Welcome to this weeks show. So who do you follow on LinkedIn and why?

I’m not talking about who you connect with, that should be for different reasons (even though you do then follow them) but those people on LinkedIn that you purposely follow with the intention of seeing their activity, posts and articles in your feed.

Have you got a clear strategy or is it based on ad-hoc seeing ‘something good’ from someone and then following them’?

More of that later, but first…..

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

• What is the true business value of social media engagement? 

This is an excellent and thought-provoking article from Mark Schaefer (who is well worth following by the way!). We can easily fall into the trap of assuming that engagement is the ultimate measure of social media activity but it’s worth pausing for reflection and challenging such a conclusion and Mark certainly got me thinking with this piece. My thoughts on his 8 points are as follows;

1. Customer engagement is not normally connected to brand loyalty. 100% agree I’m just surprised anyone would think it would!
2. Most social media engagement does not lead to short-term financial benefits. The key word here is ‘most’. I can’t imagine anyone would expect that every time they engaged, a new customer would appear! It does happen, but for the most part, engagement is about increasing visibility and that is a long game (see point 8 below)
3. Social sharing is an important metric because it represents organic advocacy. If someone shares your post, it is undoubtedly a sign that they have, to some extent, bought into you. That said, a share severely limits the visibility of a post (as opposed to commenting) so it also has its disadvantages.
4. Social media engagement that leads to customer community can create tangible business benefits. No doubt true, interacting with people allows the opportunity to invite them to join a community. That said, the community will not create customers unless it is managed in the right way.
5. Social media activity alone doesn’t lead to financial benefits unless you turn weak relational links into an actionable audience through long-term engagement. This makes sense but I don’t think you always need to go as far as calling someone, one to one DM’s can achieve the same result in my experience.
6. Engagement can improve content reach efficiency and promotional costs. Hallelujah! Probably understated by Mark though, content reach is massively improved via engagement!
7. Social media engagement has value when it encourages the right organizational discipline. Yup!
8. Social media engagement is a popular metric … but your future customers are probably not engaging at all. On this point I’m going to take issue with Mark, lurkers are definitely the majority and so many of your customers will come from this community…….this proves why engagement is so important because by getting people to engage with your content you are bringing that content to their followers and therefore many more lurkers.

Kapwing – video captions

• A desktop tool that allows you to easily add captions to your videos. This looks like a good tool because it bypasses the annoying and fiddly process of having to create .srt files. This works by simply converting your words into text on the video itself. The product is free, provided you don’t mind having their logo plastered across your video. If you wish to remove it, the cost is as seen below;

Are you against LinkedIn automation? If so, drop me a note and I will include you on any information we put out regarding our campaign to discourage people from automating LinkedIn.

New LinkedIn Features

You can now send video messages through LinkedIn messenger on the mobile app!

This isn’t like voice messages where you record the message in the app. Instead it is done through the ‘add image’ feature. Previously video files could not be added whereas now they are allowed. Simply record your video on your phone and then add it into the message from the camera reel. Tip: record your video in landscape, it looks much better.

LinkedIn Live Video

I’m starting to see Live video notifications, especially from LinkedIn’s own Peter Roybal.

I’m not impressed!

Long rambling videos that I don’t have time for with a comment thread that is full of pointless “hey” and “checking in” quotes. I really can’t see this taking off on LinkedIn!

This week I posted on LinkedIn asking for suggestions and this one was the vote from Matt Hay.

I wanted to highlight it because it is an extremely rare example of a company post that really engaged and it also fits with last weeks subject of employee advocacy. OK it’s a pretty silly video but it’s also the kind of content that people really respond well to on LinkedIn.

Who Should You Follow?

Engagement is key to increase your visibility on LinkedIn but that visibility has to be from the right audience, there is no point in being highly visible only to people who you do not want to do business with.

I have talked a lot about the importance of posting the right type of content and in the right way but the other side of this is about how you engage with other peoples content. This is a great way to increase visibility, become more familiar with and connect to those who you wish to do business with but that engagement is much more powerful when you engage with the right type of content delivered by people who care about or are experts in, the topics that resonate with your target audience.

Firstly you need to have real clarity over the topics that are important to your prospects.

Once you understand this you need to find experts and thought leaders on those topics. This can be done by searching profiles (people) or content – keyword search or a hashtag search.

Now check their posts to see if they are posting comment worthy content.

If they do, follow them!

and comment……comment….comment, as much as you can on their posts

You are now becoming more visible to your target audience.

This should ensure that subsequent posts from these influencers appear in your feed but we all know that the algorithm can’t always be relied on!

The workaround is to save their posts page url as a favourite or bookmark in your browser, this way you can always return to it anytime you wish to engage.

Following can be a key action you take on LinkedIn, provided you follow the right people and engage with their content.

That’s it for this week. Have an amazing week and I look forward to catching up with you again soon.