LinkedIn Is Counter-Intuitive. Wait, what?

Why Does Our Intuition About LinkedIn Often Play Tricks on Us?

Business | Clients | Do’s & Don’ts | Lead Gen | LinkedIn | New Business | Profile

I. Staff/executive Profiles Trump Pages

Unless your company employs thousands of employees, your leads will primarily come from staff’s individual profiles.

First, on LinkedIn, most users won’t follow your company Page. Heck, most won’t even see it.

Moreover, for those who do, you won’t have access to their email addresses. Many people hardly follow Pages at all, and if you have hundreds of followers (or less), most of those often aren’t ideal clients to begin with – many of them are job seekers, people who hope to sell services to your company, and your own employees (by default, employees follow companies they’ve added to their employment section). As if all that isn’t enough, a Page on LinkedIn is fairly static.

Let us now compare static Pages with your own profile. Your profile alone is likely to get 10 times more visits than your company page! Moreover, you will often be able to track visitors of your profile down, either because they’ll send you a connection request or by checking Who’s Viewed Your Profile (yes, even with a free LinkedIn account). The natural action on LinkedIn is not to follow pages but to visit profiles.

It could be that your staff already has 10x or 100x connections than your page will ever have followers.

So you really need to focus on staff profiles. Once those are stellar, especially C-Level executives and customer-facing leaders, then sharing an occasional page update makes sense.

Instead of wasting energies on a page that’s hardly visited, focus on your profile.

Where should you start? Look at the graph (taken from my book). Axis X shows your number of connections. Axis Y shows to what extent your profiles answers your prospect’s questions. Quadrant 4 combines convertion and exposure, and is therefore the one to target.

But wait!, how does one actually get to N. 4?

Suppose there are 2 options: either first connect with 400 people and then include relevant information in your profile, or build an optimized profile first, and then connect. Which would you say is more efficient? Cool.

Question: Is that what you’ve done? (pause)

Action: Stop accepting invitations until your profile converts prospects.

Resource: Stop Being Clueless on LinkedIn

II. A Quality Network Overpowers Quantity

Unless you’ve had 30k connections for years and haven’t annoyed them with meaningless spam, your leads will come from valuable introductions. In that sense, the number of your connections in meaningless.

Marketers often fail to have a Connection Strategy (what do I mean by a Connection Strategy? Simple: decide how to optimize your network, by selecting one: either quality or quantity). Often, they are only being reactive.

Worse, marketers who naturally prefer to connect with people they know well think that they are supposed to dumb connect with complete strangers all day to show the world…what? That they have 500+ Connections?

Why you’d better make a choice

As CMOs, strong introductions can lead to significant business. Referrals are often one of the best lead generation engines. But to make a strong intro, the person making it needs to know well both sides. Many marketers end up with 1k-2k connections they know nothing about before realizing their mistake. All it takes is looking up a prospect who’s a 2nd degree contact, scrolling down to see the name(s) of the shared connection(s) and realizing they know nothing about you. What good did it do you to cold connect with 1500 people, if as a marketer they bring you zero value?

Ok, you might say, so they’re not exactly beneficial, but they surely cannot cause me any harm, right?

Wrong – they might hurt your business’ growth. The same ideal prospect with whom you share shared connections looks you up and sees the names of the shared connections. Guess what happens when Mr. Prospect reaches out to one asking about you? Easy: he’ll hear “I don’t know that person”. You will not be able to magically whisper in your prospect’s ears: “Ask Joe, not Tom Dick or Harry!”. A meeting/demo is less likely and a deal may have just been lost (please have an argument that’s more valid than “But I didn’t invite that person – he sent me an invitation and I just accepted” – your prospect doesn’t care and there’s no icon showing who invited whom).

Imagine a stadium where open networkers (aka LIONs) make up a team on the far left, those who connect with people they know well (snipers) constitute the second team on the far right, and everyone else (ducks) wanders aimlessly somewhere between them.

Here’s the big secret no one tells you: it doesn’t matter where you are, as long as you avoid the center – and stand still.

What do I mean? Your connections can help you in one of 2 ways:

1. Consistently connecting only with people you know well ⇒ you benefit from meaningful introductions based on trust ⏩ Sales meeting
2. Getting fast to 30000 connections ⇒ huge exposure ⏩ Inquiries

You just have to choose. Most connected or best connected?

Not sure which suits you, most or best? Ask yourself this question: In 5 years, do I want to be a Sniper, a Lion or a Duck?

Both Snipers and LIONs are fine – and any of them knocks out Ducks.

Unless you make a choice, your network will be under-optimized: It won’t be large enough (meaning your 2500 connections’ exposure won’t be large enough to be translated into inquiries) nor will it be 100% trustworthy (because you polluted it with people who don’t know you at all).

Everybody wants both maximum exposure combined with 100% trust, but you can’t have it both ways. On LinkedIn, exposure and trust are mutually exclusive – picking a lane is much better than jaywalking.

For me, the choice is clear: meaningful introductions have brought me clients, and vanity metrics haven’t. Put another way, I prefer a deal without a connection than a connection without a deal.

What is your choice?

Pick a side in the stadium, don’t wander aimlessly hurting your business.

Unless you have a connection strategy, you’re letting other people decide for you. Focus on quality.

Action: Look up your network and ask yourself: Am I stuck in the middle? Do I prefer quality or quantity – or will I just keep passively responding?

Resource: Infographic – what I call The LinkedIn funnel. From top to bottom, prospects will have to find you, decide within 5 seconds they’d like to scroll, decide later they want to read, be encouraged to reach out after checking with a common connections, think they’d better reach out and be able to do it freely.

III. Build Your Profile Like a Website, Not a CV

Unless you’re job hunting, think of your LinkedIn profile as a website – not a CV. 

LinkedIn is NOT meant to be for “job seekers”, but for what you’d like to use it for !

LinkedIn has half a billion members! It’s like buying a smartphone and only use it to call people because it’s “supposed to be for calls”. Of course you can place a call, but what would YOU like to use it for? Why should you care how others (job seekers) use LinkedIn for? Do you care how others use their phones?

My question is simple: what would you like your LinkedIn presence to perform?

In a nutshell, here are 2 simple questions to ask: (a) Who’s my ideal reader? and (b) What would I like my ideal reader to perform after reading my profile?

Focus on converting your ideal clients into perform an action that’ll bring them into your sales funnel (reach out, go to a landing page, subscribe to your newsletter, download your podcast/app/whitepaper). A simple way of doing it is remembering the questions your ideal client asks himself – and their order – and answer those very questions early in your profile [banner, headline].

Action: Read your profile and ask yourself: If I were my ideal client and I bumped into this, what links, text and CtA would convince me to go to (your website/app/video/download page)?

Resource: A complete step-by-step profile building guide

IV. Produce/Curate Content Before Considering Advertising

Unless you have a ton of money, you’d better focus on content creation (and curation) and not on paid advertising.

LinkedIn ads tend to be expensive. In fact, even if you do plan an ad campaign, it’s best used to complement your staff’s free use of the LinkedIn platform.

Content is like fuel boosting your marketing on LinkedIn – without high quality content you can only go so far.

Advertising without content is feeding your dog caviar while you’re starving to death.

Don’t.

A key benefit of content production is that it can be leveraged outside of LinkedIn as well (read: your website). Even existing content can be repurposed into LinkedIn articles and gain exposure.

If you work in a heavily regulated industry or need Legal to approve every sentence, then you should consider Content Curation. Content curation can mean time-sensitive sharing of other people’s content.

Focus on producing/curating content.

Action: Analyze existing content and repurpose it into Articles and Rich Media on your profile:

Resource: Content Curation – How Should Great Content Be Shared on LinkedIn?

V. Invest Time to Master LinkedIn Before Buying Premium Accounts

Unless you have a ton of money and not a lot of brains (sorry!), you’d better stay with LinkedIn’s free account until you know it inside out.

Playing enough with LinkedIn’s free account will enable you to understand the limits of a free account – not that many for casual users – and to actually benefit from what you get when you pay.

LinkedIn’s free platform is in fact so confusingly rich that most users never learn more than 10% of what it has to offer. If you pay too early, you won’t be able to understand what you get because you won’t have encountered the limits of a free account. For many marketers who don’t regularly run a ton of advanced searches, the main benefit of a premium account is a complete list of Who’s viewed your profile (WVYP). But by visiting WVYP daily (or twice daily if you’re very active on LinkedIn) you’ll see 90% of the names as long as you selected the right privacy setting, enabling others to see you viewed their profile.

Focus on blocking time (and train your staff!) to master the free LinkedIn platform.

Action: Block 3 hours to perform the following actions on LinkedIn:

• Run an advanced search for someone in a company you’d like to target but haven’t, and make yourself familiar with the parameters you’ll see when LinkedIn shows you results
• Improve your profile by making a Call to Action clear, and providing the information your prospects needs in order to complete it
• Visit your connections and pick 3 people you lost touch with 6-12 months ago after having enjoyed working with – and then reach out to each of them (not on LinkedIn)

Resource: Top 18 Mistakes to Stop Making on LinkedIn.

Summary

I. Staff/Executive Profiles Trump Pages
II. A Quality Network Overpowers Quantity
III. Build Your profile Like a Website, Not a CV
IV. Produce/Curate Content Before You Consider Advertising
V. Invest Time to Master LinkedIn Before Buying Premium Accounts

So what have we learned?

Focus on staff profiles, have a connection strategy, make your profile a converting website so your ideal prospects perform the action you’d like them to perform, produce or curate high quality content that you can leverage outside of LinkedIn, and dedicate enough time to see what’s under LinkedIn free accounts’ hood.

Create a system identifying your ideal reader, selecting a smart connection strategy, leveraging groups, curating content,involving your staff, and simply supporting your business objective. If I learned one thing from countless workshops and lectures around the world, it’s that regarding LinkedIn, our intuition is often wrong. This post covers 5 wrong assumptions, I suggest you check yours.

Want a done-for-you premium lead generation from me? Ping me

The Hebrew version of this post was first published on Michael Gally’s website. Michael (LinkedIn) helps Israeli exporters secure more sales in global markets. This post is actually my take on one of Michael’s blog posts (click here for the original Hebrew post) entitled Marketing Isn’t Intuitive.

I first heard the name Michael Gally when Michael consulted a telecom company I worked with in the mid 90s (had you told me then that one day I’d publish any content on Michael’s website, I would have never believed you!). Thank you Michael for your thought-provoking blog!

Posted on July 15, 2019