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Welcome to Amplify Your Authority, the podcast where innovative marketing meets heart-centered entrepreneurship. Join Marissa Shadrick, an award-winning international speaker, Ray Edwards certified copywriter, and personal brand expert. You'll gain insights into the external strategies for business growth and how to navigate the internal journey of entrepreneurship. Now get ready to amplify your authority in a competitive digital world. And now is your host, Marissa Shadrick.

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Hello, hello, and welcome everyone to another episode of Amplify Your Authority. I'm Marissa Shadrick, online marketing consultant and certified copywriter, and I'm really excited to be here with you today. Thank you for joining me. Today we're going to talk about LinkedIn. Now, last week I chose to push out a replay of a LinkedIn podcast episode that I did because I discovered LinkedIn and it's been now, as I think about it. I started in the end of 2022 and I did a test for the last quarter of 2022, and the results were phenomenal. And I decided to look into it further and post every day on LinkedIn from October, let's see, was it October? Yeah, October of 2022, all the way through 2023, trying to figure it out, right? I did the work to try to figure out what was the secret because it seemed like there was a lot of people telling you to post content, post, post, post, post. I didn't know if it was true or not. And I would look at the algorithm and I'm going, okay, some of them I can see which ones people liked, which ones were kind of flat line, needed a CPR. And I was going, is this what we do? But LinkedIn is so different. And since then, I have invested in myself. I have hired people, I have joined conferences where I could learn more about LinkedIn because I noticed in a short amount of time with the results that I had that if I learned how to use it well, it could be a great way for me to discover individuals that I could serve and help them with their business growth. I'm B2B marketing, and so it makes sense for me to be on LinkedIn. It needs to make sense for you. There's a lot of features on LinkedIn that most of us don't even realize how many features there are, and lots of ways that we can use LinkedIn, but it's not always the way you think. And I'm discovering that a lot of things, although I post it every day, it's not necessary. And I'm going to share a few tips today because I'm going to explain a little bit about the algorithm on how it works, and I'm going to give you a few insights. Now, I am by no means an expert on LinkedIn, but I am passing on the knowledge that I'm learning and what I'm seeing to be very effective so that you can do the same. I'm not an expert, but I'm happy to pass on the knowledge because I always like to test and see what results I get, and that's what I want to pass on to you today. So this is an update, so to speak, from my last broadcast. And some of the things I've discovered is pretty interesting. So I think you're going to enjoy this episode. So let me grab my notes because I've got lots of notes here. This probably isn't going to be too long of a podcast. Of course, I always say that it ends up being long. So we're going to start first talking about the LinkedIn platform. And I'm specifically going to touch on profiles. There's profiles and there's company pages. If you're familiar with Facebook, you have Facebook profiles and then you had Facebook pages. Same kind of thing. I'm not going to focus too much on company pages, although there's great opportunities there as well. But I am going to talk about profiles. And none of the things that I'm going to share today requires a paid tool. You can do this on LinkedIn. You can use LinkedIn's organic features to be able to do this. Nothing is going to be complicated as far as the tech. It's going to be simple to implement. So the first thing I want you to realize is that LinkedIn is not like other social media platforms. Do not try to do the same thing you're doing on Facebook or Instagram on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is completely different than the others. There's a many professionals in there. It's not so suit and tie. It's very approachable platform. People will connect with you, but it's very professional, kind of business casual, but it's not like the other platforms like TikTok or Facebook or Instagram. And here's why. Those platforms, their main revenue comes from ads. And so what those platforms want is for people to use ads to push their content to a stream or to a feed. Now LinkedIn is completely different. Although they have ads, that's only 20% of their revenue. That's not their primary source of revenue. LinkedIn's primary source of revenue, 80% of their revenue, is in memberships and subscriptions. You've probably seen LinkedIn Premium, Sales Navigator, that's their main bread and butter. Therefore, in order to keep those customers happy, LinkedIn has to be a platform where connections with each other is possible, not some business pushing an ad for a product or service. But it's really the intent is to help us connect with one another. Otherwise, nobody would want those memberships, right? They wouldn't want those memberships. Would you want to pay to be on Facebook? Would you want to pay to be on Instagram? No. And so we have to realize that it's different. Customers want to network and to connect. So the algorithm is designed with connection in mind. So that's something we want to kind of keep in the back of our mind. And with profiles, we have to realize when people say post all the time, post every day. Well, I listened to them and I was posting every day, and I'm going, okay, even though I'm posting every day, I'm seeing some results, but boy, it's a lot of work to post every day. And you don't want to try to game the system and have other people post on your post or you post on their post. I mean, that might happen a little bit as you're, you know, maybe meet people at a conference, but that's not the general practice. For profiles, you want to be able to connect with people that you truly want in your network. Not necessarily, this isn't a place like Facebook where you connect with your friends and your family and everyone else. You're connecting with those people that you want to build a network with because LinkedIn will say, oh, these connections are important to you, and they will show you more of those types of connections. So if your brother-in-law is a lawyer or your best friend is a designer, it's going to pull through the algorithm those type of careers or businesses in front of you. And that's not really going to help you in your business. So you want to connect with people that you that would be ideal for your network or ideal audience to potentially be clients. So that's a little different. But even when we have that dialed in, only about 10% of those connections are going to see your content. And you think, oh my gosh, that's not very much. Well, there's a lot of people on LinkedIn, right? So the numbers are huge, even if we think 10%, but still we're thinking, how do we improve that? The more engagement a viewer has with your content, and this is pretty logical, you probably thought of this, the greater the chance of seeing future content. So if you engage in my content, the likelihood of you seeing a fresh post or a new post is increased because you've already shown an interest. So a comment, for example, will increase your visibility. Like if you comment on my post, your the chances of you seeing my content again is about 70% because you've already interacted with my post. Now, if you shared one of my posts, the likelihood that you will see my fresh new content on your feed is about 80%. Now, if you go to my profile and view my profile, the likelihood that you will see new content that I produce is 100%. So there's like a point system, depending on how they interact, will determine whether they will see your new content in their feed. But viewing, which is interesting, viewing does stimulate the algorithm because there's many people that will consume your content, will look at your content, read your content, and never hit a like, never comment, never share. They're like ghosts out there that are just consuming it silently. And I often wondered, you know, what happens with that? And I knew that was happening because I would go to a conference and people would say, Oh, I love your posts on LinkedIn. They're so helpful. I almost feel like saving all of them or archiving them somewhere. And I'm thinking, Really? I've never seen you comment or like or post anything, you know, related to the post. So I knew there were people consuming it, but not interacting with the post. And unfortunately, I've done that too. I don't think about always doing that, putting in a comment. But I will consume content. So I think we're all guilty of it. But here's the thing: even if they're viewing and they're lingering over your posts, it does stimulate the algorithm. Isn't that interesting? I heard this from an expert who was speaking at social media marketing world and he does a report every year. His name is Richard Bliss. So a lot of this content um I have curated from what he presented. And I found this fascinating. So the dwell time on a post counts. It does something to the algorithm. And if they click read more, because you know there's a little preview of content, if they click read more, that adds value to your post as well and stimulates the algorithm. Who would have thought, right? So there's a lot of things that we don't understand, and the algorithms are always changing. So I'm not one to say let's chase the algorithms and figure out all the hacks at all because we're gonna drive ourselves crazy. But there are some things that you need to know to be able to use the platform wisely. So let's talk a little bit about posting. Now I said earlier I was posting every day. You don't have to post every day, which is interesting. You need to not post more than once a day. If you post too much, you're gonna be competing against yourself, and you don't want that. So if you wanted to post once a day and you've got some things that you're repurposing, you could do that. But really, I'm gonna tell you what the secret is in just a second. You don't have to post every day. So I know all of you are going, Phew, thank goodness for that. And a lot of the things that they talk about posts, and I'll just go over a few things regarding posts itself so you get an idea of what to post. You know how they say don't add a link. So typically, you know, we post on another platform, we could put a link, call to action, a link for them to go to our blog post or wherever. And um, and that's typically common practice. But on LinkedIn, they kind of ding you if you put a link in the post, and it will reduce the visibility by 50%. And you thought, oh my gosh. So people, the workaround was to put the link in the comments, and then you'd see in the post, go to the comments for the link. But if there is engagement and comments going on, it could get buried and lost. So here's a simple solution for that, which I found fascinating. Again, I got this from Richard Bliss, who was a speaker at social media marketing world. But I mean, how do you find out these secrets, right? I mean, I've invested so much money to figure out one or two little things regarding LinkedIn. But what you do is you can post everything, you know, your regular post, which you're gonna post, post it, go right back immediately, edit it, and add the link. And you're not dinged. So that's a quick fix. Now, who would have thought, you know, who would have thought that that would help? I think some people have just tested and experimented. I don't think there's a rules book or some kind of manual handbook that says do this and you'll be able to do it. So it is kind of hacking the algorithm in a sense. But if you if you edit too much, that can ding you as well. But if you just create your post, say you have a blog post, you create kind of the intro to it, the teaser to it, you put a call to action, and you say click this link, post it, but immediately go in, edit it, and put the link in and done deal. No problem whatsoever. And you're able to put those links inside the post. So the other thing with posts that is really interesting with the algorithm, at least the way it is now, if you put that post in with the link to your blog, and your blog pulls up a preview image when you go to edit and you put the link in, it will reduce your reach by 75%. So if you do put a link to your blog posts, make sure you exit out, you click the little X and get rid of the preview image. You're better off without an image than having a preview image because it normally looks like some promotional content, stock photo, right? It's usually stock photo. Anything that is stock photo, even, and I hate to say this to video people, even videos, it doesn't stimulate engagement and conversation. It's not that they don't like it, it's just that it doesn't. The purpose of LinkedIn is to start those conversations. So if you're going to use an image at all, it needs to be an original image, something with real people, maybe an action shot. I would say a storytelling image. Maybe you're at the airport and people are wondering, where why are you at the airport? Where are you going? You know, and maybe they'll want to read and engage with the post. It's better than having stock images because stock images just screams promotional content. And so if you have a preview image or if you add an image, and I used to do this a lot, I used to add a lot of images, and I noticed that all the images where I was in the image and I had a quote, those did really well. But the images that I had with stock images didn't. And I just didn't understand, you know, why I didn't understand. I was just doing it and testing. So we want to be careful with images. And if we do use them, we want to be as natural as possible. If it doesn't look professional, better because that way people will engage with the post. And the other thing that I found really interesting is that a repost, you know how you can read someone's content and you can repost it and it'll be in your profile. That is considered a post. So if you've already posted that day, don't repost on the same day because then you have two posts. And again, they're going to compete against each other. So a repost is considered a post. And if you put your two cents in it, because when you repost, it'll ask you, do you want to repost with with some type of comment? So if you comment on it, it will reduce your visibility as well. So you're better off just reposting without putting your two cents in it, and don't do it on a day that you've already posted something. I know this is a lot. That's why I'm trying to keep this podcast short because it's a lot to consume, and you want, you may want to replay some of these sections while you're on LinkedIn and be able to take notes because it's a lot. I had to listen to it like twice, and I had to take notes to get this, wrap my brain brain around it, because it's different. It's different than Instagram, it's different than Facebook. It's not the same. So you can repost, just don't put your two cents in it, and just know that a repost is considered a post for the day. The other thing I want to say before I go into articles and newsletters too is to know that when I experimented on this and I removed images, which is really hard for me because I'm very visual and I love images. I really do. I love images. And to me, they kind of pull me in, but I guess that's not the case for the algorithm for LinkedIn. I did a post and I removed the image. And I went, oh, I really don't want to do this. I had the image for Instagram and Facebook because I repurposed there. So I took the image out to test, and normally I get anywhere from 300, 500 impressions. Um, the best ones are about a thousand, so I can go anywhere from 375 to 1,000. When I removed the image, and there weren't a lot of comments, a few, but not a lot. I had the post impressions were 31,838. A huge difference, and all I did was remove the image. So there you go. Let me just say that I test a lot, but you can test and see if it works for you. But sometimes little tiny tweaks is all the difference. Okay, so far we talked about posting. You can add a link if you post, and then you edit and add the link after the first post. So you edit it and add the link. Then we talked about be careful about preview images. And you can add real images, images that you took real people with your iPhone. Those are fine as long as they generate interest into a story. And then reposts can be considered a post as well. So you don't want to post and repost. So let's segue into the um newsletters and articles. I knew that newsletters and articles was something that I wanted to do, and I just knew that it was going to be helpful. I just didn't know how helpful it was going to be. So, first of all, articles and newsletters, they're a little different. So articles are just like a post. It's just longer, and you write it as an article, and there's a place where you can go ahead and add that in. When you're going into the post, you'll see there's a little menu and you can add an article. So you can have an article, but it's like a post, which means that when you post the article, it's gonna have a shelf life, it's gonna be on stage for a moment, right? And you have a few hours to try to get some engagement and maybe you'll get some traction for 24 hours or 48 hours, but after that, it goes backstage. It's not no longer front stage, it's just like a post, the articles. And if you spend a lot of time writing these articles and it's just here and gone, I mean, that's hard. That's not leveraging it unless you repurposed it from somewhere else. But newsletters, however, are a little different. Now, articles, I will say that the articles publish you can publish them whatever you want, and it does give value in content, and it will give it its natural organic reach like any other post, and it will be shown, it will also be indexed by Google, and newsletters are the same way, but newsletters have a longer shelf life, and here's why. So, newsletters, when you create these newsletters and you can have them on profiles or you can have them on company pages. And I would suggest going into LinkedIn and getting the directions to make sure you're creating a newsletter and not an article. A newsletter actually, the newsletter has a name, a title, and you go to that same section every time you create a new newsletter. But the beautiful thing about having the newsletter, I have mine on my profile, is that not only do I have a newsletter where I can put any links, any videos, my bio, call to action. I could have all kinds of links in there. I could design it with images, I could put anything I want in that newsletter. There's no penalty. I create the newsletter and I could put anything I want. So I put YouTube videos in there, I put call to actions in there, I put links in there, I put images in there. You can design it really well with sub subheadlines that are bold. The functionality is really great, and you can create a really great newsletter, and you know that it has a long shelf life. Because these newsletters, once you create it, it will appear on your LinkedIn profile. It's got a nice little section in there near the featured section. Where it appears there. And you can also go further where the activity section is. You know where the section where you see people's latest posts. You can go to the activities section and there's tabs, right? You can see their posts, you can see like images, you can click the tabs. You can edit that section in the little pencil and edit that section and have them see your newsletters first. And so now your LinkedIn profile not only has a feature section with whatever maybe lead magnet you have or anything you want to feature on there, but it'll also feature your newsletter, and you'll also have further down the activities section your newsletter featured. It gets a lot of visibility, but it also is indexed by Google. A lot of times you look up something on Google and it'll bring up a LinkedIn newsletter or a LinkedIn article, which is great. I mean, LinkedIn doesn't promote your articles or newsletters per se, but Google will index it and it will appear. Now, LinkedIn does, however, when someone connects with you and if you have a newsletter, it will ask if they'd like to join the newsletter. So the beautiful thing about the newsletter, it's not like a post. People subscribe to it, and when you produce a new newsletter, it will go into not only their feed, but also into their email inbox. Is that cool or what? That is super cool. So members can subscribe and you can determine the frequency, the cadence of it. Like if you want to have it daily, weekly, bi-weekly, whatever you want to do, you can do that. I would suggest naming your newsletter as well. But what a great place to have content. Like even if you did it weekly, say you re-posted other people's posts and you did one post a week and you created a newsletter. So three times you're appearing. You're sharing one, you're creating a short post, and maybe you create a newsletter. I mean, that's great. That's going to give you a lot of traction than just posting every day, you know, 250 words all the time with emojis and stuff, and trying to get people to look at it and being limited and not being able to put links and all these other things. You want to have a call to action of some sort. But again, when people see it, they may go to your profile. So you want to make sure your profile is updated and represents your brand well. So you want to make sure you've done that, you've updated your about section. You know, you want to take care of a few things on your profile. Make sure you've done everything you need to do to leverage your profile because people will be going to your profile. Make sure all the links are in there. Just go through it with a fine-tooth comb and make sure you have optimized that. So, as I said earlier, the worst kind of post statistically, what they have found, and it's really it kind of hurts, are videos. So, which is crazy, right? Even the short form videos, um, they don't perform as well. So that's crazy. So the secret really to LinkedIn, and this is so counterintuitive for us because we're not used to this. But it's the comments, the comments feeds the algorithm. Regardless of how many followers or connections you have. If you want to be more visible in the feed, you comment. It's like a level playing field. That's good news for some people that are just getting on LinkedIn. You can generate enough interest and have people go into your profile by just using comments. And not a lot either. If you just plan to just comment, you know, in a given week, just plan a certain frequency that you're going to comment. Maybe three people you're gonna comment and you're gonna create some valuable comments, not just, oh, this is great, congratulations, but some really insightful comments. That and here's the thing with it, that's crazy, crazy, crazy. Every comment you make is pushed to a portion of your audience and shown to your network. Your comments are giving your brand and message exposure to new audiences as well. Is that nuts or what? And this is what I didn't understand. Everybody said comments were important, but nobody broke it down. And so now I'm realizing it gets pushed out to audiences. The comments, right? If you comment on someone's post, right, and again, there has to be alignment. Let me say that again. Has to be someone that you want in your network, right? Because you don't want to teach the algorithm to go after people that maybe they're just not aligned and would would never do business with you or would never be a partner with you or anything like that. You want to make sure there's alignment. So if your comment, if you comment on someone else's post and the originator, the author of that post, comments back, which is pretty natural because they want that engagement too, right? Stimulate the algorithm. Your comment will then get pushed to their audience as well. Is that beautiful or what? And again, the comments are gonna create enough interest to cause people to go to your profile. So, what are we gonna do? We're gonna make sure our profile looks as good as it can get. And we're gonna think about what we're gonna have in the feature section, our banner and our messaging, all of that. Because when you comment, whatever you have by your name, you know, when you're commenting, that goes with you. So make sure that it's keyword driven, but also very clear as far as what you do. Because when you comment, look to see what shows up next to your name. And if it's not a good representation, go back and edit that on your profile. These are just little things that I think we should all have access to. I think we should all know this. It shouldn't be hidden somewhere. I think they should tell us so we could know how to use a dumb platform, right? So it's not a dumb platform. I love the platform, but you wouldn't believe how much I've investigated. I feel like a private eye looking for information to understand LinkedIn. And they have more features. I mean, there's more we could talk about. But if you just do that, if you just make sure that your profile is up to date, if you have no time, but you want to create content, think of maybe creating a newsletter and maybe a piece of that newsletter you can you can stay on topic and maybe create a short little post about that same topic that same week. And maybe you can share a post that week, and there you have three posts for that week. And the rest of the time comment. Real insightful comments. Now there's other types of posts, there's other things we could do, but I wanted to keep this as simple as possible because I don't want to overwhelm you, because there's a lot there. So the secret to the algorithm is in the comments. I showed you some ways that you can reduce all the content creation, but the bottom line, even with the comments, if they're going to go to your profile, you want to make sure that profile is updated and looks as good as it can look. So if you want to check out my profile, how I leverage the newsletter and how it shows up on my LinkedIn profile, you could take a peek and take a look at that and see how it shows up so you can have an idea of what I'm talking about and see it actually done. You can see what it looks like. Give the newsletter a name, and that's a great way to go. So you will have subscribers, you could, it's really there's so many other benefits to newsletters, but I'll just keep it at that. And it's a great way to leverage your time and still get more outcome, more benefits from the time you've spent. And this is coming from someone that posted every single day, right? I'm trying to spare you. It was, I got into a rhythm where it was okay to do, but still, it's a lot. So now I'm getting a little bit smarter as far as how I use it. I just didn't know. Nobody freely shared this stuff. That's why I'm sharing it with you, and I'll probably share more. I'm seriously considering doing a workshop where it will probably be maybe a Saturday workshop where we can really go into the nitty-gritty of all this, and it'll be a paid virtual workshop. So I will give you more information on that because um a lot of people are really overwhelmed with social media, and a lot of people need B2B marketing, and LinkedIn is a great option. So I will pass on what I know, and so I will plan. I'm in the middle of a move. I'm getting ready to move to Tennessee. So I'm kind of waiting to set the date because it's a lot right now. The moving truck will literally be here in a little over a week. We're gonna spend a week going from California to Tennessee. There is a lot happening right now, so I'm trying not to overwhelm myself. And so I'm passing this knowledge on to you. Next week, I will share a replay of Michelle J. Raymond, how she talks about company pages. I think that's really important to listen to. If you haven't listened to it, I encourage you to listen to that podcast. She gives a lot of great value. And she was also on social media marketing world this past year, and she also was a presenter. So this has been all distilled. This is the result of what what are we now? We're this is the result of about a year and a half of trying to figure out this whole LinkedIn, and hopefully I can shorten the learning curve for you. So if you have any feedback, if you have any questions, I may have the answer to it already. I just maybe didn't cover it in this episode. Go ahead and shoot me an email at marissa at marissach.com. I'm happy to share what I've discovered so far. And if you know something, uh share it with me. That'd be awesome. I'd love to give you a shout out. All right, until next time, take care, and I'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.