Want to know how to use LinkedIn For Marketing?

Want to know how to use LinkedIn For Marketing? (scroll down for video and podcast)

LinkedIn is THE media platform for business professionals. So if this is your market, and you’re wondering how to use LinkedIn to your advantage, you’ve come to the right place.

Lynnaire Johnston came highly recommended to me by several people who were delighted with the results they had seen after working with Lynnaire.

I learned some great tips during this interview. You can read the transcript, watch the video or listen to the podcast.

Olivia:

So welcome Lynnaire.

Lynnaire:

Thank you.

Olivia:

Thank you, yeah. I was reading up a bit of your background and actually quite interesting. You’ve worked in the media for quite a while and you have interviewed lots of public figures. Can you tell us a bit about your background?

Lynnaire:

Sure. I started out as a journalist back in the days where it wasn’t terribly common for women to be journalists or to work in radio. So I was very fortunate indeed to have an opportunity to work in radio both in New Zealand and even in Australia. I worked at 2GB in Sydney for a time as well. And one of the really interesting things about working in the media and as a journalist is as you say getting to talk to some really fascinating people. People that you wouldn’t normally cross paths with on a daily basis and get to ask them sometimes very silly questions, stupid questions, basic questions because as a journalist, you don’t have to be knowledgeable in everything.

Lynnaire:

And so yes, I interviewed prime Ministers, celebrities, rock stars, all kinds of fascinating people and got an insight into the lives. Being a journalist is a really interesting choice of occupation I think.

Olivia:

I think it is. I mean now that I’m just dabbling in it in this little way, I’m loving it. So I think what you done sounds really exciting actually. I wonder if there’s a show reel some way that we can see … Could we find you on YouTube or find some of these-

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Lynnaire:

I think yes, if you Google my name, some terribly old things are likely to come up. Some embarrassingly old things are likely to come up. I haven’t done that for a while fortunately so I’m not sure what would still be there.

Olivia:

I’ll do that after our interview then, shall I?

Lynnaire:

All right. Sounds great.

Olivia:

All right. Anyway, we’ve been telling people that this is about LinkedIn-

Lynnaire:

It is.

Olivia:

So let’s get on to that. And I’ve had quite a number of people excited that you’ll be talking because they’ve had dealings with you and you have come highly recommended.

Lynnaire:

Thank you.

Olivia:

So let’s get into why should business professionals be taking note of and using LinkedIn as part of their marketing?

Lynnaire:

Right. I think the first thing is that it’s no surprise that social media has now got a real link in with the business community. But the problem has always been social media has been seen as something that’s personal, that we do in our own free time. And so there hasn’t been a great deal of kind of dovetailing between social media and business. That changed with Facebook business pages and people often in their own businesses had a Facebook business page. That all went belly up was at the beginning of this year when Facebook decided to stop putting posts from business pages into personal news feeds. And that meant that most people with small businesses no longer had a really good strong Facebook presence.

Lynnaire:

So where do you go? You go to the professional social media and that is of course LinkedIn. And it is getting bigger and bigger all of the time. So I think there are four key reasons why people have their own businesses should be using LinkedIn as part of their marketing strategy. So the first one is if you want to be seen as a leader in your field, the go to person in your industry Olivia, then being on LinkedIn is a really good place to be because you can showcase your expertise. The second thing is it enhances your credibility and so it makes … You’re allowed to share your knowledge and so you come across as somebody who really knows their stuff. And I think that’s really important.

Lynnaire:

You can also share information of value because we all know that business is about people, it’s about relationships and you do business with people that you know and you like. So sharing information makes you a good person, makes you a good person to do business with. And I think that those relationships can really begin to develop on LinkedIn. Look at us, here we are today virtual of LinkedIn having this chat. So I think that giving knowledge, giving value to others and also being able to get something back in terms of business leads is why people should be on LinkedIn.

Olivia:

Okay. So once you’re there and you’re active on LinkedIn, what kind of things should you be sharing? How do you know how to do it well I guess is-

Lynnaire:

Well, that’s … Here is this thing-

Olivia:

It’s a big question.

Lynnaire:

It is a big question and it’s got a long answer which is it takes time. Like any new skill that you’re going to master, it does take time and it takes practice. And it’s a bit like writing, if you want to be a good writer, you have to write every day. Practice, practice, practice. And it’s the same thing with LinkedIn because it’s such a sophisticated platform these days. There is an awful lot to learn about how to do it but … though I think there are some critical things.

Lynnaire:

Firstly, your profile has to be a really good one. LinkedIn has different ranks for profiles and yours needs to be all star, which means to be … It means to be completed. It means it needs to have a good photo, a good summary and you need to be active on LinkedIn.

Lynnaire:

I think too that you need to be doing some things like … There are three specific things that I think are important. And one is your headline. You need to write a headline that is eye-catching because now headlines appear on people’s phones and on their laptops of course but they can be displayed in different ways. So how you write your headlines and the words that you use in your headline are very important. And I found out recently too that location is important. So when you’re filling in your profile, you have to think about what your location is. Not exactly where you are because that’s obvious to you but where you are expecting your business to come from.

Lynnaire:

So for example, if you have your business in an outer suburb of a city but most of your business comes from an inner suburb of the city, then that is the post code you should have on your LinkedIn profile. Who knew? That’s a really interesting one.

Lynnaire:

And the other thing that has had bad press up until recently and this has shown now to become … Being more important and that is skills. It used to be that people thought that skills was something that really didn’t matter terribly much. But now it’s shown that if you have a good list of skills, those skills will be helping people in searches. So for example, I’m a copywriter. So if I have copywriting as a skill and it’s been endorsed by people amongst my skills and somebody is searching for a copywriter, then I’m more likely to come up in those searches because I got that particular skill listed amongst my others.

Lynnaire:

And also I think you need to have as many skills as possible. I think you can have up to 40, maybe even 50. So make sure you use those and use those wisely.

Olivia:

Okay. So make sure you don’t miss anything out, anything that’s obviously … would be relevant.

Lynnaire:

That’s right.

Olivia:

That you want to be found for.

Lynnaire:

Exactly and the things you want to be known for. Absolutely.

Olivia:

And so there’s actual ranking, the LinkedIn … the way it’s set up, it will actually show you if your profile is properly complete.

Lynnaire:

Yes. And you can see the dashboard, on your homepage. And you can look and see whose searched for you, how many people have viewed your profile. All those different kind of metrics that are quite important for you to know whether what you’re doing on LinkedIn is actually working. Because you don’t want to be putting lots of working into it and finding that you’re not getting the results that you want because what would be the point. We’re in business to make money. And so to make money, you have to have people see what you’re doing and you have to be active on the platform.

Lynnaire:

I think a lot of people treat LinkedIn a bit like it’s a website. They write it, they put it up there and then they forget about it. But an actual fact, LinkedIn is something you need to be on everyday.

Olivia:

Right. Okay. So you’re active on there every day and you want to make sure it gets … That the right people are seeing you. So how do you make sure you connect with the people that are appropriate?

Lynnaire:

Right. LinkedIn has a really good search function and it allows you to search by your target market. So that might be in a particular industry. For example, if you are wanting to target the insurance industry for instance, then you can put that in as a keyword. And everybody who fits into the criteria that you put in, it might be the size of the company, it might be the kind of person in the company, you might be looking for the marketing manager for example. If you put those things into the search, then those people will come up. And you can even also to search by geography so particular cities or areas. And that will then come up with a big list hopefully of people who are your targets.

Lynnaire:

So from there, once you know you want to … You’ve got as potential targets, you need to look at their profile Olivia because that there are lots of people who are on LinkedIn who aren’t active. And so connecting to them may or may not be as useful to you as you might think. So choose people who are active on LinkedIn, who’ve got a good number of connections and people that you can see who could well respond positively to an approach from you.

Lynnaire:

And when it comes to an approach, you don’t want to be sending that default message. I get that a lot still. I don’t send them myself. I always send a personalized message because I think that’s really important and it has a big bearing on the number of people who say yes. Because I’m often connecting to people who don’t know me personally and that is okay nowadays. It wasn’t originally. LinkedIn has now said that it’s okay to connect to anybody and everybody that you want to. But it’s sending a personalized message that somehow connects to that person is a really good idea.

Lynnaire:

For example, I’ve been to connecting to a few people who are in your Facebook group who might be watching this. And I’ve sent that as a personalized message mentioning you by name and so automatically then coming up with a connection. So that then inspires people to say yes because I’m not just out of the blue. I’m not just … could be anybody.

Olivia:

All right. So that’s probably partially already answering my next question. If you do message people, techniques to make and how to message them and not be spammy, not to be all-

Lynnaire:

I did a really interesting exercise on this recently because I wanted to find out the answer to this exact same question. And so I found though that it depends on the person that you ask and everybody has a different opinion on this. But what it does need to be is that your connection invite needs to be relevant to them. In one way you can do that is to ask a question. For example, I’ve been recently connecting to various BNI members around New Zealand and I’ve asked them as part of my invitation how long they’ve been in BNI because then that automatically starts that connection happening.

Olivia:

That’s really interesting.

Lynnaire:

They want to answer.

Olivia:

That’s interesting. Instead of just bombarding them with information, you actually are approaching with a question and then you’re opening up-

Lynnaire:

Not everybody will respond Olivia and that’s human nature, isn’t it? But those that do, then you can begin a conversation with them that might go through. It might not but in the case of that particular example, it netted me quite a number of invitations to attend events which was really nice. And so you started a conversation with somebody, often you can continue it in a different way. You don’t want to be very salesy. I don’t for example ask to connect to somebody and then tell them all about what I do because I don’t think that works.

LinkedIn is still about people and about relationships. So it’s important to establish a relationship with somebody first to find out what they need. It’s like in any sales situation, you don’t just walk into somebody in a cold situation and say, “Here is what I do. Would you like to buy some?” It’s all about finding out what they need and what their problems are and then coming up with a solution that may or may not work. So I wouldn’t describe LinkedIn as one of those really terribly sales oriented techniques for getting in there and marketing. It’s much more relaxed content marketing sort of a strategy that I think works the best.

Olivia:

Okay. So when connecting with someone you don’t know, what is the most important thing to do?

Lynnaire:

I think the most important thing to do is to choose something from their profile that is relevant to them and to you and asked him about it. For example, if my profile said that I was into sports, it doesn’t. But if it did, and your profile said that you were into sports, which it may, then I would probably ask a question around that. Because then that’s establishing that personal relationship. And once you’ve got a personal relationship established, it’s a lot easier to move that onto the next step. Looking at people’s profiles before you connect to them is a really good thing to do. I know it takes time, that’s the issue. And you don’t want to be bombarding lots of people with lots of connection requests all the time. You want to be able to … It’s a little and often I think with LinkedIn that makes the relationships important. So having big numbers of connections is great but you want those connections to be targeted, to be people that you really want to be connected to.

Olivia:

That’s a clever tip. Can you see how those features … You’re saying to look at the profile, can you see all of those on a free version or do you think you need to … I was wondering about whether you need a premium version. There’s a few different premium version there.

Lynnaire:

There is a recruitment version which I don’t know very much about. There’s sales navigator which I use which is a paid platform and then there’s premium. Now I think it depends a lot on what you want to use LinkedIn for and how much you’re using LinkedIn. For anybody who is not using it in a really heavily sales oriented way, I think that the free version is absolutely fine. The only thing you can’t seem to do on the free version is to save searches which is one of the reasons why I have sales navigator because you can save the searches.

And that’s important I think if you’re wanting to connect to a certain group of targeted people because you can only send connection invites to 75, I think it is, people a day. It’s a lot actually. But if you were just-

Olivia:

On the free version or the… which version is that? Sorry.

Lynnaire:

On any version actually.

Olivia:

Okay.

Lynnaire:

So having a paid version-

Olivia:

You’d be pretty busy doing that.

Lynnaire:

Any difference.

Olivia:

Okay.

Lynnaire:

But can you imagine sending 75 a day? That is a lot of work particularly if you’re doing it in a personalized way. So I don’t see the need to pay for premium unless you are really wanting to use it heavily and in a particular sort of a way. But if you’re just starting out on LinkedIn, no need.

Olivia:

No need.

Lynnaire:

No need.

Olivia:

Excellent. What’s your prediction for the future of LinkedIn?

Lynnaire:

Now this is a big one. I think that LinkedIn is going to take over from Facebook in terms of the importance to businesses. And I think we already seeing that by the number of people who are using LinkedIn and how much interest there is in being able to use LinkedIn really well. And because Facebook is moved back and out of the business space, it allows LinkedIn to come in and really do a good job.

Of course it is now owned by Microsoft so they might have some bearing on it too and the things that they can do, the different options. Because while we’ve got video on LinkedIn, you will not notice that we’re conducting this interview on Facebook because there is no LinkedIn live video as yet. So that’s the kind of thing that I think that LinkedIn will put into play as time goes on and will see a lot more video on LinkedIn is my guess.

Olivia:

Well, I already notice a lot of videos there but yes, there’s a lot of restrictions. To be able to do something like this there and surely that’s going to happen very soon. Once that happens, it will take off.

Lynnaire:

It will take off absolutely. And I think that there’s a prediction that by the end of this year, 80% of everything that’s looked at online will be video. That’s a bit scary, isn’t it? For those of us who are readers and writers, it’s extremely scary but I think that video is definitely the way of the future Olivia. Like it or not.

Olivia:

So if I want to use LinkedIn more strategically rather than ad hoc, what should I do?

Lynnaire:

I think you need to develop a strategy. It’s like anything that if just go out it’s like bull at a gate and try to do everything all at once, then … that [00:18:04] won’t work. So you need to decide exactly what it is that you want to achieve. So start from our objective and then work backwards from there. So it’s like anything in the marketing or business plane, you need to sit down, work out what it is that you want to achieve, how are you going to do it and work backwards from your objectives.

Lynnaire:

Now I think that one of the critical things for using LinkedIn really well is being active on the platform by putting up your own unique posts. That might be videos as you just talked about or it could be written text posts, could be a combination. But it’s all about adding value in a non-salesy the way. So it’s about not promoting your business all the time by adding value. Talking about how you do your work, what kind of things that you do, what you’re good at and providing information to people what I call value added. And if you have a strategy that includes that, I think that when you work on LinkedIn and start to gain traction with more connections and being engaged with people, then you will … You’ll really start to make it work for you. But it does take time and it takes concentrated effort.

Lynnaire:

So even if you were to spend say, 10, 15 minutes on LinkedIn each day, you would very quickly start to see things happening for you because you can start to engage with other people’s posts and they will start to engage with yours.

Olivia:

Does it matter when you do? Time of day?

Lynnaire:

Yes. Yes, it does and it matters the day you do it too. Most of us looking aren’t things like LinkedIn at weekends although some people do of course. And you still find some interesting things happening on LinkedIn at weekends. But mostly during business hours and during the business day. So I would be for example, putting things up somewhere in the afternoon usually, on a week day probably Tuesday through to Thursday, the busiest days Monday and Friday possibly as well. But probably less so on a Friday because people are thinking about the weekend and what they’re going to be doing over the weekend rather than wondering about whether they should be doing things on LinkedIn.

Lynnaire:

However on the other side of the coin, they’re people on a Friday afternoon who go, “I’m just sitting here in my chair little while longer until the clock ticks by. What can I do? I know, I’ll check out LinkedIn.” So I think business days during business hours is the best time to be putting things up on … now that’s a posting Olivia, I better be clear about that. If you want to engage with other people’s posts on LinkedIn, I don’t think it matters what time you do that.

Olivia:

Yeah.

Lynnaire:

And it certainly doesn’t matter what time you send connection invites because they go through the messaging system and so they’ll just be picked up by somebody when they see it in their email inbox or in their messaging on LinkedIn when they’re there next time. So any time for those.

Olivia:

Okay. Before we wrap up, I wanted to check … I don’t know if people have been asking questions. I’ve had a bit of a technical issue. I was trying to add you when we started and I went into the screen and it’s still flashing up at the invite friends. So I never wanted to press anything in case I lost you. Sorry if any questions have come up, I can’t see them. So are you able to see if there’s any questions there-

Lynnaire:

No, all I can see’s you and I.

Olivia:

So if anyone has any questions, are you happy to just reply their comments?

Lynnaire: Absolutely. And I’m also happy to connect to anybody from the SEMBA group. So please do send me an invite if you haven’t already done so. And you can just find me by either looking at word wizard or by just writing … Typing my name which is a bit of a tricky one which is why word wizard is sometimes a whole bunch better to be typing.

Lynnaire: And I might just make a point about that Olivia which has reminded me about hashtags. People use hashtags on Twitter a lot but it’s also really important on LinkedIn particularly in terms of posting. If you put your business name with a hashtag alongside it at the end of your posts, that means anybody can search for you and your posts and any other activity that you’ve put up on LinkedIn via hashtag from within LinkedIn and I think that’s really cool. So it’s kind of like a mini search engine inside.

And anything else too.

Olivia:

So people may not be connected to you, if you put a hashtag will still see your posts.

Lynnaire:

Yes. If I just hashtag word wizard-

Olivia:

What kind of hashtag would you put? Would it be something that relates to what you’ve posted about.

Lynnaire:

Well, you can choose. I tend to use my business name as the first thing. And then if I’m writing about LinkedIn, then I’ll use LinkedIn as a hashtag as well. I might write copywriting. Anything that I think that people might be searching for and I want me to come up in that search. So I think that your business name is always a good idea. A lot of people’s business names are the same as the personal name and that’s okay too because it just gives you a nice little library of hashtags that you can direct people too. And say, “If you just hashtags this, you’ll find me there and some of my posts.” And people can see what you’ve already done. I think it’s a great idea. I’m using it a lot more.

Olivia:

That’s actually reminded me. I tend to post on LinkedIn as myself and Officeway is just a static page. My feeling is that it’s person-to-person so I should post as myself and the page pretty much just sits there

Lynnaire:

And that’s how I treat it too. I think the reason for that Olivia is that business page posts don’t show up in news feeds like group posts don’t show up in news feeds anymore either although they might be changing that. They’re doing some work on groups at the moment. So I think you’re right. It’s all about you and I talking together and so it’s about people. And that’s why putting things in your personal feed rather than your business feed is a much better idea. Although if you’re a bigger company and you’ve got lots of employees, you do need to have an up-to-date business page that’s for certain you need to be putting posts on there. What I don’t think you’ll get anything like the traction that you would putting the post up on your own personal feed.

Olivia:

Okay. Well maybe you could put it on the business page and then share it personally.

Lynnaire:

Yes, you can. Absolutely, you can. And that’s a really good way to use articles as well. You know that articles don’t get anything like the traction that posts do. If you put up an article, a nice long one because you’re a bit constrained with how much you can type in an ordinary post. But if you up a nice long article, then you can actually take pieces out of it or write a post about that article and that would be the same thing with your business page. If you put something on the business page, write a post about it and direct people to that.

Lynnaire:

Look, I think that’s a really good idea. You know that’s not something I’ve tried. I think I might still that idea. Thank you.

Olivia:

Well, I think that’s been really interesting. And I think I’ve gone a little bit longer than I intended because I was so interested and wanted to ask more questions. But I better not let go too long. So I probably should wrap up. Is there anything you have to say that you’d like to let you know before-

Lynnaire:

Sure. I would like just people to know about the program that I ran called connect me which helps people with their LinkedIn marketing strategy. It’s a 12 week program. And what it does is it helps people get connected to their target market, it uploads unique posts to their particular profile and also gets engagement on those posts because that’s the thing. When you put up close, you want people to see it. And so I’ve got a technique that I use for making sure that people’s posts to get seen by the widest number of people possible.

Lynnaire:

So if you’re interested in looking at that, that’s called connect me. Then if you go to supersizeyoursales.com as in just supersizeyoursales.com and look under services, you’ll see a LinkedIn marketing program there and it will give you a little bit of about it. And if you’d like to talk to me about that, I’m very happy to answer any questions on LinkedIn or on Facebook.

Olivia:

All right. Well will leave it at that, thank you so much Lynnaire for joining us today and thank you everyone that’s watching. We’ll leave any information in the comments of how to get in touch and leave any questions you have and have a great day and a great weekend.

Lynnaire:

Thank you Olivia. It’s been great chatting.

Olivia:

Thanks. Bye.

Lynnaire:

Bye.

Interview conducted by Olivia de Sousa-Ferres

You can contact Lynnaire Johnston from Word Wizard here:  https://www.wordwizard.co.nz/

You can find the SEMBA South East Melbourne Business Associates Facebook page here.

SEMBA is sponsored by Officeway. The office furniture website is here.

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