I sat down with LinkedIn Marketing Expert Marisa Cali of All the Social to talk about different LinkedIn marketing strategies and LinkedIn Live. If you would like to follow Marisa, you can find her here.
Daniel Glickman
Marisa is a LinkedIn strategy and live streaming expert. She helps businesses and people get views and engagement on LinkedIn. In fact, we’re going live on LinkedIn here. That’s pretty much all I know how to do. So I’m psyched to have Marissa with us today. Hi, Marissa.
Marisa Cali
Hi, Daniel. How are you?
Daniel Glickman
Good. I’m working from home as you can see.
Marisa Cali
I’m not working from home, but it’s a good day here. It’s what, Tuesday? I don’t remember what day it is; the days kind of mesh together during the lockdown. But I’m happy to be here with you today. To talk all about LinkedIn.
Daniel Glickman
So let’s talk about LinkedIn strategy. I know LinkedIn is a bit different than the other social networks. And somebody told me, that if you don’t do five hours a day, commenting on people’s posts and doing one on one share, you’re never gonna get any reach. Is this true?
Marisa Cali
Yes and No. A lot of people will focus on saying a lot of things. I’m going to post every day and spend a lot of time on making a really fancy video. And then it gets two likes. When you’re building your network, a lot of people will shy away from commenting and engaging with people. That is what will put you in a better light on LinkedIn. Get in front of the people that you need to get in front of. But before that, if your profiles are not up to date in terms of “what are you targeting, who are you targeting, who would you like to work with, what is your background, what have you done before?” If you don’t do that first and you start engaging, people are going to go to your profile and ask, “Who is this person?” Especially if you’re not well known. And I think that’s where a lot of people get misconstrued. I updated my profile, and I’m posting, but no one’s seeing me. You have to do everything. And it doesn’t take a lot of time. I would say between an hour to two hours a day. If you have a strategy in place, it’s definitely something that will be beneficial for you. And the tactics that are working on LinkedIn has definitely changed in the last four months because everyone’s online. So you have to be a little bit more strategic on how you do your outreach and what that outreach looks like.
Daniel Glickman
What is the goal of LinkedIn as a social network? What are we trying to achieve? What is it perfectly designed for?
Marisa Cali
In the business world, it is designed for your personal brand. A lot of people will shy away from that word. They don’t think that they are a personal brand. But we are. It’s how we come across digitally. There’s a lot of people that will go on LinkedIn and say, “I’m going to target b2b because that’s where the money is. And I’m going to sell to all these people and send a bunch of spam messages.” And people will check out your profile and say, “This person has not been in the industry very long. They don’t have many testimonials. They don’t have a lot of examples of their work.” And that can build a disingenuous way for how someone can interact with you. A lot of people will say, “I don’t have a personal brand. It’s not about me, it’s about selling my services.” But you need to be trusted. It’s hard for people to grasp that, because I think they shy away from the word brand. But we all are a brand. For example, I’m wearing yellow right now. That’s not my brand colors. I should have worn a brand thing. But I’ve been wearing yellow in a lot of things. And it’s just a thing that I do now. Or even my headband. You’re like, “Oh, you haven’t worn a headband in a long time.” I didn’t know you were paying attention to what I was wearing on my head. And I know that doesn’t translate to what I do in terms of LinkedIn strategy and coaching. But it makes you memorable. How are you memorable in the industry?
Daniel Glickman
That is interesting, because I used to think that nobody’s watching me on LinkedIn. And then I would get comments from people without meat. They would say, “I noticed that you cut your hair last month.” It would be very specific details. So they do watch. And they will notice a tidbit, but it’s not necessary for the whole thing to be 100%. It’s little bits and pieces.
Marisa Cali
It’s like a peek inside your life. Then they go and check out your profile or they check your website. There will be people that will check you and then never send you a message because they made a judgement based on your online presence.
Daniel Glickman
As a personal brand, what is my goal on LinkedIn? Is it to create a set number of followers and reached engagement? Track the number of inbound views of my profiles? Is it both?
Marisa Cali
I think it’s a mixture of all of those. Just depends on what your goals are. You can be strategic in how you’re showing up on LinkedIn and who you’re targeting, and never post because you’re in the messages. Or you’re engaging with people on their posts and becoming recognizable that way but you never post anything yourself. For example, I’m working with an author right now. And his book is being released in late August. Right now, we’re targeting outreach in terms of publicizing a media tour. His profile is also very important in terms of numbers, because we want to help with engagement. We want him to be known when that book comes out, and he’s a five time best selling author. So he’s known to a lot of people, but now we’re trying to expand that reach out from the existing network that he’s done because he can’t do speaking gigs anymore. They’re all virtual speaking gigs and digital sales. It’s not just shaking hands and kissing babies. Now he has to be online and it’s a mixture of all of those things – engagement views, website traffic newsletter, signups. I’m focusing on LinkedIn, but I need to have an understanding of all of those other things in order for it to be effective.
Daniel Glickman
Can you show us an example along with the kind of content that is used?
Marisa Cali
So this woman I worked with for a few months owns a youth soccer club. She’s also a military spouse, so a lot of the content that she was working on for her social profiles was focused on the kids. So she didn’t have much of a LinkedIn presence. Now she is getting invited on LinkedIn lives. She’s posting quotes that means something to her. The engagement is not astronomical, but when people think about a youth program for kids, she’s connecting with the moms and dads that would potentially sign up for the program. So her strategy is about building her name within the women sports industry, so that she can get speaking gigs. She can get invited to conferences once COVID stops. And it’s all based around things that she’s passionate about – entrepreneurship, military spouse advocacy, and sports. That’s just one example of Amy doing stuff with her personal brand on LinkedIn.
Daniel Glickman
She’s sticking to a topic and really showcasing her expertise. LinkedIn is about showing what we’re good at through the content. I got another question – I know when people get connection requests every day on LinkedIn, a lot of them are people in the sales profession. Or even professions that don’t really reflect my circle of expertise. Should I or should I not accept such requests? Is there a benefit to having a large number of connections? Do I want to grow it as much as possible?
Marisa Cali
This comes back to your goals. Are you looking to be a small seminar speaker? Or are you looking to collaborate and white label some of your services with other people in the same industry? It can get overwhelming; I have 35 open connection requests because their message was salesy, and that’s not very authentic. They’re just trying to do as much outreach as they can. I’m not going to trust them right away, so I just leave them pending and it’s not a big deal. But when you are trying to reach the masses, you accept every request that comes your way because you are trying to sell something. But if you’re trying to work one on one with people, then maybe you should be a little more selective because you don’t want to be sold to. I think people sell and make products for marketers. If we love a product, we’re going to talk about it because we’re marketers. We’re gonna make a story, we’re gonna make a video. We’re going to do all this stuff, which is like free marketing. So I think you do have to be a little selective depending on what your goals are for LinkedIn.
Daniel Glickman
It’s like the opposite of Facebook, where your level of engagement with your audience is important. So if you get a lot of fake followers, it actually harms you on LinkedIn. It’s just a question of your strategic goal. Who do you want? So let’s talk about video. There’s live video and video posts. On other platforms, videos does much better. I’ve heard that text does better on LinkedIn. What kind of data do you have on this?
Marisa Cali
So this bookseller was not doing much video at all. They were doing YouTube, but didn’t share it on social. And the way that we’re putting the video out on social has been well received. He was not posting any video at all on his platform until we started working together. These videos are really well received; almost 6000 views and 37 comments. By mid June, we were at 5400 connections and now we’re close to 6200. So it’s definitely helped grow his network. Once COVID hit, more people were posting video. But there are people and other industries that have not embraced video and the power it brings your brand.
Daniel Glickman
So what you’re seeing is that video performs better than text.
Marisa Cali
Long text posts and video perform the best.
Daniel Glickman
So he combined both long text and video. Does the same apply for live stream? For instance, for this live video, is it better if I throw in a long descriptive text?
Marisa Cali
Yes. Live right now is tricky on LinkedIn. We’re not seeing as much engagement on there and I think it has to do with the interface and how LinkedIn live notifies all of your followers. It’ll say Daniel is live on LinkedIn. But a lot of people are still not open to the live activity. People watch Facebook live and YouTube. But I don’t think people are watching LinkedIn live because it takes up the whole window, whether you’re on your phone or desktop. You can’t multitask on LinkedIn. It’s good to have it because you can repurpose it, you can showcase yourself, but I’m not seeing as much engagement on LinkedIn live. But other platforms, there is benefits to that.
Daniel Glickman
Right, and that’s what I’m seeing as well. And I’m going to repurpose this particular live for the podcast or on video for the blog. That’s where this came from. I’m broadcasting and multicasting LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter at the same time. It’s easy enough to do. I agree that there’s an issue with notification. And you can’t pre scheduled and say “come and watch me today.”
Marisa Cali
Hopefully they’re changing that. I know they’ve slowed down their approvals for LinkedIn live. I think under 2000 people have it. I don’t know of any one outside of the sales and marketing world that has it. I don’t know if that means they’re going to change it to a different interface. And LinkedIn is going to do stories eventually, too. I know that’s coming out soon because it’s in the settings. They wouldn’t put it there if they weren’t going to do anything with it.
Daniel Glickman
LinkedIn stories is a big experiment. Will it be taken over by nonsense? Would it be for job posters looking for job seekers? And of course, those who pick it up first, might do best. So let’s talk a little bit about LinkedIn pages. They don’t seem to be very popular or have gained a lot of traction. I have yet to see a LinkedIn page that has a massive following or active engagement. Is it just another showcase page for your company? Or are there examples of companies that have actually utilized their LinkedIn page for real success?
Marisa Cali
I manage a LinkedIn page for the co-working space that I’m at right now and there’s many different personalities that represent the brand. It’s really a broadcast place; we not only send different messages to the members of the community, but also to potential members so they can see the value we have to offer. And there’s a lot more engagement because everyone is working remotely. So there is more communication on that. It does require some active outreach to generate business from the people that represent that brand, which then results in traffic moving to that page. So there is a direct correlation between posting on the page and sharing it on your profile in regards to elevating that brand. You can’t just say, “I’m gonna post on the page and then it’s done.” It’s a two fold type strategy because that person is representing the brand as an employee, but they’re not going to post a personal anecdote because it is their opinion; their opinion does not represent the brand. So it depends on the industry that you’re in. And I have seen some pages that are very active. This one sales related page, I think they got onto it early, has over 600,000 followers. To me, that is huge! I don’t understand it. I don’t see results like this currently. But it is important to have that validation for your business and your brand. Even for the most simple startup, where you might not launch your product until next year, you need to have that presence so you can keep people in the loop on what’s coming up. You could even have a live show or your podcast on your LinkedIn company page. Because you might not always want to share all of your stuff on your page. Then you can outsource it to people like me. I’m an admin to eight different pages right now. If any of those clients need me to share something on their profile, it’s not me logging in. It depends on the strategy, which can change based off of your client’s needs and the other marketing outlets they have in place. Do they have an email list? Do they have other social profiles that coexists with LinkedIn? It’s not like LinkedIn is all they have.
Daniel Glickman
So to wrap this up – for those of us who are thinking of growing our LinkedIn channel, what is the number one thing we should keep in mind?
Marisa Cali
There’s two things. The first thing is to try to be on LinkedIn for 11 to 17 minutes per day. Now, what are you doing with that time? Are you looking at posts to engage with? Or are you posting something in your content strategy? You can do either of those every day, Monday through Friday. If you do it early in the morning, it can be like checking the morning newspaper. The second thing, when it comes to video, is that people want to see your face. That is how they can build trust. So if you’re not on video, my advice is is to try a weekly or monthly video challenge. This will help break that fear of being on camera. Video will amplify your message and gain the trust of your audience. Without video, they don’t hear the inflection in your voice and they don’t see your confidence. These are two things that you can use to start building your LinkedIn presence. Just another platform to work on.
Daniel Glickman
Just one more, and don’t get me started on TikTok.
Marisa Cali
I was on TikToc for 15 seconds and I was like, I can’t do this. It’s too much work. I really enjoy my quiet time.
Daniel Glickman
I’d much rather spend my time walking in the woods or swimming in my pool, then feel my mind and keep the noise there, which is useless and highly addictive. Those 15 minutes on TikToc can turn into 15 hours very quickly. This was really interesting. I appreciate all of the specific, concrete information and examples you showed here. And we’d like to say thank you for giving me this account so we can use it here. And thank you to my employer, wave.video. Which is the software we use to repurpose and create all of the previews. It’s very useful for this purpose. Marisa, do you have any final notes before we say goodbye?
Marisa Cali
If you would like to connect with me, go to LinkedIn. All of my social communication will take you right to my LinkedIn page. And I’d love to see you there.
