LinkedIn Live: Myths, Realities, and B2B Superpowers Explained with Gillian Whitney

TRANSCRIPT

Michelle J Raymond: [00:00:00] Welcome everybody to the LinkedIn for B2B Growth Show. I'm your host, Michelle J Raymond. And if you are watching this back on the video replay, the intro that we're all bopping along to is done by the none other than the fabulous Gillian Whitney. Welcome to the show.

Gillian Whitney: Woo hoo. I love it.

Michelle J Raymond: I love you. And I appreciate you coming back because we did an episode. Oh, I feel like it's 12 months ago or something like that now, when I think about it. And we covered the basics of why people should look into LinkedIn lives, but this time I think we're going to go a little bit deeper and I know that since we last caught up, you're now specialising in LinkedIn lives. Why the change? What did you see as an opportunity?

Gillian Whitney: Oh boy, got an hour. Truly it was the day that like LinkedIn took away the profile video and it was just like the straw that broke the camel's back and it was just like so many changes. And my theme is [00:01:00] easy peasy. It's always been about video easy peasy.

And to be honest with you, all of a sudden I was finding video was not easy peasy. It was getting so complicated. And as I was working with my clients, they were getting frustrated. We loved the auto captions, but they were fiddly. And one day it just snapped. And I said to myself, it's a lot easier to go live than make a recorded video.

And then I went, did a pivot with my business and I'm all in on live stream, which can be repurposed into video content. So you get more bang for your buck.

Michelle J Raymond: Look, you know that I'm a huge fan of LinkedIn lives. They are my favourite form of content for so many of those reasons you just said. And we're going to dive into those even more to share why I think businesses should be exploring LinkedIn lives far more than I see happening around the place.

So many reasons that I love them. And I think the one that you just mentioned, they take [00:02:00] far less time than a fully edited video. So I have a YouTube channel. When I create a 10 minute video for a YouTube channel, it's about four hours of editing and then pulling my hair out and then trying to make it fun and I just feel like you lose that energy as well.

So for me, there's so much about LinkedIn lives to love, and let's jump straight into this.

Michelle J Raymond: Why do you think that businesses should be including LinkedIn live in their content planning?

Gillian Whitney: It's the number 1 way for people to get to know and trust you. And I know this is boring. I say the same thing over and over again, but it's absolutely true.

And as we see more and more content that's either incredibly polished or AI generated, you're getting to go. What's real? What's not real? If I see an avatar and somebody's talking, but they look a little sketchy, is that the live Gillian or the fake Gillian?

And I think that live streaming is much more engaging. It's much more honest and real. And you [00:03:00] can engage with your audience if you so choose. You can have guests. There's so many different formats. You talked a second ago about making a YouTube video.

I have found it's much easier to make a live video. Whether you're using something like StreamYard to record it, or actually literally going live and showing something, and then editing that content and putting it up on YouTube, it's so forgiving.

You're not going to do 50 takes. You are going to do one, and usually one take is all you need. You get over yourself quicker on a live than you do on recorded video.

Michelle J Raymond: I think cause you're not stuck in your own head. Like when I'm doing LinkedIn lives, I'm immersed in it. Whereas when I'm recording videos, I'm literally stuck in my own head going, Oh, I sound funny. Oh, I didn't move my hands enough. I moved my hands too much. Oh, I forgot to say that word. And I don't think people expect perfection in LinkedIn lives.

What's the funniest thing that's ever happened to you on a [00:04:00] LinkedIn live that you just shake your head and go, did that really just happen?

One of my favourite stories I was doing a LinkedIn live as a guest with Leanne, a friend of mine, and all of a sudden it was the classic Amazon guy rings the doorbell.

Her dog was asleep on the lounge in the background. He's part of the show. When that doorbell went off, off went that dog and we lost it. And it's one of my favourite moments in all the LinkedIn lives I've done. Cause it's just human, right? That's life. That's working from home. That's what we all deal with.

Have you had something funny that's happened to you?

Gillian Whitney: Absolutely. My favourite one was I had Jeff Young on the show with me. And before that I had decided I was going to start doing a video outro at the end, because I think Juma Bannister had said, it's really awful when people just end the broadcast and you're like, you got a weird expression. So he said, either put up a graphic or a video.

And I went, okay, I'm going to 10 X this and do a video. So I made a video. I had my outro ready to [00:05:00] go. I hit the outro to play and then it just stopped, it ended. And then we're sitting there frozen. And then Jeff just went, I think we're still live.

And I went, Oh dear, through the clenched teeth, still trying to be perfect. And I'm like trying to, hit the button. And afterwards I was so embarrassed and I thought to myself, I'm going to go and bury the evidence, cut that bit out because you can actually trim a little bit of a live afterwards.

And Jeff said, let me see it before you trim it. So I said, okay. And then I went, what am I doing? Let it be. Let it be. And then I actually made a post and I just said, whoops, I did it again. I had Britney Spears, she was singing and it was like, it happens to the best of us, which means you will never be perfect on a live.

There's always a cringe moment. And you know what? People love the cringe moments. So cringe away.

Michelle J Raymond: If I go back to my very first one, I accidentally [00:06:00] shared the wrong link on the live event. And so I had people trying to come backstage rather than big guests of the show watching it live. So that was pretty stressful trying to work out why everyone was back and could see what we were doing.

The next one after that, forgot to press go live because in StreamYard, as you know, you have to press the button twice. I only pressed it once. So Karen and I were talking for about 15 minutes before Lil came crawling in on the floor going, Michelle, why isn't this on? I can't see you. What's going on?

And I was dying and couldn't stop laughing. So I just want to put it out there. Livestreams don't need to be perfect. They're quite effective if you're not, and you've got to be prepared for this kind of stuff.

Michelle J Raymond: So with businesses, do you think that they should embrace this side of things and give up on perfection? Like brands often do?

Gillian Whitney: Oh, absolutely. And with businesses, especially if you're talking about, not a solopreneur, but a company with employees. They've got [00:07:00] actually two audiences. One would be their customers or prospective customers. And that's one audience, but then they also have the internal audience of people in their company that they could actually be doing live stream events with and live streaming can go, of course, to LinkedIn and YouTube and Facebook and all these other places.

But you can also do private live streams. So for instance, if I was in a company and I had a lot of employees, I'd be doing town halls. I go to the StreamYard town halls once a week, every Sunday, and they're always telling us, this is what's on the roadmap. Here's what we're doing. Any business can do this with their customers, but also with their employees.

And that's where you could be getting feedback and people can ask you stuff. And that's a great way to connect with people. They can be doing behind the scenes lives. They can be doing events where maybe they're hosting, I don't know, some sort of charitable event. Maybe you want to stream that.

You want to bring people in. [00:08:00] Spotlight on a particular employee, and again, this could be repurposed as video content later and won't be as stressful as trying to make some perfect video and nobody's a videographer at your company. So there's just so many ways that businesses could be using lives.

Michelle J Raymond: That's such a brilliant list. And there are so many ways that you can use this. This is what I want people to think it doesn't just have to look like an interview of a guest. It doesn't have to look a particular way. You can do them by yourself. You can do them with other people.

Like there's so many different options that we have here. And I love all of those ideas. I've got a couple of my clients that I'm working with now. And as you know, I come from the beauty industry. And so we're going to set some cameras up in the lab and show how some of these ingredients come together and just do different things and embrace something that nobody else in the industry is doing.

And I think if you look around and have a look in your [00:09:00] industry, if no one else is doing it. Such an easy way to stand out like straightaway, even if we don't talk about repurposing, the community building side of LinkedIn lives, I think is amazing and I love the people that show up week after week to see what show I've got go on, what they can learn. And so there's just so much.

Michelle J Raymond: We've got two options when we live stream on LinkedIn particularly. We have the option to go live on our profiles and we have the option to go live on our Company Page. What do you think are the pros and cons of each? And then I'll see if there's anything you might miss that I could add in on.

Gillian Whitney: Okay. So full disclosure, I have never gone live from my Company Page. But I have been a guest on other people's lives from their Company Page. So I feel like I can at least talk about it a little bit. Now going live on your profile, the more connections you have, the more followers you have, you're going to have engagement.

And technically speaking, LinkedIn only [00:10:00] requires you to have 150 connections or followers, whether we're talking about your personal profile or your Company Page.

Now the thing is that just naturally profiles have more engagement. You're just going to be more visible. Your lives will be more visible. The replays will be more visible. So my personal preference would be my profile.

And then, of course, you get into situations where now, even today, we could have done it. We chose not to. But I could have co stream this to my personal profile as well. There's many reasons why we chose not to do that, and we don't even have to get into that. But that is an option.

Now, with your Company Page, It's great in that you could have different people in your company setting up the live and being the person that takes care of it. For instance, if you weren't feeling well today, it's not like I could start the live, unless somebody went into your StreamYard account and go to your profile, but it's a whole different thing.

So I think that to me would be the pro for a Company [00:11:00] Page. You can have different live stream administrators. So I think that would be really good and I'm not a hundred percent sure. So I'm going to put this question back at you. I know you can sort of gate your content on your Company Page, like a zoom. If you were having a zoom meeting and you could require people to register, if you can do that for your lives, I can see that would be a very beneficial way because you don't get a nice long list at the end if you do it to your personal profile.

So I think maybe in a nutshell, that's what I would say. I don't believe we have the ability to co stream to Company Pages and personal profiles yet. I don't know if that's even coming, but I think it's multiple profiles or one Company Page. Correct?

Michelle J Raymond: Yeah, you're absolutely right. I wish I could send it to both.

And just to kind of echo your point there, registered events are possible on your Company Page and what will happen is every person that attends clicks an option that says yes you can [00:12:00] follow up later or no you cant.

And then away you go and you can download a list of those attendees, which is important to people that are often responsible for generating some kind of ROI on holding these events.

Now, I did some research a while back to see whether it impacted how many people showed up. It didn't. I had the same numbers. We also then had a look and said, how many people said yes, I could touch base with them afterwards.

It was probably about 30% out of the whole number. So from that perspective, having that option available to people, most people said no, like more than yes. Now I could theoretically use that very easily to build a newsletter list off LinkedIn. So that is one big option that people are often keen on.

Would I do a registered event? I probably don't because I just feel like it's a piece of friction and a barrier towards people attending what is effectively a live streaming event. I want as many people to pop up.

Running a Company Page [00:13:00] versus personal profile. You're right. Numbers versus numbers. The only way that I can recommend is like a Company Page expert that if you want big numbers to your Company Page live events, the simple answer is use your invite credits.

You have a thousand every week. And the more that you use those and the more you get your employees to use those because it's per person per week. Then the more attendees you will have. The only time that there's a big difference is if you literally don't do any promotions, you will get more to a personal one. That's my personal two cents.

I used to love it Gillian. My favourite thing about going live on my Company Page is they had a video tab and it created like an amazing YouTube channel. And then someone at LinkedIn who I hope is listening to this podcast should know how angry I am that they took that away.

I've noticed recently there's been a change. Now the events tab has popped out and it shows more in the middle of your Company Page when someone arrives there. Great, if you do regular events, but if [00:14:00] you only hosted one a year ago and it's still sitting there front and center, it looks weird.

I was a bit bummed about that. So if in doubt, play around, see what works for your business. There isn't a one size fits all. Is there anything else you want to add to the pros and cons, Gillian? Or I think we've covered it all.

Gillian Whitney: Just realise whatever you do, you can always take your video, your live stream and repurpose it. So if you wanted to add it to your Company Page, you could do that.

I think there's a limit, but I think if you go through Vimeo and maybe think about, there's always the repurposing of putting something on Vimeo or YouTube and embedding it inside an article inside your Company Page as well.

So there's lots of ways to think outside the box and still get your best bang for whatever you're trying to do with live streaming.

Michelle J Raymond: Exactly. And there's the good old repost button as well, which is another way that you can easily distribute it either way on the platform, if you don't want to upload to YouTube or different things. So for me personally, I think there's just so many different ways that you can use it. If I was, to [00:15:00] give any advice around which one is best and you know, I love my Company Pages.

I'm still going to say, go and try it. I don't know that it's right for you. It might be right for you if you need a team to set it up and you don't want it to go through one individual's account, may absolutely be the right thing to do, but for other smaller businesses, it could be completely the opposite and wrong thing.

So reach out to Gillian or I, if you've got any questions and we will have that conversation and see if we can guide you.

Michelle J Raymond: Now, when it comes to getting the show up and running, is there any kind of particular format that you think helps businesses grow? Is there a favourite or do you think again, there's no one size fits all?

Gillian Whitney: I truly believe no, no one size fits all. Everybody has to experiment and see what works for them. And you also have to go back and say, what are my goals? Why am I even wanting to go live? Do I want to build brand awareness? Do I want to educate my people? Do I want to entertain folks?

What is your goal in the first place? But I'd have to say that doing interviews like this is [00:16:00] probably the best way to have growth because you're leveraging the other person's audience because I'm going to invite people, I'm going to share this live stream. Either before, during, after, whatever.

Now you have one plus one equals three. We're going to have more because we're both bringing our networks. We're both sending our networks and then down the road, we can continue to leverage that.

Panels are a great way when you have like four experts. For that, I would highly recommend somebody serve as your facilitator, your moderator, or else it just kinds of becomes a bit of like a, everybody's all talking at once and it can get out of hand.

So you have to really have somebody who's in charge and you have that order in your head, who's going to speak. Maybe they call out the different people kind of act like a Larry King, while he didn't do panels anyways, but you know what I'm saying, think that through. But panels are good because again, now you're leveraging more people.

And again, [00:17:00] you might encourage people to repost that. And I love reposting lives and I don't share lives. I like to repost the live because then all the comments stay together. So that's always my secret hack.

Michelle J Raymond: I'm with you on that. I've done some really cool ones where we got different people. Again, out of the beauty industry that all had a unique perspective on a broader topic called sustainability, but each of them came at it from a different place. And so it was a really varied and interesting conversation that really was at the forefront of what was going on in the industry.

I love the idea of bringing customers on and having conversations with them. It makes them feel good. I think when you get invited to be a guest on a live. It kind of strokes your ego. I'm not going to lie. I love it when someone invites me on and I'm like, they're paying attention to me. They think I've got good things to say.

And so for me personally, I think there's a flip side. There's the people coming in the audience. That's a win. That's community building. There's the people that are your guests [00:18:00] like you today for me. That's just another win for me. I get to spend like time talking to you. There's no downside as far as I'm concerned here.

So for me, as far as having my individual episodes lives, it's a challenge to speak in my case for 30 minutes, on a topic, keep your energy up make sure you don't forget things run the show at the same time. I love having guests. I've tried to do it by myself and just run my own show.

And what happens is I can't be trusted to turn up every week. So having a guest helps keep me accountable is the honest answer of why I did try for a little while to do things by myself, and I like to throw them in because I think it's good to challenge yourself, but it's certainly been an interesting adventure over the last two years with LinkedIn lives.

Like I've tried all kinds of different things. Some were failures and some were learning experiences and some were just fun. And I've seen people try all different variations. It doesn't necessarily even need to be [00:19:00] your core topic of interest. Andy foot played around with that a lot, with his game shows. They were entertaining. They got his audience there.

Let's have a look at something else, Gillian.

Michelle J Raymond: A lot of people are fearful of video in general. You would have come across that in all of your training that you've done with various people. How do you think businesses can set employees up for success when it comes to LinkedIn lives?

What do you think they can do to ease those nerves and really make it a great experience?

Gillian Whitney: I think you just have to experiment. That's the first step and let people know what the experience is going to be like. I've had several guests on my show when I first got going and they said, I've done webinars, I've done zooms, but I don't really know what it's like to be a LinkedIn live guest.

And one person said, could you give me a tour? Could you give me a backstage tour? And I went, why don't I just make a video and I can send it to everybody so that they can see in advance what it's all going to look like so that when it [00:20:00] comes time to go live they understand, Oh, here's, where's going to be the chat. And here's how I do my microphone.

The unknown is what frightens us. So the more that you can educate people, the better. Use a fun experience. And what I would suggest is if I was working with a company and said, okay, we want to do a live stream, but our employees are a little bit nervous, I'd say let's do it in private. Let's do a live and we'll go to a unlisted YouTube or maybe we'll just do record only, but we just want them to have the experience.

And what people find is it wasn't that bad. I have had so many newbies come on my show and they were like nervous as all get out. And then afterwards they said, can I sign up again? Like I loved it. It was so much fun. So I think the thing is educate people, give them room to grow, help them.

If I was in a large company, I'd want to have an admin that's working backstage. [00:21:00] So like you said, Michelle, there's a lot to running a live. So you're the host, you're flipping all the switches. You're the wizard of Oz today. You're doing everything.

But if you were going to have eight people, 10 people on this show today, you might want to have an admin that's working behind the scenes, never seen, but they can be the one in the chat saying, okay, is your microphone working. All those different things to make sure that they're not going to be tense. So help them not be set up for failure, set them up for success.

Michelle J Raymond: I feel like LinkedIn lives, the way that they work behind the scenes feels like a lot more cozy and a safe space because you can't see faces like you can on zoom and other places like that. So we don't get to see facial expressions. We don't see that people have got their screens turned off.

Maybe you're eye rolling, maybe you're still in bed. That's the beauty of this. You can come and, join a live. It doesn't matter where you're at. So for me personally, there's so many upsides, but I think as well, practice is what makes perfect. Look for ways that people [00:22:00] need coaching, look for ways of what's the block for people.

What I discovered is I love to turn up to LinkedIn lives and just go for it. You're going to ask me anything. I've got an answer for everything. I don't have any fear around that. I also discovered that there are a lot of people that I have as guests on my show who like to have questions in advance, so that they can prepare their answers.

And then that way they feel a lot more comfortable when they come on the live show and it comes across in their answers and they know what to expect. And this is why I have a very similar show format every single time.

So that as a guest, you can go back and see some other episodes. There's no surprises. I'm setting you up for success because I want you to shine as a guest. I guess I want other people to see you, how I see you, as an amazing expert, which is why I have you on the show.

And yes, it's live, but it's probably not a traditional live where I don't do a lot of audience interaction. I love those kinds of lives, but it's just not what works for me for what I'm trying to achieve [00:23:00] here.

Gillian Whitney: That's the key though. What works for you? There's no one way to do a live. Everybody does it differently and you have to find what works for you through experimentation. It's great.

Michelle J Raymond: Yeah. Cause I think when people say to you, Gillian, they probably come to you and say,

Michelle J Raymond: How long should a LinkedIn live be? Now, what's your answer to that? Cause I think it's going to be exactly the same as mine.

Gillian Whitney: You know, you could just say as long as it needs to be, you could just use that sort of pat answer, but I've actually done research and I found 30 minutes is my sweet spot. I really try to hold to that because if it goes sometimes too long, people they start to stray.

So I aim for that 30 minutes. It seems to be good. LinkedIn at least likes you to go 15 minutes. That's their guideline. Definitely not longer than an hour.

I think if I was having a panel of speakers, I have done a couple of those panels, an hour was a good thing. And then repurpose, repurpose, repurpose those panels.

Michelle J Raymond: Absolutely. I think the more guests you [00:24:00] have, the longer you need to go so that you can have that. But I would say half an hour is probably my sweet spot as well.

I think people can commit to that and watch that amount of time live. After that, especially if I'm doing a show by myself, it becomes a bit tricky. And, obviously this is being used for the podcast recording as well. So I've got to be mindful of not just what my goals are, but my audience, what did they want from me?

Cause I'm delivering a product that works for them, not just all about me. It's being of service to community when you do these. And so that's how I see it, but yeah, we have the same answer. It's not a one size fits all of course, but half an hour, probably the sweet spot for me as well.

Now, our favourite thing about LinkedIn lives.

Michelle J Raymond: Let's talk people through repurposing them because this is why I love them. But tell me, what's your strategy for repurposing? Can you kind of step us through the numbers of ways that you can repurpose a LinkedIn live?

Gillian Whitney: Oh my goodness. There's sort of like, remember 50 ways to leave your lover. There's 50 [00:25:00] ways to repurpose your lives. It's just amazing.

First of all, take those lives and start chopping up your files. So remember, you have a video file, you have an audio file, go get that audio file transcribed. There's so many tools out there. We don't even need to get into tools, but get that repurposed and get that transcribed so you have the text.

You can turn it into an article, you can turn it into a blog post, you can turn it into a little quotes, a PDF, those PDF documents do so well on LinkedIn, take the highlights and do that. I love to do audiograms where I'm taking the audio portion and zipping it down to 30 seconds with the little sound waves.

And I pop that up onto LinkedIn and lead them to the audio podcast. You can take the live and get the sound bites. And here's my trick. Make them look different. Don't just take your standard, like right now we're at a very standard [00:26:00] looking image, but if we wanted to repurpose this, we might want to do some vertical videos.

We might want to do some square videos. We might want to do the 69 videos. Change that up a little bit. You might even want to say, Oh, maybe I'll just do for this portion, just Gillian talking or just Michelle talking. So there's a lot of different things that you can do. I go to town and do all of it.

Don't reinvent the wheel, take your content and that can be your video strategy. One live multiple content. I did a live in May and I have content now until November, out of that one live. It's just amazing. Let alone all your other social channels. That's another thing too, get that puppy out there on all those other social channels as well.

So yes, repurpose, repurpose, repurpose.

Michelle J Raymond: There is so many different ways. Somebody asked me once upon a time, like, how do you keep up with so much content? My response is if I was to leverage my LinkedIn lives, like I would want to, [00:27:00] you would be drowning in content from me because like you, I take the LinkedIn live, the edited video shows up on YouTube for the full length.

Then I can turn it into shorts or reels or both. I don't use TikTok, but there are people that could then put it over there. I'm then using it, audiograms, LinkedIn posts, carousels, list posts. I love LinkedIn newsletters for repurposing podcasts, video, lives. I think they're brilliant for promoting. I think they're brilliant for sharing the lessons. I'm a huge fan of LinkedIn newsletters as it is. They've just been given a bit of a refresh, I'm hoping that they'll just continue to get better.

But there's so many different ways. And I think tools now make life so much easier. So I'm a big fan of Descript, which I'll share the link to using that. That for me has been a game changer because I'm not an audio engineer. But for me, video to audio just makes it so much easier.

I've now starting to use another program called Capsho who pull out all of the little [00:28:00] clips. There's other programs like Momento, Summer AI. Like there's AI tools, which are so helpful in doing some of that heavy lifting and Opus Pro for video clips.

Michelle J Raymond: Gillian, are they the kinds of tools that you're using? Do you have a favourite?

Gillian Whitney: My favourite is Otter AI. That is one of my favourite tools because that allows me to take my MP3. I upload it after my lives, and then I have a transcript and then I can search. I can figure out, cause I'm a text based person, I'm a visual person too, but sometimes I want to know what did Michelle say about such and such?

I can actually now with Otter AI, I can ask it that question. What did she say about, when she was on that trip to China or something like that, and then a boom, I've got it. So that's really good to do and, get the highlights and all that sort of thing.

Plus of course, then you can download it as a word file, as a document, you can clean it up, you can change it while you're listening to it. And you have captions and if you're going to do these lives, you want to get them over to YouTube. You want [00:29:00] to get your SRT files. So again, Otter AI, that's one of my favourite.

Michelle J Raymond: There is just so many different tools coming out to make this whole process easy to repurpose in whatever format, whether you love written content, long form, short form, short videos, long videos. Like I think LinkedIn live delivers all that and a side of fries. I don't think that there's really anything missing from this. So for me personally, that's why I love them.

Now, Gillian, every show I ask my expert guests like yourself, what's one last tip that you would love to leave the audience with that's listening or maybe watching today,

Michelle J Raymond: what's one last tip when it comes to LinkedIn lives for business growth, specifically.

Gillian Whitney: Think about in your business. What are your goals and how doing live could help? So whether that's saving time with employees doing the same training over and over again, can that be done via live stream to stop people from traveling and getting the content out [00:30:00] there?

Just think about what are the stumbling blocks that you have in your business and then listen to what we talked about today and just say, how could live save me time, save me money and help me expand my business because there is something that live can do for pretty much everything you have going on in your business.

Michelle J Raymond: I couldn't agree more with that. I'm just sitting here holding back going yes, that's exactly what I would love to share with people as well.

So for anybody that has been listening to this episode, if you're still on the fence or not quite sure, or not certain on how to get started with LinkedIn lives, I'm going to put Gillian's details in the show notes, of course, and links to come across to find and connect her.

And as always, I remind people, go to Gillian's LinkedIn profile on the top right hand corner, underneath the banner is a bell. If you want up to date tips of what's happening with all things, LinkedIn live, that is the place that you're going to find it in her content.

So Gillian, as always, I love to catch up with you. It's been far [00:31:00] too long. I appreciate everything that you've shared with the audience today on how they can use LinkedIn lives to really grow their business. So I appreciate you.

Gillian Whitney: Thank you for having me. It's been just a joy and a pleasure. Thanks.

Michelle J Raymond: Cheers.