What's Working and Not Working on LinkedIn for B2B Business Growth with Sarah Clay

TRANSCRIPT

Michelle J Raymond: [00:00:00] Welcome everybody to the LinkedIn for B2B Growth Show. I'm your host, Michelle J Raymond and I am welcoming one of my very favourite equal energy, happy, just always makes me smile, LinkedIn trainers Sarah Clay, welcome to the show.

Sarah Clay: Oh, Michelle, thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. It's pretty early here in the UK, but did I need my alarm? No, because I woke up all excited, like a little kid on Christmas day.

Michelle J Raymond: There's nowhere else you would want to be at pre 7am, I'm sure. But here's the thing. I don't know about you, but whenever I go out and about and you say you're at a party or a barbecue or a get together, and then you get into those small talk conversations and someone says. So what do you do? And I start going well, I teach businesses how to grow using LinkedIn and I'm met with blank stares and I wanted you on the show so I can have a conversation with someone that loves LinkedIn as much as I do. But do you get those same blank stares?

Sarah Clay: It's really interesting. [00:01:00] So I get two reactions. I get the blank stares, definitely like, is that a thing? That's one.

And the other one, which I got last night, which is obviously the one I prefer, is I so need you.

Michelle J Raymond: We love those ones.

Sarah Clay: Yeah, definitely. I so need you. Come and talk to me.

Michelle J Raymond: And I think the conversations that I'm having a lot right now is people are feeling really overwhelmed by LinkedIn. Like we've got new features coming in, we've got conflicting advice coming from all over the place. So I thought today's podcast episode that we would just I'd pick your brain, ask a few questions, see if we agree, disagree on things, what you're seeing, maybe your part of the world's a bit different to my part of the world.

But yeah, it'd be interesting to get your feedback on a couple of things. Now, what do you think is working really well on LinkedIn at the moment and maybe what's not working so well on LinkedIn this year? So we know it goes through swings and roundabouts, but what have you found is the best thing for people who want to use LinkedIn to grow their business?

Sarah Clay: Oh yeah really good question. So [00:02:00] what I see working on LinkedIn is storytelling and talking about why we're doing what we're doing, talking about behind the scenes at the company and on personal profiles as well. I'm such a strong advocate and I say this so many times in my day that people work with people.

We want to know, people want to know what's going on on LinkedIn. And with Company Pages particularly it's, it's so brilliant when you see the CEOs, the CFOs, all the C suite people on LinkedIn talking about themselves, talking about how they're running the company and what they're doing.

I've had a client recently and he's now posting. He brought his daughter down to London and she sat in the board meeting, this little sort of eight year old kid. And, almost viral because people love all that real human stuff because it's about connecting and building relationships.

Wishing your employees happy birthday on LinkedIn shows that you care, shows that you understand your employees. Congratulating them and saying, wow, well done so [00:03:00] and so for achieving targets or, Jean in accounts has been here 55 years, hooray and all of this stuff.

And it just shows the company culture, that it's such a lovely place to work. So why wouldn't you want to use that company for the services and goods that they have? I love all that content.

Michelle J Raymond: I love that, but I feel like last year it kind of slipped and went way too personal for my personal taste.

And I'm not part of the, this isn't Facebook brigade because I like the personal connection side of things. But there was like a whole time where I was like, I don't understand what's going on here.

Maybe I'm old, maybe something's going on, but I feel like this year, and we're going to talk about the LinkedIn algorithm a little bit later, so I'll hold onto this, but I feel like this year it's finding a really happy balance like not too much corporatey, not too much personal, but somewhere in the middle, I think is where we've landed.

Michelle J Raymond: But what do you think isn't working so well at the moment on the platform? Are there things that you've noticed or [00:04:00] things that might press your buttons?

Like what kinds of stuff do you think doesn't work on the platform right now?

Sarah Clay: Okay. So just dialing back a little bit. Yeah, I agree. Sometimes the personal content is just there for the sake of being there. And I think that's that doesn't work. As I say, it's about storytelling and if you're being authentic and I know it's a very overused word, but if you really are telling the story of the company, telling the story of why you're doing what you're doing, I think that resonates, but the kind of, here's me with my cat or whatever, just for the sake of trying to get a huge reach on LinkedIn that doesn't work.

The same old question, what doesn't work on LinkedIn is being salesy and spammy. I spoke at a finance conference two days ago. And of course the next day, my DMs are just full of people saying, great to see you. Great to meet you. And all of this lovely really genuinely lovely comments.

And right in the middle, you see the first three lines, it said, Hey, Sarah, do you need a new website? No. I do not need new. Have you seen my website? It's actually quite good. Yeah, it needs a few tweets. Or hello, Sarah, would you like some LinkedIn training?

Michelle J Raymond: Oh, my favourite. [00:05:00]

Sarah Clay: Why? Do your research, do your homework. Don't just use a third party bot. And I still find it amazing because we've been talking about this for years and people are still doing it. Wolfie of Wallstreet and Del Boy, you might not know who Del Boy is, he's an English Wolfie, basically. Just don't do it, just go somewhere else, don't do it at all, because it just doesn't work. It really doesn't work.

Michelle J Raymond: Yeah, I would say those unsolicited messages, now that there's so much automation tools available to people. The number of those, and I think, it's not the automation that I'm against. It's the fact that they're trying to blanket a one size fits all template that somebody on those platforms has created and said, this'll work.

Read the fine print. It says, if you go and join our engagement pod as well, that's the only reason that this is working. And they literally say that as part of the play, do this, connect the automation and then go and join the engagement pod.

So [00:06:00] it's connecting at speed to the wrong people and then a group of false people are going to go and pretend to cheer you on and then people are high fiving themselves going, wow, look at me, I don't have to spend any time on LinkedIn.

And I'm thinking, how many relationships are you damaging? How much are you turning what could be a really positive experience into a negative one for people? Not even neutral. I think when you are on the end of these things. I just want to block and block. And I just learned that there's a limit.

You can only block 1400 people like every couple of years or something like that. But I reckon I could block them all.

Sarah Clay: Yeah, absolutely. But you know, talking about pods, okay, your post will get a lot of comments and likes and, it'll maybe increase the reach. But what's your reason?

What's your ROI for being on LinkedIn? Is it to get huge reach of your posts or is it actually to get some business and to, to build relationships in order to do that?

I just don't understand why people would invest in these vanity metrics when at the [00:07:00] end of the day, they're not going to get them anywhere.

They'll get nothing from it apart from a load of bland comments that don't mean anything from people they don't know.

Michelle J Raymond: I have never understood it. I personally, I can understand how people end up in an engagement pod. So for the people listening in that don't know what they are, essentially you pay to be part of a group and that group and yourself all make a commitment that when somebody posts, you'll all jump in and support it as fast as possible.

Leave a comment. And they're the ones that used to be like great share. Well done. And that add no value to the conversation. They're never interesting comments. They are so bland and so manufactured and they're coming from people so far out of the industry, probably on the other side of the world, all these random people.

And I just can't wrap my head around it. I can understand when you sit and you're starting on the platform and your numbers look so low. And that whole community minded thing that it kind of, that's [00:08:00] how they present it. Come and join our community. We'll all support each other to grow.

I love that idea, but the actual execution of it. I just don't understand. And I love when people come to me and go yeah, I accidentally fell into one and then I realised what was going on and then I was out of there, which I'm sure you get clients reach out to you like that, that have been through that experience.

Sarah Clay: And they're frightened to come out of the pod because they know that their engagement on their posts will drop dramatically.

But you, you can't stay in those pods. And it's interesting you say, so when I run my six week program, I have 10 people and I encourage them all to when they've posted, post the link to the post in the WhatsApp group and everybody can go over and give it some love.

These are a group of people who are helping each other, nurturing each other, and supporting each other, and genuinely interested in what each other is doing.

And I keep saying to them, this is not a pod, please don't join a pod. This is a group of people who are helping each other, which is a very different thing.

Michelle J Raymond: Yeah. And at least there's [00:09:00] some kind of common bond between them all, whereas this is just every man for themselves. And Yeah, look, I know that there's all kinds of ways that you can go around LinkedIn and everybody's got their own version of it, but that's just one, no matter how much time has gone on and how many different ways I try and look at it, I'm just like, what you actually have done is sent yourself at speed a hundred miles an hour in the wrong direction.

Of which when you end up wherever it is that you're trying to end up, you actually realise you're in the wrong spot and have to turn around and come back again and restart all over.

So you've lost time in the whole process. And I don't think people realise that's what's going on. And so I want to keep this conversation moving because I want to, like I said, pick your brain so that we can help as many people move from overwhelmed by all of the noise that's on the platform is what I'm going to call it right now.

And maybe move into some practical steps, but I want to talk [00:10:00] about  how do you incorporate LinkedIn Company Pages with clients into their strategy? Are you approaching things different this year? What are you seeing? I'm just going to put it out there. I think it's getting harder and getting closer and closer to a pay to play platform for businesses, but there's other ways that we can use it, but I'm curious what things have you tried and what are you seeing working?

Sarah Clay: I completely agree with the whole Company Page thing, they are hard. Linkedin you know values personal profiles much better. I do like the way that they're different and I do like the way that Company Pages can't bombard personal profiles with their content and stuff. And I do like that because the power structure is very different between a Company Page and a personal profile.

What I see working is because we're about the people and it's about the people within the company, using the employees in the company to spread the message of the Company Page is an [00:18:00] absolute no brainer as far as I'm concerned.

Let's post on the Company Page really high quality, value add personal as well as businessy content on the page, but getting your employees to build their own profiles, to build their own networks and taking the content from the Company Page and posting it on their personal profiles, as well as other content.

And they're the ones, the employees are going out and building the relationships and bringing them back to the Company Page. That's the gold on LinkedIn right now.

Michelle J Raymond: I think as well, there's an opportunity for Company Pages for me, I call it the digital library. It's like where your greatest hits are and you just, it's quality over quantity.

But there's also a thing that I think as page admins, we can go in, use the Company Page, and I don't care how big your company is. It can be a solopreneur for all I care. I've actually used it myself, but use that Company Page in the brand to reinforce the personal brands of those employees that are out there.

So every [00:19:00] time they're posting, guess who's commenting? The Company Page. Guess who's liking that post every single time? And I think it reinforces hey, we notice what you're doing as an employee. We appreciate it. We're supporting you. We're cheering you on. And when you're starting out on LinkedIn, all those things matter.

And knowing that someone else noticed what you're doing, it's a team sport as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to LinkedIn. That's my new kind of thing that I'm building up into my new website is that, you can't just ignore one part. Like you can't just ignore the brand because if your people leave, you're in big trouble.

You can't just put all your eggs in the personal brand basket, like I said, with turnover, but also the Company Page, you can't put all your eggs in that one because reach is so tricky at the moment. So it's finding that right balance. And someone asked me the other day, and I'd love to hear your answer.

Michelle J Raymond: How much time do you spend into a Company Page versus personal? Now I'll leave it at that because that's all the information that I had, but what would you say if someone asked you that?[00:20:00]

Sarah Clay: Ooh, good one. The Company Page is, as you say, I call it like a mini website, if you like, all the information's there. And because you've got the tabs at the top which I know don't work in the same way as they did because the algorithm changes, but they are still there. So it's very easy for people to access old content that's been sitting there. You can go through the videos tab and look at the videos in a kind of similar way to YouTube in a way or a website.

So having that sort of organised structure of a Company Page, I think makes the Company Page content much more accessible. But using, as I say, using the content going backwards and forwards between the employees and the personal profiles, I think is a really valuable thing, but you've got to have the right content on the Company Page in the first place.

And it depends how many employees you've got and what you want to achieve and what their resources are. People say, how often should I spend on LinkedIn? How often can you spend on LinkedIn?

If you can spend 20 minutes every day on LinkedIn, that's great. And if, even if you've got a small company of say, there's [00:21:00] only five of you out there or three of you on LinkedIn for 20 minutes a day, that's an hour a day that the company is showing its face on LinkedIn.

But it's really important that people go back to the Company Page and find something interesting, valuable, value add there. So it's both. Both are really important. So yeah, time wise, I always say to employees, start with 20 minutes a day and if you can grow that, then great.

If you say you have to be on your personal profile for an hour a day, obviously no company has jurisdiction over personal profiles anyway, but starting like that, it's like going to the gym, you sign up in January I've got to go every single day, and off you go and you do your workout for an hour and then you get home and go, I'll never do that again, and by January the 12th, you're done.

But start slowly and building it up and be realistic with your expectations. And I think that's the the call on the personal profiles, but you've got to have the Company Page [00:22:00] content going out regularly and consistently.

Michelle J Raymond: Yeah. It's how long is a piece of string? What are the business goals? What are the resources?

It's completely different if you've got an established marketing team that's handling one part and people that are already active on the platform versus a solopreneur that's like juggling everything in the business going, how do I make a Company Page and a personal profile work? And it's about finding that balance.

Like I've got some clients I work with, I just do Company Page management. Not one employee is on the platform. It is never going to be any other way. It doesn't matter how many times I say, look, we could do this and that. What works for their business right now, and this has been a few years now is that they're just like, keep that Company Page ticking over.

That's all that we can manage. That's all that we're interested in. I don't have other resources in the business to do anything else. So just keep it ticking over. I don't want to have to worry about it.

I've got others where we've got that and that's been the starting place. And then we've turned [00:23:00] into getting a couple of employees on. And then there's some, where we don't do any Company Page at all. Like no matter how much I say, yeah, you've got to, they're just like, we don't have it, the resources to manage it all.

If push came to shove and someone said to me, where would I spend what my, time spent on LinkedIn, of course, you're probably going to put more into the personal side, if you're after reach and engagement, but again, it depends on the business goals. So I think we're totally aligned. It's how long is a piece of string is our answer because that is genuinely what it is.

Now, if I move into the next question, I get you and I haven't had a conversation about this, but let's talk about the new AI features on LinkedIn. I'm going to call it this segment, the good, the bad and the ugly.

Michelle J Raymond: What are your views on AI and the new things that LinkedIn are bringing in specifically on the platform? Where do you sit? Have you liked it? Not liked it? What's working for your clients? Yeah. Just curious what your thoughts are.

Sarah Clay: Okay. You may have noticed the the [00:24:00] phrase AI has never popped up in my feed. You're talking to the wrong guy here. I don't hate AI. There's a lot of things I really dislike about AI. The main thing I dislike about AI is it's plagiarism of other people's work.

So I know that potentially stuff that I've written that's out there. Yeah, okay, it's out there on my website, it's out there on LinkedIn, it's on, wherever it is. And AI is scraping my content, your content, you know, all of our content, and then compiling it together. And we don't get any credit for that at all, because they don't really know where it's come from either.

So from that perspective That's my big beef with AI. I really don't like that at all. On the other hand, somebody sent me, I'm going to a lunch today and they wanted a bio and they sent me some text and said, does this sum you up? And I was like, yeah, that's really good. Did you write that? It was AI scraped my profile and wrote a really cool bio about me.[00:25:00]

So, you know, they're sort of my views on AI, but when you're talking about AI on LinkedIn, I think you're talking about when we're asked to comment on certain posts and what do we think about this, that, and the other. It's interesting because some of the suggestions I get are quite relevant, but some are way off key, you know, really, really off key.

And I did start thinking, okay, I'm going to respond to some of these. So I started and I wrote my comments and my thoughts on these different posts, but I don't know what's happened to that information. I don't know who's seen that information. Nobody has come to me and said, Oh, I really liked your thoughts on this post.

So I have no idea. And it's what's the point? Why have you asked me to comment on this AI post, but you're not telling me why I'm doing it. You're not telling me who's reading it. You're not telling me the results of what I've done. So why would I waste my time on something, I don't know the outcome?

Michelle J Raymond: I assume what you're talking about is those collaborative articles. Cause I'm on team anti collaborative articles. I'm throwing it out there. [00:26:00] Why am I anti it? For me, it's like such a distraction. I get no credit. You get all of my IP, you being LinkedIn land. And like you said, it disappears.

And from what I can see, everyone gets super excited if they get to have a little badge next to their name. I just personally don't care about it. I have got better places I can invest my time on the platform.

Michelle J Raymond: I've seen these AI tools that have popped up and prompts about helping with headlines and about sections. Do you have any comments on those?

Sarah Clay: Again, who are we helping? Why are we doing this? If I want to help somebody with their headline in their about section, then come to me and let's have a conversation. Let's look at your profile. And I can help you with that.

If I want to write an article or a post about how to write a smacking headline or, your about section, then I'll do that. And I'll do it in my time when I want to do it. And I don't feel I need the prompts. I don't feel they're necessary. And as you say, LinkedIn are just taking our information.

Michelle J Raymond: [00:27:00] I've found like I played with it. I love to try and see what it will help with and I tried to find the use case for it. So if I was new to LinkedIn and not good at writing, would AI helping me write a headline be helpful? I would say yes, but for the quality that it outputs, I was like, wow, if you couldn't write better than that yourself, I think we're in trouble because it's not great. That's the nice way of putting it.

I have had some thoughts about it and some people reached out and said, look using tools like AI help dyslexic people form their thoughts and write their words and it makes life easier for them. Or I can see maybe English is a second language and it helps other people like that. So I can see some upside and I'm mindful of those kinds of things.

But I just feel like everyone will end up just being Dolly the sheep, we're going to clone person after person when we're all fighting to stand out and be different, which is where my concern is.

I [00:28:00] love the idea of it being helpful. Again, in my mind, AI is there to help, but I'm not sure it literally is doing that so much, or if it's hindering most of us more than anything.

Sarah Clay: I think it's impeding creativity and personality. And it's like when, you know, I work very closely with, CEO, C-Suite, just with their personal profiles. They come to me and they say, will you write my profile for me? I said no, we work together. And it's because it's about you. It's about your personality. It's about who you are. And if I did write somebody's, I've done a couple of writing people's own profiles, but I asked them so many questions and find out really why the depth between behind what they're doing, because it's about our personalities and that's what our profiles should be.

So if I had a hundred people came to me, said, will you write my profile with all the best will in the world? They're going to look similar because I've written them. So no, I genuinely feel it's about, we need to [00:29:00] show ourselves and that's what people are buying. That's who people are doing business with or recommending and referring.

So it's so important that we are ourselves on LinkedIn.

Michelle J Raymond: Yeah, there's no way that at this point in time, the AI tools don't have your experience, your history and your career. They also don't know your personality, what your values are. The storytelling element that you mentioned earlier is so critical right now because that's part of what bonds us as humans.

But it also is what distinguishes us from the robots, from the carbon copies, from the clones. And so for me, sometimes LinkedIn feels it's like this big game of lemmings where people are just going to follow each other off the cliff.

And I'm like, where are you going? Stop and think, if I see another post about, oh, I've reverse engineered all of the creators headlines, or I've reverse engineered all of the best influencers hook lines. And then all that happens is they become templated. And then it's okay, so you wrote a carbon copy of someone else's post.

[00:30:00] You change one word and then said, Oh, it's mine. I'm being creative. Like that presses my buttons, so much. And I've had to get out of some of those circles. I've ended up connected to some people and no, that's called plagiarism. And there's, again, these tools, automation tools making that possible.

Here's the viral post, like just go and change one word. It's a template. No, you copied someone else's work, but anyway.

Let's just say, let's go back to employee advocacy, getting employees out there.

Michelle J Raymond: Let's just say you've got that 20 minutes that someone's starting off.

If you had to give someone advice about where they should spend that 20 minutes, in the best way possible, what would you recommend?

Sarah Clay: Oh, good one. So 930 something million people on LinkedIn it's busy out there really, really busy and you can spend a lot of time, as I say hanging out in the kitchen at the party.

So just talking to your friends, engaging with your friends, which is nice because I'm very much about, we need to enjoy what we're doing and have fun. But if we really want to grow the business and if we [00:31:00] really want to grow our personal profiles, it's about being targeted. So my tip is if there are certain people on LinkedIn, you really want to see their content, then ring their bell.

Engage in their content and you're going to get their content in your feed and you'll get the notifications as to when they've posted. So I scroll through my notifications and I get the notifications of the people that I've rung their bell has posted and I'll go straight there and comment on their posts. So it's a very targeted approach.

The other thing is the search bar at the top. It's so pale. It's so small, but it's massive. And I said, this is the platinum or diamond of LinkedIn, this search bar and all of the sections that you can niche down, saving your searches, saving the URLs of your searches makes life so much easier.

So if you do a search, save the URL, cause you can't save searches anymore, which is really frustrating because you used to be able to do [00:32:00] that. And really target who it is that you're communicating with on LinkedIn and comment on posts. And I say, try and comment on five posts a day and comment with value.

So you talked earlier about the three C's. I have four C's for commenting. So the first one is to give a compliment. This is interesting. Congratulations. I really like what you said here.

The second C is to add a comment where you add your value. So in my experience, this has happened. I've seen this happen there. Oh, I did this and this happened. So add some value, but don't show off. So compliment, comment, conversation, use open ended language, ask questions, try and get a conversation going in somebody else's feed. Okay, you don't get the credit as far as the algorithm is concerned because it's not on your post, but you're building that relationship.

And then go over and connect with that person. So that's the fourth C. [00:33:00] So even if you do that on one post a day, you're adding value in other people's feeds and loads of other people will see your comments. So all the followers and connections of the person whose content you're commenting on are likely, and they do see that.

So commenting in a targeted way, I think is a really valuable use of time and connecting with people. So if you can comment on five posts a day and connect with two people a day. That's a very, that's quite a low bar, but it's a consistent and realistic way I think that you can really make traction on LinkedIn.

Michelle J Raymond: I think that's brilliant. It's a ditto for me. There's nothing that I would recommend any different. I think they're the types of actions that build relationships and nurture relationships and get you discovered in your industry. And I think the word targeted is so important when you want to be efficient on LinkedIn.

Now, the sad [00:34:00] part is I've gone way over time but it's also a miracle that I have somehow stopped us from talking all day because I would want to. I appreciate everything that you've shared today with the audience. Do you have one last quick actionable tip that people could take away today?

And then I'm going to wrap this thing up. But yeah, it's just been such a good conversation. And yeah, what's your one last actionable tip?

Sarah Clay: Oh don't be frightened. Don't be frightened of LinkedIn. So many people come to me and they say, I don't know what to post about. I'm, I'm worried that I'll write something and put it out on LinkedIn and people are going to, attack me or my boss isn't going to like it or whatever.

Be yourself and don't be frightened because LinkedIn, yes, Okay, it's an open platform, but it's about being you. And that's the most important thing.

Michelle J Raymond: What a fabulous way to end this show, Sarah Clay. I appreciate all the time that you've given today and all of the brilliant tips that people will be able to take away about what's working and what's not [00:35:00] working on LinkedIn for B2B at the moment.

So I appreciate you and thank you everybody that has joined us live and is listening to the podcast until next week. Cheers.