Podcast: LinkedIn Success Requires a New Social Media Selling and Sharing Strategy

I relished the opportunity to once again join my good friend Deborah Corn, Principal at the Print Media Centr and self-proclaimed intergalactic Ambassador to the Printerverse, on her podcast series. This episode we discussed social media selling on LinkedIn.

This time I was a guest alongside Atlanta-based Erik Holdo, who recently took over as Chief Marketing Officer for Funnel Amplified.

Funnel Amplified is a content amplification platform specifically for business-to-business clients who want to take that corporate messaging and expand their reach on it. As Erik explains, usually, it is the employees, industry analysts, and competitors that are connected to a company on LinkedIn and that’s about it; the potential clients aren’t connected to those companies. So, Funnel Amplified takes that corporate messaging and allows employees to very easily amplify that across their social networks and takes the personal brand of that individual employee and allows him to curate additional content.

Find Out Why LinkedIn Success Requires a New Content Sharing Strategy here

What We Covered

While Erik expertly breaks down how social media algorithms work and shares what he believes is going on with LinkedIn at the moment, I conveyed my usual LinkedIn Company Page bashing…

We laugh explore and debate, covering:

• LinkedIn’s new Creator Mode,
• which content format performs best
• the future of the platform
• the people that claim they know the “silver bullet” to LinkedIn’s success
• what simple things people can do right now to be successful on LinkedIn

Highlights of our Discussion on Social Media Selling and Sharing on LinkedIn

“Company-based messaging on LinkedIn actually doesn’t work that well, to begin with. If I’m a company and I’m using LinkedIn as my primary platform – good luck with that! Unless you’re doing paid media. If you’re just doing organic or earned media it’s not going to happen from just direct social posts from companies. It’s down to the individual as well.” – Erik.

I shared how the algorithms seem to have rewarded more personal posts on LinkedIn during the last 18 months or so.

“Although I do want LinkedIn to remain the professional business-to-business networking environment that it’s known for, you can’t get over the fact that people buy people first.” – Me.

“People who follow you [your company page] are never never your future prospect customers”. When was the last time you followed a company on LinkedIn because you followed a person? It’s not what we do.” – Me.

“Just because you post some content doesn’t mean to say your Connections or Followers get to see it.” – Me.

The conversation then led to which types of content get the most engagement.

“Video content is becoming more and more important. It’s interesting because it’s not video content where I’m sharing the video. I’m offering it either live on LinkedIn or I’m uploading it on LinkedIn. You’re going to see that those videos, their engagement is higher, who they [LinkedIn algorithms] show it to is higher than standard posts.” – Erik

“This concept of your brand being your logo, which is utterly rubbish, your brand isn’t your logo, your brand is the culture that your clients and prospect clients believe you to be and therefore our culture is largely emanated through your employees, through the people that represent that brand in person, on the street, having a coffee, having a conversation.

“I don’t think you can get around the question of having yourself in the frame, either on video live or somewhere in the story relating to the message you’re trying to get across. The more you can have yourself in the story is becoming ever more the likely formula for success it seems to me and the more corporate and third party it becomes the less interesting it is somehow.” – Me.

Our discussion then wound up discussing the future of the platform and the plethora of LinkedIn marketers claiming they can help people sell on LinkedIn!

“I’m worried about the concept of pay to play.” [with regards to LinkedIn’s future] – Me.

“There are a lot of training groups out there that are saying ‘hey we’ll teach you how to sell on LinkedIn’ and the problem I have with that is they’re full of it. I mean, for the most part, they’re all LinkedIn-centric, which is not sales. Sales is not LinkedIn-centric. LinkedIn is a relationship-building tool.

“LinkedIn is something that allows you to approach somebody that you couldn’t otherwise go meet and potentially… I think one of the most powerful things you can do when you Connect with someone isn’t to go: ‘hey I’d like to schedule 20 minutes, I want to take your most valuable resource, time and I want to take 20 minutes of it, 30 minutes of it away so I can tell you what I do.’ Really? No! I have no interest in that, whatsoever. However, if you told me: ‘Hey, you know what, I’ve got a pretty good network is there anything you’d like me to share in my network about what you do?’ That’s kind of an interesting different approach.” – Erik.