Your Next LinkedIn Post Is Already In Your Inbox - Ep 211

Welcome back to the podcast. On today's episode, I wanted to kind of talk about what inspired me to publish today. I actually got it on my to-do list podcast episode. And earlier today, I got an email from Adam Shibley.

He's the head of Podcasting Business School. He's really inspired me to be consistent with my podcast. And then I listened to his latest episode, which ironically was discussing why we should be consistent in publishing our podcast episodes. And I saw that as a sign.

So Adam, thank you for that. I'm going to put a link in the show notes to his episodes in case you're a podcaster as well. But what I'd like to talk about today is what I posted on LinkedIn, which is something you should be doing if you are self-employed. If you're a coach or a consultant, there's a good chance that you're getting questions from people in your network.

These might be questions that are sent to you through email. They might be texted to you. They might be sent in a direct message. But these are questions that people are coming to you for your area of expertise.

And I always encourage my clients and members to use that as content. So what I decided to do in my LinkedIn post for today is I took an email that I received actually from a client, and they were asking on behalf of their client for some feedback on their LinkedIn posts. And there was really no context around it. It just said, can you give me some thoughts on your post or ask your LinkedIn expert what she thinks about this?

So I gave the post a once over, and then I did uh a post about it on LinkedIn and I removed any information from the post which could identify them, meaning gender, company, and even some of the details about the post itself. I changed some of the numbers so that if this person were to stumble upon it, they wouldn't know that I was talking about them. But I thought this was really good content just to show an example of the type of expertise that I bring to my clients and members.

And I'm sharing this with you in hopes that this will inspire you to do the same. So the question again was provide me your thoughts on my latest post. And my answer was always happy to help my clients and members. And I said, I'm not sure what type of feedback you're seeking, but here's my expert evaluation of your post and what to do next.

And I want to pause on that point for a second because this person really didn't ask for feedback specifically in any area, meaning, what do I do next? Is there anything I should change? You know, he didn't really give he or she didn't really give me any of that information in the context. It was just an email that was forwarded to me.

So I'm just kind of putting my expert eye at this and I'm I'm explaining what I'm seeing in terms of what the person did well. And I'm also explaining perhaps some opportunities for improvement or some some quick hit wins that you could do with this as well. So my background is a corporate marketer. I specialize in LinkedIn.

I do not work for LinkedIn, the corporation, or work for myself, so I'm not beholden to them in my responses to my questions. I really am just answering from the perspective of myself and to help my clients. So in this case, I said the post generated over 80 reactions and 10 comments. And my guess is based on that, it's that this is one of this person's top performing posts for the year.

Now I did take a quick scroll through their activity feed, and it seemed at least over the past four to six months, they've been posting sporadically, you know, maybe once or twice a month, in some months, maybe weekly, but there really wasn't a lot of activity in those past posts. They were getting some likes and some comments here and there, but this seemed to be one of the top performers. I said, I can't see your impressions, but typically posts with a high level of reactions, comments also correlate to a high number of impressions.

And I said, if I were you, I'd review all 80 reactions for connections or follow-up opportunities. Because come into the day, we're not just posting to get likes and reactions. We're posting to try to reach our ideal target audience. And one way we we can see who those people are is by looking at the reactions.

So we can look through that list and we can see people who are first level that maybe we haven't engaged with in a while that maybe we want to return the favor, look up their posts and add a thoughtful comment or engage with one of their recent posts, or maybe even send them a direct message. But I wouldn't call them out and say, hey, I saw that you liked my posts because that might deter them from doing the same on future posts. But just let them connect the dots if they would like to do so.

If not, you don't need to, just message them because it seems that they are now warming back up to you for whatever reason. And then I would also look for the people that are second or third level, which means you're not directly connected to them yet. And I what I like to do is open profiles in a new tab and look at like five profiles at a time. Just give it a quick once over.

If the person's profile seems to match your target audience criteria, then invite them to connect. And if you have LinkedIn Premium, add a note, mention things that you have in common or something interesting that you saw in their profile in their invitation. The goal here is to demonstrate that you're a real live person, that you've actually looked at your their profile, and this isn't the same invitation that you're sending to everyone. So you're really trying to break out from the clutter and build some dialogue.

So there could be potential opportunities for reconnection or new connections in those 80 reactions. Now, I also said, you know, 10 people have commented and you haven't replied to anyone. And I always recommend that you reply to every comment that you receive. Not only is it good etiquette, but it also helps to push that post out to the homepage feed again to get more reach, to potentially reach more people with likes, reactions, and comments as well.

And I always say if the person was standing next to you and they commented whatever they commented, they said to you, you wouldn't just turn and walk away. You would turn back to them and you would acknowledge it, right? Patting them on the head is kind of like giving it a like, but instead, you'd probably as a human being, you would say something back to them. Thanks for that.

You know, I appreciate you saying that. You would say something to them. Okay. Now, the other thing I noticed about this person's post is in a quick once-over, it appeared conversational.

It appeared that this was this person's voice and it wasn't AI written. Now that's a good thing. Now it could have been AI written, and they really just polished it up and it sounded like a human voice, and that's fine too. What I don't like is when I see a post and it clearly looks like it's written by AI, and it's not always the M-dash that throws me.

It's there's other things in the language that just feel robotic and stilted, is the best way I can explain it. Now, in this particular instance, it didn't feel that way. It felt very conversational, almost like I could feel that person's voice coming through. What else?

I said of the people that did respond, um, they were at a pretty high level. You know, most of them were C-suite or in a leadership role. So that could be part of the reason the post got continued reach because other people were seeing the people who commented on it, that it reached that right level of target audience for this individual. Now at the bottom of the post, the person used six hashtags.

And my comment there was that LinkedIn really isn't prioritizing hashtags like it used to. It's not really rewarding you with additional reach. You can still use hashtags. And the word on the street from the LinkedIn training and coaching community, and even you know, some of us have bounced this off of LinkedIn, it seems to be three to five hashtags work if you would like to use hashtags at all.

Now, I do know that if you use hashtags in the posts, three of those hashtags will appear in the URL. And some LinkedIn coaches and trainers are saying that that might help you with SEO search engine optimization. I don't know if there's any rhyme or reason to that. I've not seen any data that confirms that.

So that's a hypothetical. But I would say if you would like to use hashtags, use three for that very reason. And my philosophy on hashtags nowadays on LinkedIn really hasn't changed. For the most part, the biggest question I get about hashtags for my clients and numbers, it's what's a hashtag?

They're just not using those at the same degree here as they are on other platforms. So if you want to use them, use hashtags that are relevant to the topics that are addressed in this post. And in this case, for this person's post, they were relevant and they were on track with that. And I ended that off just saying hoping this helps to give you some additional insights.

If you have any questions about the feedback or if you'd like any different additional clarification, let me know in comments. Now I'm speaking back to my LinkedIn audience again. So again, this is a really great way of taking a question from someone in your community. It could be a potential client, it could be a current client or member and repurposing it.

And it's a really great way of demonstrating your expertise when you do so. Okay. All right, so that's it short and sweet for today's podcast episode. I hope that you found this helpful.

And I will remind you if you do have any LinkedIn questions, you can email me at Brenda at MellerMarketing.com. And there's a good chance that your question might appear in a future podcast episode as well. Until later, look forward to seeing you on LinkedIn.

Thanks for watching the show.