Improve your Growth with Social Media: 6 Actions that will give you a Boost!

Welcome back to C-Suite Sidekick! I'm your host, Summer, and you're tuning into another insightful mini pod, part of our B2B Summer Sales series. Today, we’re diving deep into leveraging social media for your business growth, focusing specifically on LinkedIn. Are you ready to align your sales and marketing efforts, enhance your personal brand, and establish trust with your audience? We’ve got six actionable tips to help you get started, from optimizing your profile to posting engaging content. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just getting started, there's something here for everyone. So grab your coffee or settle in for some after-dinner insights, because we're about to transform your LinkedIn game! 

Tune in now to catch all the details!

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• Repurposed content, such as this description created using CastMagic
• Visit Rise of Us for more information about Summer's services
• Connect with Summer on LinkedIn

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro to mini pod
• 1:14 Stats you need to know
• 2:14 Tip number 1
• 3:35 Tip number 2
• 5:12 Tip number 3
• 7:06 Tip number 4
• 12:33 Tip number 5
• 14:51 Tip number 6
• 16:23 One last important stat
• 17:24 Recap

Transcript

summer: 0:00

Welcome back. This is another mini pod for you. And this is the next in the series of B2B summer sales. And it's also a spin off of Sales and Marketing Alignment from last week. We're going to talk about leaning into social media and specifically LinkedIn. Social media, isn't that marketing's job? Well, yes and no. Remember that we talked about sales and marketing working more in tandem, and a good way to get marketing on your side is to use their stuff. Share the posts that they create, comment with your point of view, and add value. And then you can tell them what posts get engagement from your audience and which ones kind of earned crickets. A lot of marketing is throwing spaghetti at the wall, so help them dial it in. And then imagine this, I'm pulling from my public relations background. It's basically the concept that things other people post about you are more valuable than the content you create yourself. Think about when you do your research. What do you trust more? A paid commercial or ad or an article written by an industry expert? That article, right? Well, your company posts are the commercial and you are the industry expert. A couple of stats to think about before we get started. 90 percent of top performing salespeople use social media as part of their sales strategy and that comes directly from LinkedIn. 55 percent of all buyers do their research using social networks. That comes from HubSpot. 77 percent of B2B buyers claimed that they do not talk to a salesperson until after they had performed independent research. That comes from DemandGen. So people are searching for you. Before they're willing to talk to you in an increasingly digital world in which sales professionals, thank goodness, are no longer expected to hit the streets and knock on doors. Your social media warms up your audience and helps establish the know, like, and trust that we know is so important. So whether you're an employee or an owner. Personal brand beats company brand every day. But how do we get there? And how do you start? I've got six tips for you and you can start today. Number one, you're going to want to start with your profile. This is your digital brochure. LinkedIn isn't an online resume anymore. Unless you're a job seeker, your profile needs to speak directly to your ideal client. Those people clicking your profile need to hear you talking directly to them, and they need to know that you understand their problems. Use a photo where your face and your face only takes up most of the circle. It's well lit, there's a smiling face with no sunglasses. You need to be dressed well with a decent background. It can be a cell phone photo instead of a professional one, but it needs to look nice. Your action item is to rewrite your profile to talk about the problems that you solve for your ideal clients and the results that you get for them. Remember to use words or terms that people would use in the LinkedIn search and your profile needs to evolve. If you're not getting a lot of click, if you're getting a lot of clicks, but not as many connections as you want, go back in there and tweak it. Now I am not an expert in this area. If you want a resource on profile optimization, I've got a few. Number two, get started! I'd ordinarily tell you to have some goals and a plan, but I have a feeling that you're going to get lost in the weeds. So we'll get to that later. You don't have to do anything cheesy like post something about posting more often. Just do it. Get in there. Block off some time in the mornings when you're having coffee, or in the evenings after dinner. I do both, but I'm pretty active there. Scroll, of course, but instead of simply scrolling or liking a post, add a comment. The best comments follow the improv rule of Yes, and. And what that means is it's continuing the conversation. Adding a comment of, yes, agree, is fine, but you can say, I'd also like to add. And then you insert a little nugget of wisdom from your point of view. I avoid arguing on LinkedIn. Remember, that there's a lot of people on there who are active, they're watching you. If you disagree with something, it's best to keep scrolling unless your personal brand is going to be the disruptor in the room. Your action item here, get on LinkedIn every day and engage. Follow your ideal clients, industry publications, and thought leaders, connect with your partners, Start paying attention to the kind of content that gets a lot of engagement and also the kind of content that inspires you to comment or share. Number three. Start posting. Now it's your turn to start posting your own content. If all you do is share your company's content, your feed is basically an infomercial and your engagement is going to tank. You will also lose followers. You can start by finding industry articles and posting them with your own insight, why you find it helpful. Those tend to get a lot of engagement because you're piggybacking off of a larger audience. So it's a good place to start. For your own homegrown content, start with FAQs, common objections, common problems that your customers come to you and how you solve them. Look to provide educational and helpful content that speaks directly to your ideal client. Now this is not, I can help you 10x your inbound leads, buy from me kind of content, who wants to watch that? It's more like, here are lead gen tactics that are working right now, and then you give little helpful nuggets. Highlighting client success stories, leaving out names of course, are also very powerful. Your action item here. If you don't know what to post, start by sharing content from Thought Leaders, and then you can add your own content later. Center it around FAQs, tips and tricks your audience would find helpful or inspiring, think about What people come to you asking, what people come to you telling you that they need to solve. Those are going to make good posts because there's a lot of people in your audience that aren't coming to you asking those questions, but they do have them in your head. Avoid anything even remotely controversial. Nothing that you couldn't say in the boardroom. Leave the politics for that other social media platform. Four, let's talk about some content that works. I am by no means a LinkedIn influencer. If you want to talk to some of those folks, I know a few, or you can find them on LinkedIn. I'm sharing what's worked for me in my little sphere. I don't care about having a huge audience. I just want to find and engage with my people. And from my experience, here's what works in order of reach and engagement. Number one, video, of course. It's one minute, plus or minus. It doesn't have to be slick. I just use my iPhone and the best audio actually comes from my wired headphones. I use CapCut to edit the beginning and end to make sure there's no lag that tanks engagements. And I put captions on the video before I upload it. Auto captioning services on all social media channels are hit and miss, and I get more engagement on my captioned videos, so I want to make sure that those captions are always on there. My videos are usually tips and tricks, but I'll occasionally post a blooper. Video is a great way to relate and humanize yourself in an asynchronous communication. Have you ever taken out your camera to record something and you tripped over your own words? Don't delete that. I highly recommend that you consider posting it. I promise it will perform well. It's all about authenticity and this just shows you as a real human being instead of this like buttoned up business owner or salesperson. People love nothing more than to take that person down a peg. So if you take yourself down a peg, There you go. Photos. If you have a written post, they get better engagement if there's a photo attached. And what performs best, unsurprisingly, are real photos. Stock photos are okay, maybe a GIF. AI generated images, I have found them not performing very well. What really works is authentic photos. Candid photos that I have taken in my real life. I want to warn you about posting too many selfies. The occasional reintroduction to an audience, because your audience is going to grow, you're going to have to reintroduce yourself regularly. That's fine to post a selfie though, although a video works better. A candid photo from your real life, tie it back to work, so that it's not, here's my dog, isn't he cute? It is, I love remote work because in the middle of the day, I get to get some fresh air and take my dog for a walk. Something like that. Carousel posts. This is when you can give people quick tips and tricks, or post about FAQs. They don't get as much engagement and as videos, but they're a great way to repurpose blog content. How about a blog that was six tips to increase your lead gen? Guess what? Now that's an eight slide carousel post. If I find the content relevant, those are fun to scroll through. It's like little bite sized content. You can design it quickly in a free Canva account. And I use the same template every time, which is a lot easier. But it also starts getting recognition. When people see that image, they know that it's a tip and trick from me. Polls are ascending again. Oh my God. Remember when they were brand new and they were overused, and it was super cheesy and you just scrolled past them? Well, people stopped posting them because they got kind of cringey. And they're kind of a novelty again. If you can think of a conversation starting question to ask, this can be a great way to engage your audience. All too often, social media posting can kind of feel like you're talking to a wall, so this is a way to draw people in. And text only posts still work on LinkedIn. Believe it or not, I checked this morning. My top performing post in the last 90 days was a text only post. I was offering help, networking, introductions, references to anyone in my network who was recently affected by layoffs in SaaS and financial services. Now, did that speak to my ideal client who is the owner of a financial or SaaS company? Um, no, but it did show me as a well connected and empathetic leader, and as a fractional executive, That's a win. Plus, anyone I help is going to get a new job, and maybe they remember me when they get there, so, you know. Social media kind of feels like junior high. So, if you're going to do a text only post, you need to put emojis in there, you need to break up your text, you need to carriage return after every sentence or so. We have the attention span of gnats when we're scrolling social media, so if you're going to do a text only post, you need to make it easy to scan. Okay, your action item here, this was a little bit long, this is what works. Pick something that doesn't freak you out too much and post it. If you hate it, you can pull it down, You're not a famous actor, so no one's going to screenshot it and save it. And then as you start to feel a bit more confident, you can work your way up to those video posts. I promise you they work. Now, number five, you got to figure out when to post. I don't want you to overthink this. Again, this is something where business owners or hyper analytical folks can like try to dial in and know exactly when people are online. When you're getting started out and you're building your personal brand on LinkedIn, you're gonna need to be consistent. You don't have to do it every day. Three to five times a week is good. Try to avoid going the opposite direction and posting multiple times a day.'cause the algorithm's gonna think you're a spammer. High engagement days for me are Saturday and Sunday. I work with a lot of sales and marketing folks and business owners, and we tend to work a lot. Thursday is the busiest weekday that I see. Low engagement days tend to be Monday and Friday. I mean, we all have a case of the Mondays, right? And Friday we're already thinking about we're we're what we're gonna do on the weekend. I post in the morning thinking that others will be scrolling while they're having coffee and I use a scheduler. I post important content that I want people to see on days that are high engagement. New blogs, now my podcast or a video, I'm usually dropping that on a Thursday or another midweek day if I've got more than one post like that. I post work life balance on Saturday and client success on Sunday. That's when a lot of high achievers are scoping out and planning the week ahead. So I get good engagement on those. Motivational posts on Monday, and then goof off or bloopers on Friday. I post daily, but you don't have to. Post some stuff, see what your audience likes, and then adjust. When you're getting started out, you're not gonna know the perfect plan, so just do something. Do it fairly regularly. Go to your LinkedIn analytics and see what's performing best for you and then make little adjustments along the way and continue to look at those analytics and adjust as needed. I've adjusted my strategy quite a few times in the last 90 days. Your action item here. Decide how many times per week you're okay with posting. Pick a time, use a scheduler to help you automate, measure and adjust as necessary. Number six, make a plan. Come on, you knew I was going to get to this, right? I tend to hear one of two things from sales pros or business leaders. Either you don't have enough time to do social media work because you're busy killing it, or you spend two hours on LinkedIn today and then you think you did your job. Now, both are kind of wrong for different reasons. It's all about balance and intentional work. You're not an influencer, so you don't have to have a full blown LinkedIn strategy. Again, this is something I don't want you to overthink. Start with an objective in mind. Why are you doing this work? And then make it measurable. Now, since you've started posting and you see what works for you, come up with a couple of actions that you can perform regularly. to reach that objective. A certain number of posts and new connections per week should do the trick. And now, block off time in your schedule and stick to it. Unless it's in the evening while you're watching TV, you probably don't want to let yourself scroll endlessly. And also, avoid checking throughout the day to see how many likes you got. This is not Instagram, we are not influencers, that's not going to serve your objective. A little mini tip here, Turn off your notifications on the app. Your action item, have a measurable purpose for your LinkedIn work. Put it in your personal success plan and add it to your perfect week. Track your progress and hold yourself accountable. Side note, if you don't have a personal success plan or a perfect week planned, we need to chat. Those helped me to stop chasing shiny objects. Okay, now one last thing to consider. Approximately 4 percent of LinkedIn users post regularly, yet there are millions who check it every day. I cannot tell you how many times I see people at networking events and they tell me that they like my videos or my content on a certain topic, and it's detailed, so I know they're paying attention. I tell you, I'm gagged, because they've never clicked on my profile, commented, or shared, or even liked a post of mine, but yet I can tell that they are seeing my stuff regularly. So those engagement stats on LinkedIn are not the only indicators that your content is reaching people. Keep posting, trust in your process, and you never know when your ideal person is watching. Which is why you're supposed to be nice, right? Oh my goodness, we have barely scratched the surface and I feel like I've been talking into the void for way too long. This needs to be a multi part er. So be on the lookout for how to make meaningful connections and grow your network. That is the entire point of this, right? Okay, recap. Social media isn't just for marketing. This is a great tool to establish know, like, and trust with your audience. Here's your tips. One, start by optimizing your profile so it speaks directly to how you help your ideal client. Two, get started. Log in every day, engage with content, and pay attention to what inspires you. And just remember that liking is the lowest form of engagement. Three, start posting your own content. FAQs or helpful tips and tricks perform well. This is all about educating and not about selling. Four, a mix of formats. Understanding that video and authentic images perform really well, but start with what you're comfortable with yourself. Five, pick days and times that work for you. Make sure that you're posting consistently, although it doesn't have to be daily. Use a scheduler. And then track the analytics to see what's working and adjust as needed. Number six, make a plan so your work is intentional. I don't imagine that you're going to want to scroll social media aimlessly daily and tell yourself that it's, using air quotes, work. If this was helpful at all, let me know. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Summer Paletti. I'm there every day. Or you can go to my website, theriseofus. com. If there are other topics you'd like to hear about, please chime in. I aim to educate and help my audience. See you next week!