Daniel Disney: Thank you for having me today and sorry I am the last person standing between you and the bar. So, bear with me. I’ve got a light session. We’re going to run through social and hopefully, I’m going to show you how you can bring social to life. The two key areas I’m going to focus on are bringing your LinkedIn profile to life, and also how to create more effective content. Now, obviously we’ve had amazing sessions today looking at sales enablement and what I’m going to touch on in social is how you can leverage it to reach your colleagues and also your customers, to help them essentially understand what sales enablement is, whether you are selling it to potential customers or trying to get your teams to buy into it. I loved Rusty’s reference to snackable content and we’re going to dive into how you can create more engaging content to help pass that message along.
First of all, my name is Daniel Disney. I am not related to Walt Disney. Apologies if anyone is here for that reason. I know some of you were thinking it. I have to say that in every talk I do and probably will do for the rest of my life. And it’s also a real name. I get asked if it’s a stage name. I am genuinely a Disney. I am a social selling, digital selling, LinkedIn trainer. I have worked in sales all my life, predominantly traditional sales. Around about six, six-and-a-half years ago I started to utilize LinkedIn when it really started to boom and have seen how it has transformed both the buying journey and also the sales journey.
So, we are going to focus on today how you can leverage that. I also run a page called The Daily Sales, which is LinkedIn’s most popular page for salespeople. Quick rundown on some of the numbers: The Daily Sales, which is a company page on LinkedIn, has over 430,000 followers and is growing by about 10,000 every week so when we talk about content today, I can show you all the latest areas of content that are most effective: big personal audience, content reaching lots of people, and I have been able to generate a lot of sales from LinkedIn as a sort of a lead generation source.
I’m here as a social selling expert as I’ve just sort of illustrated, but as a reality, I used to hate social media and I come from a traditional sales background, as I mentioned. I used to knock on doors, I used to make cold calls, and I was never a social media person. I think I was 18 when Facebook first came out and I really didn’t have an interest in it. Where it connected with me was when LinkedIn came out, a professional social network, and suddenly there was a platform where my customers were and where I could communicate in a professional way. And my entire sales world blew up by this ability to suddenly reach far and wide, and far more effectively.
There is a reality that I’m sure many of you will share today. With a lot of us, social media is the first thing we check in the morning and it’s the last thing we check at night, and it’s what we constantly check every five minutes throughout the day. Social media is a big part of our lives and as salespeople, sales enablement people we have an opportunity to leverage that to reach and communicate more effectively with our customers.
So, what is social selling, digital selling – it has a few names? A lot of people are scared it is here to wipe out traditional sales methods, which is very much not true. In its simplicity, it is using social media as a platform to sell, and that could be to generate inbound opportunities, to generate outbound opportunities, to generate brand awareness. It is a communication platform. And there are so many of these communication platforms out there. When I started in sales, it was very much the phone, face-to-face, then email came along, and now we have social media and video. We have these new platforms that people are using that we can use to communicate.
One of the best ways I like to try and illustrate it is those wonderful finger mazes. You are offered several doors to go in, one of them will lead to the middle, all the rest lead to dead ends. And I like to look at it as the modern-day prospecting maze. Each door represents a communication channel. Each of your prospects, and this could be a customer prospect, or it could be someone within your organization or group and you are trying to communicate the effectiveness of sales enablement. We each have different preferences, so put me as a buyer. If you were trying to sell to me and you’re cold calling me, I’m not going to answer. I spent years making cold calls and leading cold callers, but as a buyer, it is not a communication method that I am comfortable with. So, if you are trying to cold call, you’re not going to reach me. And it would be the same for many of your teams and companies that you work with.
You might be trying to communicate the effectiveness of sales enablement in certain methods, but it might not be connecting with your audience because their preferences are different. We each have different preferences. Some of us prefer social, some of us might prefer email, some of us might prefer video, and so on. We each have these different preferences, and this is important as salespeople, sales leaders, business owners, that we leverage as many of these as possible. One of the biggest confusions, and we’ve talked a lot about the whole sales and marketing mix, and whether sales enablement has a place in the middle and I believe it does, and social kind of also provides that bridge between sales and marketing. The biggest difference, and certainly what I’m going to focus on today, is the ability to start conversations.
When you are leveraging content and trying to create marketing, you are trying to bring people to you; and social selling and LinkedIn as a platform also gives you the opportunity to communicate directly, which essentially is an outbound method. There are several key ways that you can utilize LinkedIn and social media to sell. Your LinkedIn profile is there and can generate inbound and outbound opportunities. Your personal brand. Everyone in this room individually has a personal brand. You might not know it, you might not be aware of it, you might not be doing anything about it, but you have one. There are search engines within LinkedIn and other social media platforms, emails, messages, and content. We will dive into profile and content today, some of the core areas that you can start with.
One of the first questions you need to ask is, what would your customers think if they looked at your profile today? Would they have a good, positive impression, or perhaps not so much? And there are plenty of people, there may be people in this room, that have profiles that may be empty. Maybe they lack a good profile photo, maybe they lack a background, maybe they are not built in the right way.
So, a quick show of hands, how many people think their LinkedIn profile is as professional as you look today in person? That’s an impressive show! Usually, it’s a bit less. That’s really good. One of the realities is we now have this digital self. So everyone here is dressed really smart, we’re at a big networking event, we’re all looking professional, communicating with potential customers, colleagues, partners; and what a lot of us very rarely do – and it’s good there’s a lot of people in this room who do it – is apply that same logic to our digital self. This is where personal branding really comes in.
We have this digital presence, and when you are trying to communicate something, one of the first places people are going to look at is your profile. When you are trying to instigate change in a business and trying to instigate sales enablement, chances are people are going to look at your profile and that’s going to be the foundation, the starting point. And it can work in many ways, inbound and outbound.
Your LinkedIn profile is a nice little base that says loads of information about you and if it’s built in the right way, and I will show you a few ways you can do that in a second, you will generate inbound opportunities. People will want to talk to you. But equally, with LinkedIn, you can see who views your profile. It’s an amazing feature on it. You can go in and see who’s viewed your profile, and a percentage of those will be potential prospects. And you can use that to start conversations.
So, a quick example: when I had the managing director and sales director of a company look at my profile, it was a three-hour gap between them looking at my profile and me checking. In that time, they hadn’t sent me a message or email or communicated any interest. But I used it as an opportunity to send them a message. And very simply, not sales-y or aggressive, just, “Hi, Thanks for looking at my profile. I would love to know what your company is doing around the world of social selling. Kind regards, Dan”. I had a message within five minutes back from the managing director saying, “Yes, it’s funny, we were just talking about this earlier today. We think we’re doing good stuff, but we would love to see if there’s more we can do. Can you speak to my sales director?” I arranged a phone call, and several phone calls, several emails, several meetings later, they hired me to train their team. I may not have gotten that opportunity, a) had I have not had a decent enough profile that made a good impression with them, and b) had I not checked and used it to start that conversation.
So, let’s have a quick look through some top tips on how you can bring your LinkedIn profile to life and use it to create a better first impression. For many of you, whether it’s your customers, your staff, people that you are trying to encourage to enter the world of sales enablement, their first impression of you may be your LinkedIn profile, and it’s a great opportunity for you to make a better first impression digitally.
As you can see, a LinkedIn profile is built like a CV, which is why a lot of people make it look like a CV, which is great if you are trying to get a job. I’m sure many of you who are here are not trying to get a job. If you are, make it like a CV. If you’re trying to influence, you want to make it customer focused. So, when we look through some of these core areas, we want to make it suitable for the customer. We’re not trying to get them to hire us, but we want them to potentially buy from us, or buy an idea from us.
Here are some of the key things that hopefully you can take away and maybe use to update your profiles. Number one is profile photo. That’s probably going to be the first place the person looks when they look at your profile. Try and get a professional photo done. If you can’t get a professional photo done for whatever reason, most of us have a professional quality camera on our phones. All you need to do is find a nice, plain background, get a colleague to take a decent headshot of you. The background is one of the most underused opportunities on LinkedIn. It’s almost like your own personal billboard.
So again, you’ve got this wonderful professional photo of you and then you’ve got this great opportunity behind it to hopefully show people what it is you do. Keep it as simple as possible. Remember people are scrolling so they are processing information super-fast. So, as you can see with mine, nice and simple, helping people sell with social. And the logos that support that – obviously don’t have to have another picture of yourself; that’s because I have to sell myself in that sense – but you can have a company logo, etc.
Then you’ve got your summary, and again, a lot of people will just have one paragraph, maybe two paragraphs, and this a great opportunity to show people how you help, what you do to help, and how you have helped people. Remember, buyers are going to be looking at this or, again, people you are trying to influence, and you want to help answer those early questions they’re going to have. This is the sort of thing that’s going to lay the foundation of trust in that relationship, and what you want to express is why you do what you do, how you do it and how you’ve done it before.
One of the key things, and you see this in the content section as well, are those spaced gaps between the sentences and paragraphs. Again, remember people are scrolling. It’s not like reading a book from side to side. People are scrolling down, and those gaps help massively increase the engagement you’re going to get, whether it’s in your profile, whether it’s in the content you share. Bullet point, caps, all these things help bring it to life.
One of the final bits is have your contact details on there. Your contact details will exist on your LinkedIn profile, but they are hidden, and someone would have to be very keen to get in touch with you to go all the way and click it open. It sounds silly but on social media, that’s a lot of effort. So, put them in your summary. Make it nice and easy and inviting for people to get in touch. You have your experience – again, make sure a lot of focus on your current role. I see a lot of people where they have tons of information for all their previous roles. Again, if you’re trying to get a job, that’s important, but if you’re trying to influence a buyer or someone, you just want to focus on your current position. You can have all these previous positions and a brief summary but keep it minimal.
Skills and endorsements: unfortunately, I’m not here to tell you that these carry any gravitas at all. Unfortunately, for a lot of us, the people that endorse you have never met you in your life and they know nothing about you, and most people know that. So, people don’t look at this and go yeah, he’s got 99+ endorsements on social selling so I’m going to buy from him. It doesn’t quite work like that. However, they are in your profile and you can choose which three sit at the top. You can open it up and choose which three sit there, so I would recommend that the three that are at the top are the most relevant to you and what you do. So, whilst they’re not going to pack a massive punch, they will have a slight level of influence.
Obviously, what does pack a massive punch in the social influential spectrum is recommendations. We live in the Amazon age, we look for reviews, we look for recommendations. LinkedIn has put it right on your profile. So again, if you’re trying to sell sales enablement – whether it’s to a customer or even to your team, having people say from experience how effective that’s been – they’re going to be way more effective at selling it than you are. You are a biased person. These are non-biased people that have hopefully had a positive experience with you.
Top tips then are to pick or get a professional profile photo done. Have a nice billboard background. I use something called Canva.com. if you don’t have a marketing department or any experience in Adobe, www.canva.com is free to use and it creates the right quality backgrounds for LinkedIn and social media content. Real easy to use. Create a captivating profile title. By the way, I will make sure these slides are available for those taking notes.
Use keywords in your profile. When people search for things on LinkedIn, if those words aren’t in your profile, you won’t show up. So, if you haven’t got all of the relevant keywords relevant to your industry in your profile, you might be missing opportunities for people who are searching for it. Have an elevator pitch profile summary. Again, in as few words as possible, you want to show people what it is you do. Always give an ask for recommendations. Make it part of the process. Keep your profile up-to-date and make sure those contact details are within your summary.
So, let’s dive into content. We’ve kind of alluded to this quite a bit today in how, unfortunately, a lot of marketing-generated content either isn’t used or isn’t very engaging. And, again, we’re in this modern buying age where people are on social media and they are consuming content at such a massive pace, and our expectations and needs for content have changed massively. So again, I love that phrase snackable content, creating more engaging, short pieces. So, I’m just going to talk you through how you can create more effective LinkedIn content as a good place to start in the B2B space. There’s obviously a huge variety of forms of content you can create. I’m going to focus on the core ones as salespeople, and certainly within the sales industry, that are most relevant. But, just to quickly run through some top tips.
Do it properly. When I say that, if I took a selfie or a picture of myself over here, it would look very different than if I took it over here and if I took it at the back of the room. When you are creating content, whether it’s taking a photo, whether it’s writing something, try and create it to the best of your ability and make it as engaging as possible. Use humor where you can. What I will say to this is do it with variety.
So, if you posted humor with every post that you did, people won’t take you seriously. But if you mix it up with other valuable, serious content, it helps provide balance. Use quality images and texts. Again, I see a lot of people that will take photos and they keep it quite dark. If you’ve got an iPhone, I’m sure some of the other phones do the same, you can easily brighten up images and it makes it loads more engaging. Look for keywords, look for trending subjects, create standout titles – and I’ll run through a few ways you can do this in a second.
Use video. We’ve already heard a few times today that video really is sort of at the top end of high-performing content. There are loads of great ways you can do that. I know we looked at how you can use video to sort of train and get your salespeople more competent, but equally, from a content perspective, it’s an amazing tool. And I loved this concept of this company having a video studio in their business, and not only is that great for training salespeople in their pitching, but it can be a great way for them to create content for them to share with their audience.
Again, sales and marketing are coming closer together. Customers are more likely to engage with content created and shared by the individual salesperson than they are from the regurgitated marketing-type of content which tends to be an advert. They want to hear from the people, the individuals, and videos can be a great way to do that. Try and include some form of statistics or facts. Again, a lot of social is fluff and noise. Have a consistent theme and obviously brand it where you can.
So, let’s look at some of the core forms of content. The first one is just the standard post/status/update. There are two ways you can do this: long-form and short-form. For the last year, still, very much a trending form is the long-form status. So, you have a 1300-character limit to write in a LinkedIn post or update, and if you can fill in as much of that as possible, very high performing form of content. Short-form still does well where it can be a couple of sentences, but the long form tells a mini story and can provide a lot more engagement. Again, make sure you’ve got those spaces. What is important is that the top lines are only visible. I think it is expanded now and it might be the top three or four lines, but either way, those top two lines are going to be the hook, so make them as engaging as possible. If you just dive into some really intense subject, people are going to start reading it and get bored. You need to draw people in and want them to open it up and read the whole thing. So, make sure those top two lines, the opening bit, is as engaging as possible.
Hashtags are starting to gain momentum on LinkedIn but don’t be fooled, putting a hashtag isn’t going to massively increase your engagement. The quality of the content will determine engagement. Hashtags are good. It makes it searchable, but I share content with and without hashtags and there is a minimal difference from an engagement perspective. It just makes it searchable. Quotes are another great form. Now again, you can use motivational quotes, inspirational quotes, which will appeal to a bigger audience, or you can use statistics. We’ve heard some amazing, amazing – I’ve taken photos myself – some of the amazing statistics about how effective sales enablement is. Tamara shared some amazing slides, and those could be used to create some awesome quote-type images that you can then add some thoughts to about how effective sales enablement is. The statistic will draw people in and then you can elaborate on it, and there you will be influencing people in a positive engaging way.
Another great thing you can do is show people that you are a human being. So whether you are a salesperson, a sales leader, or someone trying to influence a team or department, you can become almost too passionate about just talking about that subject, and what social gives is an opportunity to do is almost park that every so often and show people that we are human beings.
So, this is a post I did last year after a very intensive working period where I took a weekend off to spend with my kids, and that’s me and my youngest son, Joshua. We went on these wonderful little boats which I could not drive for the life of me, crashed at every given moment. But what I had an opportunity to do is show people that I’m a dad, I’m a human being, I’m not just an aggressive salesperson looking to get the next sale. And you can use it to show people that you’re not just trying to sell them sales enablement, but that you’re a human being as well. Again, use these in variety. If you keep posting this kind of stuff, it’s going to turn people off. You need to make sure you are giving as much value as possible and then use these on a rare occasion just to show people and let people into your world. Again, where possible, always try and include elaboration and a bit of a story and use those wonderful spaces. They make a difference.
The next form of content and one of my personal favorites is a good old meme. You cannot beat a good old meme. Humor is an amazing tool. The Daily Sales was built on humor because it brings a bit of light to an often dark world of sales or even just work in general. Memes are great. Again, share these on occasion because I guarantee your customers and audience will connect with these. It will make them laugh and it will be something less serious to the more aggressive content that often goes out. They are easy to create. There are tons of free apps that you can download. Nice and easy. Find some good images, create some words that people can connect to, and off you go. And again, add a nice status behind it so the people have something to read as well. Another thing that works great is tagging people in. I would only tag people in that you know and that is relevant. Don’t tag people in for the sake of it, and again, don’t do it every single time. But it can really help drive engagement because it draws them and their audiences to the post.
Video. We talked about how scary video can be. For young people, maybe they are a little bit more comfortable with it. Regardless, it is hard, and I remember the first time I started recording video in my car on my phone. It was the worst thing ever. I hated it. I hated sitting in front talking to myself and it was a horrible thing. But it has become such a powerful source and form of content, so I would highly recommend that you get your sales team and marketing team more comfortable in utilizing it because, again, people want those personalized messages. They don’t just want to see the senior directors pitching products or pitching demos. They want to see individual people talking about the passion they have for the subject. The exciting things they are doing. The great conversations they’ve had. How they are helping people. All those wonderful things.
Some quick top tips: again, on LinkedIn, it needs to be one to three minutes long max. Short and sweet. Ideally with captions, subtitles, because a lot of people are on LinkedIn at work and they can’t listen to it, but they want to read it. So, if you can have subtitles, then great, and just make it as value packed as possible. I use a quick rule. It’s a famous one in sales. It’s the 80/20 rule and it applies very much in the world of social. Most companies and salespeople will give out 80% of content about them; latest offers, latest customers, testimonials, etc., and then they will give out 20% of content that actually has value and interest to the customer. And you want to flip that around. You want to give out 80% of engaging, valuable content that earns you the opportunity to talk about yourself 20% of the time. What you will end up doing is generating way more engagement because you’ve earned that opportunity. And content can open up tons of opportunities. I won’t dive into this in any great detail, but I have loads of examples of blogs that I have written that have created inbound opportunities, and also created outbound. I will touch on the outbound bit because when you share a blog and you create inbound, that’s a marketing activity.
As a salesperson, your content will get engagement. So, when someone clicks, likes, comments, or shares a post or an article, you can see that. So, for example, when you share a blog on LinkedIn, you might get 100 read it. You can’t see that. LinkedIn won’t show you that. But when they click like, comment and share, you get to see them. Once you’ve seen them, you can talk to them and you can send them messages, “Hey, thanks for engaging in my blog”, and talk about the subject. Start a conversation. Don’t just jump in and try and pitch them, but talk to them and after a while, you’ll earn the opportunity to potentially pitch your product and through that process, qualify them and if they are qualified, pitch them and use it to open the door to conversation.
It’s one thing me telling you how to create great content, but I want to leave you with some ideas as well because that can be another sort of stumbling point for salespeople especially. So, here’s just a few quick content ideas. I mean, we’ve already heard about some amazing books, the wonderful Niraj and his “Everybody Works in Sales” is a great book. Write about a book that you are reading because I guarantee you some of your customers and people in your audience will also be reading the same book, and that will help you connect with them. It’s a really nice place to start with your content.
Take a photo of your office workspace. Social media allows you to open the doors. Let people in. Show them how great your company is, the culture, the atmosphere. Take a photo of your team. Write a post about your career in your current role. Again, open the doors to you. Show people your journey. Talk about a recent story from work. Think about industry humor type posts. And any upcoming events. We are here at an event today. I have seen some people post about it but not many, so we still have an opportunity. We are going to have a wonderful networking event in a second over some drinks. Take pictures with people that you’ve met, people you have seen, and post it, because your audience will be interested in it.
So, we’re going to do a bit of virtual networking then I’ve got a quick gift for everyone, and then we’ll do a quick Q&A session. So, if everyone could get their phones out and open up the LinkedIn app, we’ll do this together. If you click on the wonderful people button at the very bottom, you will see in the middle at the top, “Find Nearby”. If you click that on, what you should start to see are names filling in and you have an opportunity to connect with everyone that is here. So, I’ll give it two minutes just for everyone to start connecting with people that they perhaps haven’t done. And again, when we go down and have a drink, use it as an opportunity to talk to people. It’s a nice way to connect with people that are around you at events, etc., and hopefully, start some conversations. If you don’t get to see them at drinks, pop them a message, “Sorry we didn’t get a chance to chat, but it would be great to learn more about what you do”.
I have a gift for everyone. As a thank you for listening to me today, I’m going to offer one of my eBooks, “100 Social Selling Tips”, for free. All you need to do is give me your business card or pop me a message and I will send it to you. Hopefully, it will have some tips that you can use post today. Thank you very much. Feel free to hopefully connect. I’ll make sure to turn this back on, and I will open the floor to questions.
Emcee: Thank you very much. So, we’ve got time for a quick Q&A. If you have a question, please raise your hand.
Audience 1: Dan, thank you so much. I always love hearing you speak, and I always learn something new every time you do speak. There was a debate two weeks ago on LinkedIn, people saying, “Don’t like posts, actually comment on them and it gets you higher up the chain.” And then somebody would say, “No, no, forget that. Likes are okay.” What are your thoughts on the whole like and comment debate?
DD: That’s a fantastic question. A really good question, and a really hot topic at the moment. When you like something, you’re visible, you’re seen. And if you think about it, when you share a piece of content and someone clicks like, you feel good, and if you can do that for your prospects and customers, you’ll make them feel good. But as Niraj rightly points out, it is slightly invisible. When you comment, you start to share your voice and you can share your thoughts and opinions.
So, my recommendation is to do both. Like and comment, but don’t do it on every post. If you like and comment every single post that your prospects and customers share, it gets a bit stalky, a bit weird. So, choose your moments. Do things where you do have an opinion, but comments really help bring it to life, helps grow your personal brand because you start to add a voice to it and not just a hollow like. But don’t sacrifice one for the other. Use them both, just not too stalky.
Audience 2: Hi. I used to write a lot of native articles on LinkedIn and they used to get loads of eyeballs and then it kind of died and I think they changed the algorithm. I noticed that Gary V was talking about native articles the other day and saying that you should absolutely do it, and it’s like his top three things. You didn’t talk about that today. What’s your opinion on that?
DD: So, let me talk about that because it’s a whole bigger subject to talk about. I personally think they are the best form of content on LinkedIn, but it’s a whole different game. Getting salespeople to write articles is a lot different than posting a photo or a video. They are brilliant and actually I remember when I started writing blogs about five years ago and they had their own landing page. So, LinkedIn had posts, which was a landing page you could go on and you could see it and you could share it with big audiences, and it was amazing.
Articles are still doing just as good. You really need to bring them to life. The expectations are a lot higher, but I see so many articles doing amazing numbers. It’s about packing it with as much value as possible. So, articles are fantastic; it’s just about writing them in the right way to be effective on LinkedIn is a little bit different than how you would put it on a website. The LinkedIn audience is a little bit different in their expectations.
But I can share a couple of examples of successful posts and some of the key kinds of structures to that. But absolutely. Articles are an amazing form of content, the core reason being you can give the most amount of value in an article compared to a post, even a video as in two to three minutes there is only so much you can give, whereas in an article you can really give a lot which means you can ask for a little more back. They can be a lot more effective in personal brand building and lead generation.
Audience 3: Hi Dan, how you doing? A couple of questions. One is on timing. So, I was posting a lot of stuff on LinkedIn, some of it was going off the hook, some of it wasn’t performing very well, and I couldn’t work out why that was. So, what is your view with timing? And I don’t mean time of the day. Is there a timing issue around that? And also, talking about long-form articles, I noticed one of your articles went to about a million views not long ago – I don’t know what it was about – but it went to a million views. Why do you think that happened? What was the secret ingredient? What can we take away from that?
DD: Let’s go back to timing, not the time of the day, sorry, what did you mean with the timing?
Audience 3: I’ll just prompt you a little bit. I’ve noticed some of your stuff performs really well. For instance, the last episode of Game of Thrones, “Jon Snow is dead” meme – and it goes to a million. So, what’s that all about?
DD: Yes, okay. Timing as in the timing of the subject. So, when it comes to viral content and content doing far better in engagement, again timing in terms of the right time, right place, can play a big part. So as Steve mentioned, I think it was the fifth episode of Game of Thrones, I posted a Jon Snow sales meme and it did massively better than any other meme, even though in its structure it was no different, because it was a hot topic. In terms of choosing things that are very present, that can have a huge influence and again it helps you connect with your audience, because there will be plenty of people here that like Game of Thrones, maybe not so much the latest series, but they like Game of Thrones. And you can connect with them by using that as a subject.
So yes, you can’t do it all the time, but if you can try and find those hot topics, they can help elevate content. In terms of other reasons why individual bits of content do better, again it really does kind of come down to timing, choosing subjects that are more in the front of people’s minds. So, you did a great one, I think it was a year, year-and-a-half ago, where you put some great statistics around social selling and cold calling thing and you did a real-world example. Someone in your team did a hundred emails, a hundred cold calls, and that was at a point where that subject was really intense, and you were the first person to go out and say actually, I’ve experimented with this and got some real insight. And it did huge as you well and truly know, so it’s trying to find those subjects that are most important, and actually, sales enablement is kind of getting to that point now where it is such a hot topic. It’s about finding the right way to present it in a way that connects to your customers.
Audience 4: So, thank you very much for sharing all that information, and with such great energy. I just wanted to share something maybe more than asking a question. But I’ve been doing the in-the-car thing and I call it “hashtag on-the-go”. The feedback that I’ve been getting mainly is something that I want to share. My videos are always shorter than a minute, so they are always 45 seconds to a minute, max a minute, and it’s very consistent. The comments I’m getting are that I’m giving information, I’m giving a motivational, inspirational something, but the feedback is consistent and it’s short. So that’s what I wanted to sort of share and back up what you were saying. And the videos really have been working. I’ve been getting so much more engagement, as much as you feel like a toolshed. Because you really do. But it really is working incredibly well.
DD: And it goes to show that a one-minute video takes one minute of your time and a few seconds to post, so it’s not like you need to invest tons and tons of time into these things. That quick one-minute video can have such an impact and it takes such a small amount, you could do it before you sit and make cold calls, before you go into a meeting or after, and so on. It’s finding those nice little pockets of time where you can share an engaging message that can help in so many ways. So, thank you for sharing that. Brilliant.
Audience 5: Hi Dan. So, one extra context from something you said and then a question. So, the context is when you are posting things on LinkedIn now, post the native material. Don’t post a link to a video on YouTube. LinkedIn’s algorithms degrade it.
DD: They don’t like it when you direct people on other platforms. They want to keep you on LinkedIn.
Audience 5: That’s why this is important. It’s small. Post the native video straight into LinkedIn, which they support. It will immediately get better results on LinkedIn than another platform. So, the question for you is you talked about hashtags on LinkedIn and this is an opinion piece, but tagging in other people so that it – and I like what you said and then tagging people. I hear other people say well that’s rude, tagging them. What’s your opinion and what’s the effect that has?
DD: It can be rude and a lot of people have used it in the wrong way where they’ll write a post and tag in like twenty people to try and boost the engagement. When they keep doing it, it does become quite rude. So, it’s okay to do it. I would say a maximum of four to five people to tag in but make it relevant. Tag in people you know. Tag in people that are likely to engage with you, and just don’t tag the same people all the time. Find that nice bit of balance. It can really work but a lot of people kind of overuse it because they see it as it’s the only way, they’re going to get engagement. So yeah, just find that balance with it. But that’s a great point about uploading it directly to LinkedIn. If you make a video, put it on YouTube and share it, it will probably do way less engagement than if you actually upload it directly to LinkedIn, so where you can, keep it all organic.
