal vs. business profiles, and CRM recommendations. 

Additionally, I discuss the costs and benefits of LinkedIn Premium and offer practical advice for maximizing connection invitations and engagement on the platform. 

The questions primarily stem from participants in my recent 'Stop Chasing Clients, Start Attracting Them using LinkedIn' webinar. 

Join my VIP email list to be notified about future webinars and events.

Enjoy this podcast episode format? Let me know, and I'll add more episodes like this in the future. 

00:00 Introduction to the Series
00:31 Overview of Questions
02:31 LinkedIn Invitation Limits
05:57 Revising Social Media Pie
07:49 Understanding LinkedIn Invitations
09:26 Cohort Size Expectations
12:15 Teaching Sales Navigator
15:27 Using Countdown Timers
17:00 Optimizing LinkedIn Profiles
19:24 CRM Training Insights
20:35 LinkedIn Premium Costs
24:19 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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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:

Welcome back to the show. Today I'm going to start a series where I'm going to be covering questions of the week, and I may do this once a week, may do this once a month, we'll see how it goes. But what I've done is I've collected out some questions that I've received about LinkedIn, about marketing, about the work that I'm doing over the past week, and I'm going to answer them to you in this podcast episode. So, if you enjoy this, let me know If we're connected on LinkedIn, send me a message there, or on Instagram or email or text. Whatever. Just let me know if you find this interesting and I'll keep doing episodes like these. Okay, so I'm going to first read off the list of questions that I'm going to respond to and then I'm going to go through them one by one. So, question number one did you say there's now a limit on how many times you can send a note with an invitation? And you can send a note with an invitation? And I should say a few of these questions came from participants in my recent webinar. It's called Stop Chasing Clients, start Attracting them Using LinkedIn, and it's a free live webinar I'm currently offering. I've got two more sessions that are coming up. The next one is going to be on Tuesday March 25th at noon and then we're doing this again on Thursday March 27th at 10 am Eastern time. By the way, if you're interested, go to Mellormarketingcom slash stop and you'll be able to register for those. These are only going to be delivered live. You won't be able to register after those dates to get a playback, but you can always go back to Mellormarketingcom slash subscribe, get on my VIP email list. That way you'll be notified when I do future webinars on these. All right, so let me go through this list again.

Speaker 1:

So question number one did you say there's now a limit on how many times you can send a note with an invitation? Question two when will you revise social media pie? That's my book. Question three what do you mean by invitation? Is that a connection request? Question four how many people do you expect in your cohort? Question five do you teach Sales Navigator? Question six what is the timer that we can see on your screen? This is a countdown timer, by the way. Question seven please discuss optimizing your personal profile versus creating a business profile on LinkedIn, which may be repetitive of your personal profile. Question eight do you do trainings on any CRM? And question nine actually there's 10. So question nine is premium now $70 a month, and a follow-up on that was? Does it let you see who has searched you? So let's start going through these one by one and I will always bring the knowledge that I know to you. If I don't know, sometimes I'll go and seek the knowledge and find it and then I'll do a blog or a video about it. But we'll go through these one by one.

Speaker 1:

So, starting with question number one, did you say there's now a limit on how many times you can send a note with an invitation? Yes, this is something that was changed by LinkedIn in the past I believe in the past year. Maybe it was in the past past two years they started trying this out, whereas in the past, any person who was using the free basic version of LinkedIn could send out invitations and we could add a note with every single one. So what happens here is, on LinkedIn, when you're inviting someone to connect, you have the option of when you go to their profile, you click on the connect button, it will either say add a note or send. Now I think it's now saying send without an invitation and the send without an invitation is like this big blue bold button. It looks like that's what LinkedIn wants you to do, but if you read the text, they say that adding a note with your invitation will help more of your invitations to get accepted.

Speaker 1:

Now what happened is, in the past year, I think, they sat around at LinkedIn headquarters and started to say how can we make more money? And somebody said you know what we should do. We should now only give our unpaid users, the ones using the free, basic version of LinkedIn. We should now only give them the ability to add five invitations per month with a note, and the rest of them they won't get the ability to add a note. But if you upgrade to premium, you can add a note unlimited with every invitation that you send.

Speaker 1:

Now I am a big fan of surprising and delighting your customers, rewarding your customers for loyalty, not penalizing people, and I really felt like this was a penalty to LinkedIn members who weren't paying for a subscription. I would have preferred that LinkedIn added something to a premium membership rather than take something away that everyone had, and what they did is they took away the ability to add a note to every single invitation, so now you can only do it with five invitations. Now my workaround on this, my friend, is if you don't want to upgrade to premium, yeah, you don't need to, but if you don't want to do that and you still want to try to get those invitations accepted, only use those note credits rather than add a note feature with people that don't know you. That would add some context. That would likely help them to get to know you so that they can accept your invitation. The other folks, the people that you've had interaction with, maybe on a webinar, in person, you've known from past lives or careers, don't add a note If you know they're going to know who you are. Don't add a note. Don't waste that precious invitation credit on them. Now, if you want to use this feature, you've personalized it for the five people that you don't know. You still have more people you don't know that you want to invite to connect.

Speaker 1:

My recommendation for you is go to their profile, find their activity feed, look for something recently that they've posted and, by the way, if they're not posting, don't send them an invitation. They're probably not active on LinkedIn, but if they have something posted recently, within the past week or two, add a thoughtful comment, more than maybe a sentence or two. Even so, your name starts to build some familiarity and they can actually they remember you. What may happen is they may click on your profile and then they're gonna see a button that says accept, because if you send them an invitation, it would say pending from your end, but from their end, if they look at your profile, on your button, it would say accept. The other thing that might happen is they may not look at your profile right away, but the next time they look into your pending invitations they go oh, brenda Meller, she sounds familiar. I think she's that person that responded to my post this week with something really thoughtful, right? So we're building some familiarity, we're building some trust. That's going to help you with the workaround, all right, so that's it. So that's question number one. Question number two when will you revise social media pie?

Speaker 1:

So I wrote a book it's called Social Media Pie how to Enjoy a Bigger Slice of LinkedIn and I published this in. It was actually the very end of 2020, but going into 2021. And at the time, it was really hard to publish this book because LinkedIn is a running target. They're continually making tweaks and changes to the platform, so I decided to focus on overall LinkedIn strategies and not so much including screen captures of different features, et cetera on the platform, because I knew that they were going to change things. And the ironic part about this is, before I went to publish my book I think it was I was working on it in like October, november of 2020, getting it off to the printer LinkedIn made a major change to some of the back end the privacy and settings area and I had to redo an entire chapter. So I knew at the time that the day would come that I'd want to do a refresh and for those of you who are authors, you could probably relate.

Speaker 1:

When you're publishing a book, you just want to go through that first process, get it done. After you publish, or even throughout the publishing process, you realize there's some things that you want to change, but there's so much momentum and you really just want to get the book done. So I think going through the book the next time probably what I'll do is at the end of each chapter. I'll put some action items in there and maybe even some QR codes pointing to blogs or resources, and I might make some other changes in there as well, and obviously, any changes reflecting what's happening differently on LinkedIn as well. So I'm thinking about it for 2025. It might be a 2026 project. When I do publish a new edition of the book, I'm going to follow the same theme social media pie and I'll probably put a different type of pie on the front cover. The current first edition has apple pie, so maybe it'll be blueberry pie or banana cream pie or something different cherry pie even on the front cover. So that's the plan At some point in the future. I don't have a timeline in place for that yet.

Speaker 1:

Question number three this was asked by someone on the webinar and my understanding is this is probably someone who's a heavy Instagram Facebook user who's now starting to use LinkedIn. So their question was what do you mean by invitation? A connection request, and this is a perfectly valid question, especially if you're not super savvy on LinkedIn, not very super familiar with the network, but you're familiar with some of the other social sites that are out there. On Instagram and Facebook, we don't have connection requests. We have friend requests or followers, right? So when we're talking about invitations on LinkedIn, this is a really new concept for many people. So I love that this person asked this because, about invitations on LinkedIn. This is a really new concept for many people, so I love that this person asked this. Because I've been on LinkedIn so long I forget that this might not be something familiar to those of you who are newer. So on LinkedIn, you certainly can just click on connect and invite someone to connect with you, which is very similar to the friend request on Facebook or even on Instagram.

Speaker 1:

If you have it set up that somebody has to request to follow you and you have to approve it. So an invitation on LinkedIn is a two-way action. One person initiates it and the other person has to accept it. Whereas followers and following is a feature you can do on LinkedIn, follow is a one-way action. You don't have to wait for approval. When you click on follow, you're automatically starting to follow their updates and posts. You'll start to see some of their posts in your homepage feed. If you interact with them, you'll see them more frequently. But an invitation is a two-way interaction and it is a connection request.

Speaker 1:

Now, as I said in the answer to number one, I would add a note with every one of those, just some clarification and how these connect together there. So that's question number three. Question number four how many do you expect in the cohort? So right now what I'm doing is I'm launching for the fifth time my program which is called the Recipe for Social Selling on LinkedIn, and I've designed this program specifically for individuals who are self-employed. Coaches, consultants, course creators, speakers, authors, service providers, independent professionals and even some B2b sales professionals are going to be a part of this program and the question asked in the group was how many people do I expect in the cohort? And I think the person asking was asking because sometimes you'll enroll in an online program and it's a cohort, but there's 100, 200, 400 people in the cohort and then you get into the group coaching and it's not small group coaching. It's really a broadcast on a Zoom webinar and you can't see other people. The chat might be locked down, you can't even ask questions of the host because there's just so many people on there, and that happens when you get that volume.

Speaker 1:

In my program, the Recipe, I really focus on small group coaching, so I try to keep the cohorts to anywhere from 10 to 25 individuals. I've not had the problem yet to have such a large cohort that I would have to split it out, but if I do get too large in there. I will split the cohorts into subgroups so that our small group coaching is exactly that small group coaching. My goal with that small group coaching is that everyone gets the opportunity to ask questions. I will facilitate the session, make sure we go around, I will make sure that everyone is acknowledged, at least in the call. If I see you on, you haven't asked a question. Before we leave I'll say do you have any questions? And I think that's something you don't get from some of the larger programs that are out there, from some of the bigger names. I want to make sure that I get time with my audience. That's really important to me as I continue to grow and evolve this program, because I want you to be successful in the recipe. That's a big goal for me.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so how many do I expect? And I think there's another part of this for those of you who are course creators or who have historically been learning by doing If the person were to say how many people do you want in the cohort versus how many people do you expect, I think you'd get a different answer. How many people do I want? I'd love to get to 50 right away, but realistically, based on my past experiences with course launches. I'm getting between 10 to 25. So there's just some historical data that I'm looking at.

Speaker 1:

I am trying a couple things different with this cohort in terms of marketing and promotion. I've been running Facebook and Instagram ads for the very first time leading up to this, trying to both promote my LinkedIn checklist in the month leading up and then, now that we're in the webinar promotion period, I'm running some ads specific to the webinar. So maybe you've seen one of those. If you have, I'd love it if you click on and you can get the link to register. But again, you can go to Mellormarketingcom slash stop. If you're interested, all right, moving along.

Speaker 1:

Question number five do you teach Sales Navigator? Interesting question. I have used every version of LinkedIn except Recruiter. I should say so, the free, basic version. I've used Premium Career, which is what I'm currently in. That is $40 a month. There's Premium Business, which I've used in the past and I think right now for new members coming in, I think it's $70 or $80 a month. They keep changing it. Then the next level up from there is Sales Navigator and if you pay monthly, I believe it's $120 per month. It might be a little bit more. It might be a little less, but it's definitely over $100. Now, if you do an annual subscription with any of these, you get a discount, but you have to pay in full for it. So I have used Sales Navigator.

Speaker 1:

Do I teach Sales Navigator? That's not a core component of the recipe for social selling, because the recipe program is really based on the public version of LinkedIn. Sales Navigator is actually an entirely different site. It's the same in that the connections and what in the homepage feed are pulling from the same area, but Sales Navigator is an entirely different subscription. So what happens is, when you sign up for a Sales Navigator subscription, if you happen to message people using Sales Navigator and then at some point in the future you delete your Sales Navigator membership and you go back down to free or premium career or premium business, you lose all of your messaging history inside Sales Navigator. So that's one of the cons of using it. If you start using it, you just have to remember that messaging history go into the public version of messaging so that you're not losing that. The other thing, though with Sales Navigator, it's really meant for heavy users of LinkedIn that are using LinkedIn for prospecting and business development, for individuals that maybe are doing enterprise or B2B sales on a much larger level. You get much deeper access to filters. You can set up lead lists and prospect lists. What I like about Sales Navigator is it does give you the ability to curate your own feed so that you're not just spending time wading through countless irrelevant posts in your homepage feed, but you're really Sales Navigator. You can set it up in a way so that you're only seeing posts from people that are in your lead or prospect list and when. I see that we have the ability in Sales Navigator to set up an individual lead list, which would be people, or we can also do company lead lists as well. So it does give you some additional bells and whistles.

Speaker 1:

While I don't teach Sales Navigator, I don't go deep into the ins and outs on how to use it. I have used Sales Navigator in the past. I always tell my clients and members that if you have any level of premium subscription, go into the LinkedIn Learning Library. They have a video that's all about learning Sales Navigator. I think there's multiple videos in there now and this is approved by LinkedIn, so they really are making sure that the LinkedIn learning video is pretty comprehensive in how you use Sales Navigator. Now, beyond that, there are other individuals that I know that are LinkedIn trainers and coaches that specialize in Sales Navigator. I can point you there, but the average person coming to me really is just looking to use the front end of LinkedIn, the free basic version, or maybe using LinkedIn layered on with premium career or premium business in there. All right, next question During the webinar, I had a countdown ticker on there and the person said what is that timer that we can see on your screen?

Speaker 1:

And if you go onto my webinar for the Stop Chasing Clients webinar, I think I had this in two places One, I do an exercise in the beginning like a brainstorming exercise, where I had a three-minute countdown timer, and then I also did one at the end. I think I had a 10-minute countdown timer to take questions. And if you use Google Sheets rather Google, what is it? The Google Slides, I think, is what they call it there is a countdown ticker that you can incorporate as part of that, and I think Zoom even has something as well. But I find sometimes that those are a little bit tricky. The user has to enable it. It might hide things on screen. So I figured it out.

Speaker 1:

I just I started using Canvacom for all of my slide decks and there's a way you can add in animated GIFs and things like that inside Canva. What I did and this is me being a very scrappy marketer I found a countdown ticker. I think I actually recorded it on my phone. I did it myself on my phone and I did a countdown from three minutes to zero and I did a screen video record on it and then I uploaded that into my Canva and I put it in the Canva as a video. So now when I do the Canva in presentation mode, as soon as I advance the slide to that, the countdown ticker starts. The video essentially starts playing and it plays until it's ending on there. So that's how I did the timer. I did it myself using my own phone and Canva. It wasn't using any special software or tools or things we had to pay for. It was really just capturing a video on my phone and then uploading it into Canva from there. All right.

Speaker 1:

Question seven the person was asking can you discuss optimizing your personal profile versus creating a business profile, which may be repetitive? And the answer in the webinar. I'm going to tell you the same thing here. You should have a personal profile on LinkedIn. You will be the most active on your profile. That will get the most views over your company page. But you should also have a company page even if, and especially if, you're self-employed, because by having a company page, first and foremost, you'll have the ability to put your company logo next to your company name, instead of having that gray avatar which immediately creates a question mark for people who want to look like a legitimate business. The second thing is your company page on LinkedIn almost serves as like a mini version of your website, and sometimes people are more apt to stay inside the platform instead of leave to go to your website. So it allows them that ability to navigate through and to learn more about your business by finding it in search results or going to your experience section. So I don't think it's necessarily repetitive, because your company page, your company, is an entity and even if you're self-employed, it's just you.

Speaker 1:

People might assume that you're an agency or that you're bigger than you are, and I like using it because it's a place that I can promote my products, my services, my events. It's a place where I can put additional postings. So on LinkedIn you can only really post once a day without getting hit with an algorithm penalty. If you do more than one post within 18 hours, you're going to get a slight decrease in impressions for both posts. So if I have two posts in a day, I go out of my company page. Or even if I don't have two posts in a day, I try to always post at least once a month on my company page, if not once a week. And what happens is when people visit your company page either by you inviting them to follow the page, by them navigating on their own, or your page coming up in search results when they get there, when they go to the activity section of the page, all they're seeing are posts by your page and when they scroll down, it's a very captive audience. It's a very condensed feed in there of just posts from your company page, whereas think about the LinkedIn homepage. You're competing with so many people out there, right, so it's highly concentrated. I love having business pages for that reason and I believe and I've used my own business page as a lead generating source for my business, so I don't think it's repetitive. If anything, I think it serves as an extension of your brand and I do go into this in the recipe program in greater detail.

Speaker 1:

Question number eight do you do trainings on any CRM? So this question was interesting. Not specifically, but I always tell people I'll teach you what I know and I'll share my experiences. So for me, when I first got started with my business, I was using an Excel file to track leads and inquiries and things that were coming in, and then eventually I started using a site called 17Hats, which was somewhat of a CRM system. It also allowed me to do emails and things like that. I looked into HubSpot from time to time. I've gone back and forth through the Excel spreadsheets. I've used Trello for CRM as well, which is really a project management tool, but you can use it for your CRM as well. So I don't do trainings on specific CRMs like Salesforce or HubSpot or things like that. I have used them once upon a time. Years ago I was using Salesforce, but I don't use them specifically now, and Salesforce is really designed more for enterprise level individuals. It's not really cost effective for a typical entrepreneur. So my area of specialty is marketing and LinkedIn. I don't really go into great depth on trainings on CRM. So I let you know what I do and I let you know the lanes that I say in there.

Speaker 1:

Question nine we've got two questions to go here. Question number nine is premium LinkedIn now $70 a month? Yes, it is, and this is interesting. So if you've ever paid for any LinkedIn subscription before and then canceled it, you may notice they say this is a special rate. You're never going to be able to get this rate ever again. Are you sure you want to cancel? They create that FOMO, that fear of missing out at the time that you want to cancel it. Because what happens is LinkedIn is a business right and, just like all of us who are business owners, we may increase our prices from time to time and newer customers coming in might get charged a higher price than customers who started with you a long time ago in their subscription. So this is essentially what LinkedIn has done.

Speaker 1:

I have had friends who've said to me they got in for premium business I think for $20 a month but they can't ever cancel it. They can't upgrade to Sales Navigator because if they ever go back down they're going to have to pay $70 a month for premium business. So yes, whatever the rate is that you are seeing is the current rate that they are offering. You may notice that LinkedIn will give you a 30-day trial for free, or sometimes you might see a 60-day trial or a 90-day trial out there. If there is any sort of offers out there that you're interested in, grab them. Definitely try to use the free month before you pay for the full upgrade on there and do keep in mind if you want to get that cost down, you can also go with an annual subscription, which reduces the monthly cost, but you have to pay for the year in advance, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1:

And then follow-up question for that person. She said at that level we were talking about premium career versus premium business and I was recommending going into premium career, which is the version I'm using, because I'm paying $40 a month and I'm getting everything that I need and I'm a pretty heavy user of LinkedIn. And she was asking for the premium career. Does it let you see who has searched you? And my response to her was you can see who has viewed your profile for the past 90 days. Using premium career In premium business. You can see who's viewed your profile in the past year. Now who has searched you.

Speaker 1:

This is available in general analytics. You don't need to pay for this. It will show you how many times you've come up in search results in a certain time period. I'm going to pull this up in the background to talk to you about what that time period is, but essentially, when it's coming up in your analytics, your search results, it gives you like a specific number how many times you've come up in search results in a certain time period. I'm looking at my profile right now and it says how many times my profile appeared across LinkedIn between March 11th and March 18th and this is the past seven days.

Speaker 1:

So it's telling me the number of search appearances, but it doesn't tell me was I in page one? Was I in page 10? It doesn't tell me. Did people actually click on my profile to look at my profile or did they just skim through me as a part of the results? If that's the case, who cares? I came up in page four of search results and they didn't see me right Now. It will tell me where I appeared post comments, network recommendations, search things like that, et cetera but it's not going to tell me specifically did they look at my profile? So I really don't think that looking at who has searched you or the number of search results you've come up in First, two numbers how many times your profile has been viewed in the past 90 days or, if you're using premium business in the past year, has been viewed in the past 90 days or if you're using premium business in the past year. And the middle number, the number of post impressions, which is the number of time that your post crossed by somebody's pair of eyes in the homepage feed. Both of those numbers should be at least steady or growing. That tells you that you're reaching your ideal target audience, that your content is seen as valuable and you're attracting the right people to your profile.

Speaker 1:

All right, my friends, those are the questions of the week, mainly coming from participants of my staff webinar, but a couple of additional ones that I was sharing with you in there as well. If you found this helpful, again, do let me know. If we're connected on LinkedIn, send me a direct message, send me a text if you know my cell phone number, or send me an email. Let me know if this was helpful for you and, as always, if you do have any questions, feel free to reach out to me and maybe I'll feature your answer in a future show. Have a great day and I look forward to seeing you on LinkedIn, where I'm going to help you to get a bigger slice of the LinkedIn pie. Take care and have a great day.

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