What the heck difference does it make if you Subscribe, Follow, Connect or Ring the Bell? I recently had a hard time explaining the differences to a client when in all four cases LinkedIn seems to assure us that making any one of these choices will result in us receiving that person’s content.

When we visit someone’s LinkedIn Profile, we are offered one or more of Following, Connecting, Subscribing and Ringing the Bell. But what are the differences between the four with respect to seeing their content? So today we venture into the weeds to see what those differences are.

Followers

You decide you don’t necessari;y wish to connect with a person you find on LinkedIn, but you are interested in what they have to say, so instead you follow them. LinkedIn tells us that when we follow someone, we will receive their posts, articles, and shares in our homepage feed. And as far as I can tell, this is typical LinkedIn speak: it is both true and disingenuous. If I follow you, your post winds up in my feed…somewhere. I may have to scroll down for fifteen minutes and it is the four hundredth piece of content in my feed, but it’s there alright. And this makes sense. If ten people you follow all post early next week and you check in to LinkedIn mid week, all those posts can’t be at the top of your feed at the same time.

I think that it would be more accurate to say following someone will result in a largely random smattering of their content showing up in your feed where you can see it from time to time.

LinkedIn does say that you will get notified for their “top posts,” but of course the algorithms will decide what those top posts are. This is the thing that makes me grind my teeth. I either like someone’s thinking and writing, or I don’t. I would like to be the one deciding whether I want to read it, not LinkedIn.

Connecting

LinkedIn used to use something called the Connection Strength Score to decide which Connections’ content should appear prominently in your feed. The Connection Strength Score was based on how much you had engaged with another person’s content recently. I have not seen any mention of this anywhere in the past couple years, so this may have quietly gone away, and as far as seeing someone’s content is concerned, Connecting is really no different from Following (does that mean a Connection is just a “Follower with privileges?”).

Newsletter Subscribers

Now we are getting somewhere. When Newsletters came out on LinkedIn two years ago they included the option to Subscribe to them. LinkedIn would notify subscribers via Email, a LinkedIn Notification or both that a new issue was available. While I have heard multiple complaints, the subscribe feature seems to work, and LinkedIn has since added Newsletters as an option for companies on their Company Pages.

Ringing the Profile Bell

Ringing the Bell on someone’s profile results in LinkedIn notifying you when a person publishes any new content. But there’s a catch. If you hover over the Bell, it will offer you either “only get notified about X’s top posts” or “get notified about all of X’s posts.” You want to choose the latter. You can always go back and change it again. LinkedIn actually says you should hit the bell if you want to “subscribe” to someone’s content. So  you can subscribe to someone’s Newsletter, or you can subscribe to all their posts, which is an interesting and useful distinction (I have made use of it several times already).

One aspect of this I don’t like is that you can’t Ring the Bell unless you are already Connected or Following the person. In fact the little bell icon won’t even appear on someone’s profile until you either Connect or Follow them. I would rather that LinkedIn had the Bell there for people to see, even if clicking it resulted in a pop up saying they need to Follow or Connect first.

Summary

If you Connect or Follow someone on LinkedIn, you will likely see some of that person’s content. If you Subscribe to their Newsletters you will be notified when they publish. When you Ring the Bell, you will be notified when they publish anything on LinkedIn.

With all this in mind, here is what I have done: I subscribe to several dozen LinkedIn newsletters and I have been on a Bell whacking campaign for key people whose content I appreciate and I want to see more of. I am getting to the point that for new content, ninety percent of it comes from my Notifications tab. I scroll through my Notifications like I do the subject lines in my email. Instead of scrolling down my Homepage feed to “see if there is anything interesting today” I make better, focused use of my time on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is finally allowing me to hone in on the content I want to see.

The obligatory disclaimer: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month. 

I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains one or two articles like today’s, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/

 

“I am publishing content but just not getting any engagement.” is a popular refrain I hear. People want to know how to get more engagement with their posts, polls, articles and newsletters. Here are six ways you can help yourself. 

1) Grow your network

This is both remarkably obvious and remarkably overlooked. And it completely has to do with LinkedIn’s algorithms. When we publish, LinkedIn puts our content in front of a small percentage of our connections and followers, thought to be somewhere in the five to seven percent range. Let’s say it is six percent. You have 500 connections and followers. I have 5,000. So LinkedIn puts your article in front of 30 people for you and 300 for me. Advantage: me. For publishing on LinkedIn, the more connections and followers you have the better. Having more people that can engage with your content is a good jumping off point for actually getting that engagement. 

Note that the only real loophole you can use with this is by using a LinkedIn newsletter. If you have a newsletter with 500 subscribers, LinkedIn promises that 500 subscribers will be notified when you publish. That’s a huge advantage that newsletters have over all other types of content on LinkedIn. 

2) Have your own voice 

When I write, I poke fun at just about everything, including myself. The comment I get more than any other about my writing is that I am different from most everyone else. I don’t write clinical boring prose, and I don’t just regurgitate LinkedIn’s press releases. I write about what I think. I have opinions.

My main suggestion for most people is to write like you are speaking with a friend. Be engaging. Tell stories. Let your personality come out. Don’t be a robot. If you come across as interesting and engaging people will be more disposed to read and comment on your content.

3) Be a specialist 

Find your niche, the part of your work that really intrigues you and write about that. You do need it to have broad enough appeal though to attract the interest of enough people to be worthwhile. I suppose you could sum up what I do as being “studying the way LinkedIn works, and helping people translate that into making LinkedIn work for them.” I avoid parts of LinkedIn that I think are flawed or have little value. You may have noticed I rarely mention LinkedIn Groups (now there’s a topic for a future newsletter) and that’s because I don’t think they will help my clients and readers. I don’t try to be everything. You shouldn’t either. 

4) Be regular

It’s hard for people to comment when you don’t publish something for them to comment on. If you have problems coming up with ideas, sign up for ChatGPT and use it to come up with ideas. You just feed it prompts like “Give me ten problems quality control managers have to deal with.” It’s a terrific tool for people with writer’s block. Just don’t use it for the finished article. That’s your voice, as I mentioned earlier. 

Also being a regular publisher helps people set expectations. I usually publish on LinkedIn every second Tuesday. If I alter my schedule I actually get messages from people asking where my latest article is. If you are writing genuinely interesting content that people want to read, you will develop regular readers.

5) Invite your readers to comment 

Ah, the CTA – Call To Action. If you want comments, you need a call to action. What not to do: ask a question that is easily dismissed or results in an answer that will go nowhere. An example of this that I often see is “Do you agree?” Which results in a yes or no answer. Hardly a compelling piece of engagement. 

Instead, think of your Call To Action as an invitation for your readers to tell a story. Then, word your Call To Action in that manner. Close your article or post with something, like one of these:

“What would you add to this list?”

“Based on your experience, is there anything I have left out?”

“When faced with a similar situation, what have you done in the past?”

You want to get across the idea that you welcome their ideas and that you consider them additions to your original content. 

6) Lastly, when you do get comments, be responsive 

If someone takes the time to read your post or article and then takes the additional time to write a thoughtful comment, reply to it. First, thank them, and then add something further – respond to their question or point, putting your take or spin on it, and then maybe add another question back to keep the conversation going. 

Three good things happen when you respond to your commenters: LinkedIn thinks your content is more relevant, and puts it in front of even more people, the person you responded to is encouraged to continue the conversation, and is more likely to comment on your next article, and also more likely to become a follower or connection (maybe that’s four things, but they are all good).

And that’s it. I was trying to come up with an acronym for these six ideas, but “ghbbib” sounds more like someone clearing their throat or maybe the name of a town in Wales.

Have a look at your last few pieces of content against these six ideas and see if there are places you can shore up your posting. And of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask, what would you add to this list? 

Want more like this? I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two articles like the one above, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/

Obligatory boilerplate: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month.

Author’s note: file this one under, “this isn’t going to make me very popular.”

Answer: not very. 

I have long posited that LinkedIn is a big database with a tiny social network embedded in it. 

And now I have some tangible figures to go by, courtesy of all people, the folks at LinkedIn. 

First, some background. 

LinkedIn has always been circumspect (coy? opaque?) with respect to how often users visit LinkedIn. Before LinkedIn was purchased by Microsoft a few years ago, LinkedIn used to include a figure in their quarterly results for how many users logged in at least once a month. Back in those days it was around forty percent. Occasionally, someone would come up with “new” numbers – always wonderful fabulous numbers – which did not stand up to scrutiny (and I have scrutinized many of them).  

LinkedIn has never published weekly or daily user numbers. Now, for the sake of argument, let’s say that LinkedIn’s daily user number is big, like really huge. If you were LinkedIn, would you keep it a secret? No, you would be shouting from the rooftops. In the absence of said shouting, I suspect that the number is pretty small, and LinkedIn would rather people don’t talk about it. 

But this past summer I was able to pull back the curtain and see for myself. Not everything, but some hard data and some clues. 

What happened was, I ran a LinkedIn ad for a client. When I finished setting up the target market for the ad, it was 82,000 people in size. The way the ad worked, when someone in our target market logged on to LinkedIn, they were shown (or more accurately, had a chance to see) our ad. The ad ran for a month. 

When I tabulated the results at the end of the month, 11,553 unique recipients had seen the ad a total of 38,571 times. 

Let’s translate that out of advertising-speak and into plain English: Over the course of a month, 11,553 out of 82,000 had logged on to LinkedIn. That’s 14% or much worse than the monthly user number was a few years ago. My thinking is this can be explained by the fact that we only showed the ad to engineers, and they must not show up as often as say, HR or sales people do. 

And those 11,553 people saw the ad an average of three and a half times each. So there are people coming by more often than once a month, but not a lot. If two thousand of them logged in every day or 20 times a month, that would make 40,000 ad views, but there were only 38,571. The type of distribution that would make this work is 1,000 daily users (20,000 views of the ad), 2,500 weekly users (10,000 views) and 8000 monthly users (8,000 views) for a total of 38,000 views. That would leave the following usage numbers for the engineers in our ad group:

Daily users: 1.25%

Weekly users: 3.13%

Monthly users: around 10%

These are interesting figures, and if close to the mark, would explain why LinkedIn remains mum, even if engineers are much less regular users. 

So what does all this mean? Just this: unless they are power users of LinkedIn like sales, marketing, solo practitioners, consultants or HR people, only a fraction, and a small one at that, of your target audience will  be around on LinkedIn today, or this week for that matter. 

Does this mean you shouldn’t be using LinkedIn? Of course not. But it does mean that you should be checking how your target audience uses LinkedIn, and there are a few ways you can do so. The clues I look for are completed profiles, lots of connections and followers (at least a thousand), and most of all LinkedIn activity. You can see someone’s recent activity on their profile, and see what they have posted, commented on, and liked. Taken together you can judge whether someone sees value in LinkedIn and how much they participate. 

In the case of my client, we discovered that only a very small percentage of their prospects were truly active on LinkedIn, so we now use a strategy that is less social and more credibility based, posting daily  instructional and educational content on their company page. This presents a body of content that their occasional LinkedIn user prospects can find. 

While people like to call LinkedIn the “professional social network” the facts point to it not being one for most LinkedIn members. 

Are you knocking on doors when there is nobody home?

Want more like this? I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two articles like the one above, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/

Obligatory boilerplate: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month.

Having lots and lots of connections

And it is maybe the most critical factor in more people seeing your post (or article, video or whatever it is you are publishing on LinkedIn). This is because of the way LinkedIn’s algorithms work when we publish. 

When we hit the “publish” or “post” button on LinkedIn, Linkedin takes our content and puts it in front of a very small fraction of our connections.  This number is thought to be 5-7%, though this is just an educated guess by the independent LinkedIn training and consulting community. Of course LinkedIn won’t confirm or deny anything, and to be fair, LinkedIn is always tweaking the algorithms, so maybe it is just as well they don’t tell us exactly how the system works. 

Once we have published our content, and  if we get engagement, the algorithm judges our content’s  relevance and puts it in front of more people, both more of our connections, and connections of the people who engaged with our post. That’s why you will get LinkedIn notifications saying “Bruce, a connection of yours, commented on Jeff Ball’s post.”

Let’s look at a couple hypothetical examples. Let’s say you have five hundred connections. You write a really good post and publish it. LinkedIn puts it in front of 5-7% of your connections, or around thirty people. Those people respond really well, and LinkedIn puts your content in front of another 20% of your connections, that is one hundred more people.  So you have been (possibly) seen by one hundred and thirty people. Meanwhile I post at the same time. LinkedIn puts my post in front of 5-7% of my five thousand connections, or three hundred people. But my post isn’t as well written or relevant as yours and gets a lot less engagement. So LinkedIn puts my post in front of only another 10% of my connections, which is five hundred people. 

So your  objectively better, more relevant post gets put in front of 130 people. My lesser post gets put in front of 800. The much larger number of connections I have gives me a huge advantage over you. 

The bottom line is that all other factors being equal, the more connections you have, the wider LinkedIn  will spread your post and the more new people will have the opportunity to see it. 

There are a couple unknowns here though, and those are how LinkedIn treats followers and subscribers. You can follow someone or subscribe (ring the bell on their profile)  to someone’s content on LinkedIn without connecting with them. LinkedIn says you will see all of their posted content, but I am skeptical. I think that LinkedIn has a vague definition of what “see” means. I do think that LinkedIn does put all of our content for people we follow or subscribe to in our feeds, but way down the feed where it is pretty unlikely that we will ever scroll down far enough to see. 

Note the one exception to this whole publishing algo thing seems to be LinkedIn newsletters. LinkedIn says they go to all your subscribers and this seems to be true.

So there you go. Quality of your content is of course really important. But LinkedIn controls the delivery system for that content and one of the few ways you can really work that system to your advantage is by giving it a bigger list of connections to work with. 

Hunters? Farmers? Let me explain. 

There are two broad methods of finding and contacting prospective customers on LinkedIn, particularly if you are self employed, and don’t have a marketing department to lean on. 

The traditional way for most sales or self employed people to find new customers is via Hunting. Hunting is using LinkedIn in the traditional sales sense of using it to find a prospect, research them and contact them (or at least try to contact them). 

There is only one real problem with Hunting, and that’s that just about everybody hates it. Rejection city. Abuse. Being labeled a spammer, or worse. You need to develop a pretty tough shell to be a hunter and most people don’t keep at it long enough to develop that shell.

So they turn to Farming on LinkedIn. 

Farming is using LinkedIn as a place to publish content and interact with other people’s content under the plan that some of these seeds you plant will germinate into relationships. This results in the person spending  a lot of time on LinkedIn being “social” and a lot of time writing and posting on LinkedIn. They wind up with what I frankly think are weird habits: “I put 45 minutes a day into reading and commenting on posts I find in my feed.”

The problem with farming is that it is…messy. It is hard to quantify. How many posts do you need to comment on to generate a real lead? How many posts do you have to publish to generate a real lead?  

Hunting gets black and white results: you contacted twenty people, and two were interested in talking with you. Farming? Not so much.

Now, before we get into things here, let me say that Farming has been one of the pillars of my LinkedIn consulting practice. It works. So if you want to Farm, great, but like myself, you have to have a system and the metrics in place so you know if it is working or not. I have used Farming to great advantage over the past ten years, but aside from good content I put together a system. 

The first thing I found when I started my Farming on LinkedIn was that I never really counted on picking people up from commenting on other people’s posts – too hit and miss. I would find the occasional prospect, but the time required per prospect just didn’t work. I remember that at one point I figured I needed to be on LinkedIn for two hundred hours a week to make commenting work for me. So that was out as a strategy. 

I also found sharing content on LinkedIn to be a waste of time as most of the time someone discovering my shared content was more interested in the author than the messenger (me).

So I focused on writing my own content. It was a good fit for me as I enjoy writing, I am hopelessly analytical, and really stubborn. The system part of Farming on LinkedIn comes down to counting how much engagement results from your posting and the quality of those reactions. There are several parts as follows: 

• I started counting what I call the Big Five ways of engaging on LinkedIn: how many Likes, Comments and Reshares I was getting, along with how many Profile Views and New Followers/Connection requests I received. 
• I would review the lists of these people every day – I would look for my new followers, profile viewers and people that engaged with my posts or articles on LinkedIn. 
• I would contact the ones that looked like a good fit with my ideal customer profile. I invested in a Sales Navigator subscription in order to be able to reach out to these people. 
• When I contacted them it was to thank them for their engagement and I used the article they were interested in as the jumping off point in my approach. No sales pitch, just an open ended conversation about their interest in the topic I had covered. This resulted in a huge acceptance rate – typically 55% – in my outreach messages and InMails. 
• Despite my hilarious ineptitude with spreadsheets, I started one up that tracked my progress. I started to find patterns – for example, commenters and followers were much more responsive than shares or likes. Profile views fell in between. 

Over time as I started to acquire customers, I was able to go back to my spreadsheet and find out important information that was crucial to my business:

• I could see on average how long it took from someone first identifying themselves via engaging with my content until they became a customer
• Which types of engagement generated more customers (surprise: comments, then followers)
• And finally, which topics were the ones that generated the most comments and followers.

Was this a lot of work? Yes, and no. It sounds like a lot, but once I was up and running, my weekly commitment to Linkedin was to write an article, publish it, and be available to respond to comments for the next three hours (though I could do other things while I was monitoring my post). Every morning I took up to fifteen minutes to look for new engagees (is that a word?) and send messages to interesting people I found; and every afternoon I took five minutes to look for replies to my messages. Total time invested in LinkedIn every week: around four hours, plus the time it took to write my weekly article.

And here’s the important part: I spent zero time wandering around LinkedIn. And that’s a habit I still have today. These days I check every morning for the people who have engaged with my content, any connection requests, new messages and my notifications (I usually have around twenty). Every week I review the people who looked at my profile and my new followers. I usually put a chunk of Friday afternoon into reading the fifty LinkedIn newsletters that I subscribe to.

So Hunting works on LinkedIn, and Farming does too. But if you are going to Farm, you need a plan, you need some patience and you need to stick to it.

Want more like this? I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two articles like the one above, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/

Obligatory boilerplate: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month. 

 

I thought I would talk today about Following on LinkedIn. We all do it – we see someone who says something interesting somewhere on LinkedIn and we hit the “Follow” button. But what is the real value in following someone? 

So let’s have a look at what the benefits are to the Follower and the person being Followed (the Followee?) 

What benefits does a Follower receive? 

From my standpoint, there are two benefits in following someone. Both are marginal, but take a bit of explaining. 

1) The person you are following can see that you are following them

The question here is not so much that they can see you are following them, but if they will see that you are following them. Then what? I ask this because I know there is a whole weird little subset of people on LinkedIn who think, “If I follow them, they will see that and maybe ask me to connect.” Well, I am here to tell you that that is highly unlikely. First of all, not everybody looks through their followers on a regular basis. And even if – like me – they are someone who does, they are unlikely to ask you to connect. The way I see it, in following me you have shown a slight level of interest in me, but not enough to ask me to connect, so I am not going to ask you. 

So the connection angle is a long shot. What other benefits do you get from following someone on LinkedIn? 

2) All of their content will be shown in your feed. 

This is the big one of course. I follow you because I don’t want to miss out on your content and LinkedIn tells me that your content will be in my feed. But a little common sense applied to this statement shows that having that content in your feed is pretty meaningless. Say you follow a handful of people or a hundred people. The posts these people publish are somewhere in your feed every week, mixed in with posts from your connections, companies, promoted stuff and other advertising, and whatever else the LinkedIn algorithms feel like tossing your way. 

It might be more accurate to say that posts from the people you follow will be buried somewhere in your homepage feed. Think of your feed and the content within it as if this was a Google search result. There may be a hundred pages of search results, but you are only rarely ever going to scroll to page five. 

Oddly, LinkedIn’s promise to put more and more stuff in your feed just makes it worse. 

So, in following someone, it is unlikely they will ask you to connect and it is unlikely that you will see much of their content. Well, heck, this following thing has to be advantageous to someone, doesn’t it? 

What benefits do those being followed get? 

Again, there are two benefits that I can see. The first is an extension of one mentioned above, and that is that you can see who your followers are. And yes, you can choose to message them (if you have a premium plan or know one of the work around hacks to send free messages on LinkedIn) or ask them to connect. As I mentioned above, why would I decide to ask someone to connect when they have already indicated that they would rather just follow?

The second benefit – and don’t underestimate this one – is the ego boost from having a lot of followers. And LinkedIn knows this as they have now put your number of followers in a prominent place on your profile. 

But those are both pretty thin benefits too. So what should you do? There are two options: Click the notification bell on the person’s profile you want to follow, or subscribe to their LinkedIn newsletter if they have one. LinkedIn will notify you when they publish something. Your bell-ringers / subscribers actually see the content they wanted to see, and you also know that they had the opportunity to see it.

To summarize: 

1) I have a lot of followers on LinkedIn. When I publish a post or article, it will be somewhere in my followers homepage feed. They may see it. 

2) If they also click the notification bell on my profile, they will be notified when I publish something.

3) I have a lot of newsletter subscribers on LinkedIn. They will be notified and they can decide if they want to click on my content and read it. 

In the first case, LinkedIn decides who sees my content. In the second and third cases, my followers and subscribers decide. 

Want more like this? I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two articles like the one above, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/

Obligatory boilerplate: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month. 

The road to better prospecting

First though, how not to prospect on LinkedIn.

• Search and find a person who could be a prospect for your product or service.
• Send them a connection request.
• If they accept, pitch them.

This does not work for any one of multiple reasons:

• You have not established your credibility as to why they should listen to you.
• You have not established that they are really a candidate for your product or service.
• You have not established if they are in the market for your product or service now.
• And worst of all, everybody else is doing it.

Connect and pitch is a stale sales tactic that is considered spam. In many cases your prospect won’t even finish reading your message.

And now that you have established yourself as a crappy salesperson, you will not be welcomed again.

The second way people prospect on LinkedIn these days is:

• Use an automated tool to do the search, make the connection request and send the followup message.

This does not work for all of the same reasons as method number 1, plus the following:

• A lot of people will recognize that you are using automation in your messages, and decide they do not like being just another line on a spreadsheet.
• And there is always the chance that LinkedIn will detect you are doing this, and ban you from using LinkedIn.

So what does work?

I have had success with a seven step process as follows:

1) Find prospects using an effective LinkedIn search

The key here is the word “effective.” Anyone can run a search for “Managers” in a certain geography, but adding nuance to the search by using all the filters that apply to your prospect – industry and job title are key ones – will yield much better results.

Better search results will yield fewer false positives and a better probability that you have the right people on your target list.

This takes very little effort, just a fundamental understanding of what filters are available and understanding when and how to apply them.

Now we head off the beaten path and into the woods. The next four of the following five steps are largely ignored by salespeople using LinkedIn. But if they did pay attention to them, my results suggest their sales would improve.

2) Research

As research takes time, most salespeople would rather leave it out. But I maintain that because research is largely ignored or avoided, it can be twice as effective. This is basic stuff – reading profiles, figuring who is who at the target company, and reading and analyzing the target’s company page and posting. Buried in these places are a ton of clues and information you can use in your outreach and your initial conversations with your prospect. Information that shows you respect them and their time and that you have done your homework on them.

3) Plan the outreach

Planning the outreach means not just blindly charging ahead with an InMail or a Connection Request. If I can see someone does not use LinkedIn that much, both of those methods are very low probability, regardless of how good my messaging is. What is my strategy then? Use email first then a connection request second? How about the other players at the target company? Do I have options for getting an introduction or a referral? Maybe I would have a higher probability with them for outreach on LinkedIn. The idea here is to map out my strategy: who to contact, in what order, using what means will likely be the most effective.

4) Engage

This is where the messaging, connection request, or email occurs. It will lean heavily on the research I have done and will follow my outreach plan. The message has one goal: arouse their curiosity enough that they will want to speak with me and learn more.

5) Establish credibility

This is the next thing I need to do once I have gotten a response. I need to establish my credibility with the person. In many cases I will have planted a seed in my outreach message that gives me a bit of credibility. But the bottom line here is that without credibility, this person will not be interested in speaking further.

6) Discovery and Sell

Yes, now. But not till I have completed steps one through five.

I have found that once I have my search results, I can send four or five fully researched, personalized outreach messages that establish my credibility in an hour. Sending four or five messages may not sound like much, but I get a 65% response rate to these types of messages. That means my prospecting generates an average of three conversations with prospects for every hour I put in. People that want to speak with me. This is a repeatable process that works.

You get out in direct relation to what you put in. You put in automation or lazy connect and pitch and you get lousy results. You put the time and effort in and you get outstanding results. Better process, better outcomes.

I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two articles like the one above, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/

Obligatory boilerplate: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month. 

Need: stay alive. Suggested activity: stay away from the leopard’s tree

Many people using LinkedIn wonder why they are not more successful in using it to find and land customers. They think, “I’m using LinkedIn. My customers use LinkedIn. Why don’t I have more customers?”

The usual issue is that most people’s goals are too broad or generic, “I want more customers” being the big one.

But people need to be aware of you in the first place, they need to see you as a viable option, then you need to sell them on your product or service. You can be a great a salesperson with a great product or service but if people don’t know you exist or see you as someone they should be considering, you are going to have a tough time.

In assessing how you should be using LinkedIn for your unique situation, you first need to look at where the holes are in your sales and marketing. What needs fixing or improving?

• I need more people aware of me or my company
• People are aware of me but I can’t get and hold their attention
• I have lots of real prospects, but don’t start the number of conversations I need to in order to make my numbers

All of this is preamble to today’s topic: matching your LinkedIn activity to your specific needs. I am going to talk about the types of things you could be doing to solve these three fundamental problems: awareness, credibility and starting conversations.

“Awareness” (aka Reach)

Here’s my definition of awareness: Having someone realize that you are a player in the industry that may be able to help someone solve their problem. That’s it.

What type of LinkedIn activity works to help you increase awareness?

• Publishing, especially posts. Posts are easy and quick conversation starters. And LinkedIn likes conversations. LinkedIn rewards posts with lots of comments by exposing your post to new people. This goes for both individual’s post and company page posts, but individual posts work better as we tend to have more connections and followers to work with than our company pages do.

What to look for: a healthy number of comments. You will know you are doing well if someone comments on your post and that comment brings in more people, resulting in numerous little sub-threads in your comment stream.

• Newsletters and articles can work here too, but if your goal is purely Reach, I think posting is faster and easier. I could come up with three to five posts in the time I write one newsletter.
• Participating in other people’s posts. Avoid likes and avoid sharing. These work poorly. Comments are the way to go. When you comment on a post, LinkedIn regards your comment as a vote that the post is relevant and worthwhile. The result is LinkedIn increases the distribution of the post to more people which means more exposure for you.

Make sure your comments have value and add to the overall discussion. Things like “I like this post” or “I couldn’t agree more” sure aren’t going to make you stand out. But something like an anecdote which relates to the post and adds value to the conversation will.

You will know you are doing this well, if you start getting people – that is, the author and others – commenting and replying to your original comment.

“Consideration” (aka Credibility, Thought Leadership)

Here’s my definition of Consideration: establishing yourself as someone a prospective client knows they need to consider when evaluating a product or service like yours.

Your goal is to establish yourself as an expert in your field, someone who has the answers to your prospect’s questions and someone who should automatically have a seat at the final table when vendors are being considered.

In this stage, the prospect:

• realizes they have a problem and are wondering what they can do about it
• they are gathering all the info they can
• they start looking at all the possibilities
• they want to know what others are doing
• they will want to talk with resources that have a broad level of knowledge into what is being done in different places and how well those things are doing.

What you need to do: this is where you establish yourself with them. You need to establish that you have helped others with the same or similar problems.

What can you do on LinkedIn to establish your credibility?

• Publish articles or newsletters. These can be individual or company page based. Articles have big advantages over posts as far as credibility is concerned. They have more formatting options, they are indexed by Google and can be found online, and they are attached to your LinkedIn profile, forming a body of work that a person finding you can reference. Every week I get someone saying they went down the rabbit hole and spent two or three hours reading articles of mine that they found via my LinkedIn profile.

In particular, publishing information that answers the questions your prospects have, and showing how you have helped people and companies with similar problems in the past, will help establish you as an expert in your field.

• Have recommendations and testimonials on your LinkedIn profile

Starting Conversations aka Leads

So, people are aware of you, and you have credibility with them. What types of activities on LinkedIn can help you start conversations with these people?

• Being Open Profile. If you have a Premium LinkedIn account, you can designate yourself as Open Profile, meaning anyone on LinkedIn can send you a message for free.
• Inviting people to contact you. Yes, it can be that simple. Does it work all the time? Of course not. But if you encourage people to contact you, some of them will.
• Intelligent Outreach. Reviewing the engagement your publishing receives on LinkedIn, that is the reactions, comments and shares plus new followers and profile views, over time you will see the same people showing up. These are people who you have credibility with, so contact them.

To contact these people you can do it via InMail if you have Premium LinkedIn subscription, or by using the Open Profile or Group Messaging hacks. Or, you could just ask them to connect on LinkedIn.

In summary, match your LinkedIn activities to your needs. Then measure, test and repeat. These ideas and methods work. They have for me and my clients over the past twelve years.

Want more like this? I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two articles like the one above, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/

Obligatory boilerplate: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month. 

When ChatGPT decides that it is more efficient running the railroad right through the center of town.

We have all seen the wild headlines: 

“I fired my marketing dept and replaced five people with ChatGPT”

“We made up a fake person and she got admitted to an Ivy league School”

Does ChatGPT deserve all the hype?

What does it really mean? 

And how can we use it on LinkedIn? 

What is ChapGPT?

We have lots of AI in our lives already 

• Photo apps store our photos and recognize and archive things like places, faces, and things so that you can search in your photo archive for “car” or “beach”, your photo app will pull them up. 
• Netflix archives what you watch, how long you watched it, your likes and dislikes, and comes up with recommended lists tailored to what it perceives are your tastes.
• Siri and Alexa recognize speech, convert it to text and can answer questions
• Automobile Navigation Apps use AI to analyze moving traffic and interpolate user reported data like accidents to predict travel time

Here’s how ChatGPT differs from other apps:

• a tool to search for relevant information, 
• refine that information 
• and turn that information into content
• ChatGPT is designed to do this by carrying on an ongoing conversation

ChapGPT is free, though there is a premium service launched February 1 called ChatGPTPlus that promises better access and a few other features.

Google is coming out with its competitive offering called Bard. Bard promises more nuanced responses, showing both sides of an argument for example.

As Bard will use whatever info is on the web, it will be more up to date than ChatGPT

And Microsoft now is coming out with “Bing with AI” which – according to Microsoft – will be a much more powerful chat oriented search than ChatGPT itself. 

The Good About ChaptGPT (On Face Value)

It’s fast

It’s easy to get started

The results are astounding

But Then You Start Seeing The Limitations

The current version only uses data it was “trained on” through 2021. So don’t expect it to take into account events or discoveries made in the last fourteen months. 

Unlike a search engine, it just doesn’t take what it finds and cut and paste it in the results, or just show you a link, but distills what it finds into its own version. In this sense it is original, but the downside is it is only going on what it finds, and it may interpolate info from different sources

It can be wrong and I mean really wrong. Note that both Microsoft and Google when they announced early versions combined with search on Feb 8 both had huge disclaimers about whether results were correct or biased. 

And Unanswered Questions

There is talk that ChatGPT will watermark it’s work so that detection will be easy

There are already companies developing apps to detect ChaptGPT or assign probability that AI was used in content generation

At present, anything you create on ChatGPT belongs to you. ChatGPT confers all rights to that info to you. That could change. 

If you use the ChatGPT to write a post, are you ethically required to say so in the post?

There are also possible issues with plagiarism. You don’t necessarily know where ChatGPT got its source material. 

What Does This Mean For Content On LinkedIn?

Anyone can create content, though the “create” is open to interpretation.

Content will now be cheap. It will potentially flood places like LinkedIn. 

Many of the use cases I have seen seem ridiculous: 

• For example “how to use chat GPT to write your LinkedIn Profile About Section.” What follows are seven steps involving a lot of cutting and pasting into ChaptGPT and then you are instructed to proofread the result and personalize it. All this for 200 words? 
• I have already seen one company whose plugin will comment on other people’s posts for you. The comments are generic, and kinda dumb. (“What a great idea! I can’t wait to read your next post on this!”). I have already seen one person who appears to be using this approach. It was easy to figure out as all the comments looked alike – one sentence, one capability of ChatGPT and just…boring.
• Other use cases are incredibly time consuming: you instruct ChatGPT to write a 300 word post, then get it to write two more versions. Now you – that is you personally – combine the best parts from each of the three to get your final post for publishing. That sounds like way more work to me than just writing a 300 word post.  
• Writing posts. So a company may get rid of their writers, but then just have to turn around and hire re-writers and editors. Anything ChatGPT writes must be reviewed and edited.

We Also Don’t Know What LinkedIn Will Do

How will LinkedIn treat content that comes from ChatGPT? An interesting question. If ChatGPT helps generate more content that LinkedIn users want to see, great. But if ChatGPT is used to blindly generate content and swamps our LinkedIn feeds…not so great. 

You can bet that Linkedin will figure out how to detect AI generated content or at least make educated guesses. If LinkedIn winds up swamped with mediocre content, you do not want to be one of these companies that LinkedIn detects, as the result will be less distribution of your content.

Your content will have to be outstanding to rise above the crowd. 

Even if you want it to write posts, those posts should be carefully proofread. Remember these are going out under you or your company’s name. 

Okay, So What Are The Use Cases On LinkedIn?

I see three good uses, and a possible fourth.

1) For content ideas – “write and article giving me ten examples of how ChatGPT can be used on LinkedIn”

2) or content optimization – “give me ten variations on a headline for this article”

3) expanding content or contracting it. ChatGPT can turn a 100 word paragraph into a 200 word paragraph[p, or into a one sentence summary. 

4) possibly repurposing old content. I originally thought this was a good one until I did some experimenting with some old content from a customer. The revised ChatGPT versions were not usable or even reworkable. Maybe I need to refine my instructions more effectively, so the jury is still out on whether it’s me or ChatGPT that is the problem here. 

But the first three are good use cases, for generating ideas and alternative ways of getting them across. I think ChatGPT’s best use is overcoming writer’s block. 

Summary

ChapGPT represents a change. The popular line will be that it democratizes writing. While true, I think that it will democratize mediocre writing. LinkedIn will likely get flooded with mediocre content. That represents an opportunity for people writing good content that people want to read and that people find engaging. So use ChapGPT to help you come up with ideas, but then do the writing yourself. The one thing ChatGPT can’t do is speak with your voice.

Oh and those five people that were laid off back at the start of this article? I heard they got hired to replace the admissions people that an Ivy League School fired for admitting fake people.

When ChatGPT decides to run the railroad track through your neighborhood

(this post was originally published in my Email newsletter for subscribers last month)

We have all seen the wild headlines:

“I fired my marketing dept and replaced five people with ChatGPT”

“We made up a fake person and she got admitted to an Ivy league School”

Does ChatGPT deserve all the hype?

What does it really mean?

And how can we use it on LinkedIn?

What is ChapGPT?

We have lots of AI in our lives already

• Photo apps store our photos and recognize and archive things like places, faces, and things so that you can search in your photo archive for “car” or “beach”, your photo app will pull them up.
• Netflix archives what you watch, how long you watched it, your likes and dislikes, and comes up with recommended lists tailored to what it perceives are your tastes.
• Siri and Alexa recognize speech, convert it to text and can answer questions
• Automobile Navigation Apps use AI to analyze moving traffic and interpolate user reported data like accidents to predict travel time

Here’s how ChatGPT differs from other apps:

• a tool to search for relevant information,
• refine that information
• and turn that information into content
• ChatGPT is designed to do this by carrying on an ongoing conversation

ChapGPT is free, though there was a premium service launched February 1 called ChatGPTPlus that promised better access and a few other features.

Google is coming out with its competitive offering called Bard. Bard promises more nuanced responses, showing both sides of an argument for example.

As Bard will use whatever info is on the web, it will be more up to date than ChatGPT

And Microsoft now is coming out with “Bing with AI” which – according to Microsoft – will be a much more powerful chat oriented search than ChatGPT itself.

The Good About ChaptGPT (On Face Value)

• It’s fast
• It’s easy to get started
• The results are astounding

But Then You Start Seeing The Limitations

Unlike a search engine, it just doesn’t take what it finds and cut and paste it in the results, or just show you a link, but distills what it finds into its own version. In this sense it is original, but the downside is it is only going on what it finds, and it may interpolate info from different sources

It can be wrong and I mean really wrong. Note that both Microsoft and Google when they announced early versions combined with search on Feb 8 both had huge disclaimers about whether results were correct or biased.

And Unanswered Questions

There are already companies developing apps to detect ChaptGPT or assign probability that AI was used in content generation

At present, anything you create on ChatGPT belongs to you. ChatGPT confers all rights to that info to you. That could change.

If you use the ChatGPT to write a post, are you ethically required to say so in the post?

There are also possible issues with plagiarism. You don’t necessarily know where ChatGPT got its source material.

What Does This Mean For Content On LinkedIn?

Anyone can create content, though the “create” is open to interpretation.

Content will now be cheap. It will potentially flood places like LinkedIn.

Many of the use cases I have seen seem ridiculous:

• For example “how to use chat GPT to write your LinkedIn Profile About Section.” What follows are seven steps involving a lot of cutting and pasting into ChaptGPT and then you are instructed to proofread the result and personalize it. All this for 200 words?
• I have already seen one company whose plugin will comment on other people’s posts for you. The comments are generic, and kinda dumb. (“What a great idea! I can’t wait to read your next post on this!”). I have personally seen one person on LinkedIn who appears to be using this approach. It was easy to figure out as all the comments looked alike – one sentence each that mention one capability of ChatGPT and they were all just…boring.
• Other use cases are incredibly time consuming: I saw one suggestion where you instruct ChatGPT to write a 300 word post, then get it to write two more versions. Now you – that is you personally – combine the best parts from each of the three to get your final post for publishing. That sounds like way more work to me than just writing a 300 word post.
• Writing posts. So a company may get rid of their writers, but then just have to turn around and hire re-writers and editors. Anything ChatGPT writes must be reviewed and edited.

We Also Don’t Know What LinkedIn Will Do

Microsoft owns a chunk of ChatGPT’s parent company. Microsoft owns LinkedIn. Seems pretty obvious LinkedIn will embrace ChaptGPT.

If ChatGPT helps generate more content that LinkedIn users want to see, great. But if ChatGPT is used to blindly generate content and swamps our LinkedIn feeds…not so great.

For everyone who is already complaining that their posts’ reach is getting worse and worse, what if ChatGPT brings three times as many posts to compete with?

Your content will have to be outstanding to rise above the crowd.

Even if you want it to write posts, those posts should be carefully proofread. Remember these are going out under you or your company’s name.

Okay, So What Are The Use Cases On LinkedIn?

I see three good uses, and a possible fourth.

1) for content ideas – “write an article giving me ten examples of how ChatGPT can be used on LinkedIn”

2) or content optimization – “give me ten variations on a headline for this article”

3) expanding content or contracting it. ChatGPT can turn a 100 word paragraph into a 200 word paragraph, or into a one sentence summary.

4) possibly repurposing old content. I originally thought this was a good one until I did some experimenting with some old content from a customer. The revised ChatGPT versions were not usable or even reworkable. Maybe I need to refine my instructions more effectively, so the jury is still out on whether it’s me or ChatGPT that is the problem here.

But the first three are good use cases, for generating ideas and alternative ways of getting them across. I think ChatGPT’s best use is overcoming writer’s block.

Summary

ChapGPT represents a change. The popular line will be that it democratizes writing. While true, I think that it will democratize mediocre writing. LinkedIn will likely get flooded with mediocre content. That represents an opportunity for people writing good content that people want to read and that people find engaging. So use ChapGPT to help you come up with ideas, but then do the writing yourself. The one thing ChatGPT can’t do is speak with your voice.

Oh and those five people that were laid off back at the start of this article? I heard they got hired to replace the admissions people that that Ivy League School fired for admitting fake people.

Want more like this? I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two articles like the one above, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/

Obligatory boilerplate: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month.