Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Learn how to boost engagement and drive sales on LinkedIn with thought leadership ads, sponsored posts, short videos, and conversation-sparking text updates. Brooke Sellas, of B Squared Media, reveals her successful tactics so you too can increase your reach on LinkedIn.
Converting Clicks to Customers through CRO Summary
Key Takeaways
- Thought Leader Ads: LinkedIn’s new ad format encourages brands to sponsor posts from thought leaders to build brand equity.
- Engagement Focus: Prioritize engagement over sales in LinkedIn ads to gather valuable audience insights and build relationships.
- Consistency Counts: Consistent, valuable content like Brooke’s weekly video tips can drive significant engagement and lead generation.
- Broad vs. Narrow Targeting: Testing broad targeting options can sometimes yield better results than highly specific audiences.
- Team Involvement: Encouraging your team to engage with LinkedIn content can organically boost your visibility and reach.
Transform Your LinkedIn Strategy with Thought Leader Ads
In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, LinkedIn remains a powerhouse for B2B marketers. As the platform continues to innovate, it’s essential to stay ahead of the curve and leverage the latest features to maximize your reach and engagement. Today, we’re diving into some cutting-edge LinkedIn strategies that can supercharge your B2B marketing efforts.
Thought Leader Ads: The New Frontier in B2B Marketing
One of LinkedIn’s most exciting new features is the introduction of thought leader ads. These ads allow companies to sponsor posts from industry leaders to build brand equity. The idea is simple yet powerful: people want to connect with people, not brands. By sponsoring thought leader posts, you can tap into the trust and authority that these individuals have already established within their networks.
How to Leverage Thought Leader Ads
- Identify Your Thought Leaders: Whether it’s your CEO, a senior executive, or a well-known industry influencer, choose individuals whose insights resonate with your target audience.
- Create Engaging Content: Develop posts that showcase thought leadership, such as industry insights, trends, or personal anecdotes related to your field.
- Sponsor the Posts: Use LinkedIn’s ad platform to boost these thought leader posts. This can significantly increase their visibility and engagement, driving more meaningful interactions with your brand.
Focus on Engagement Over Sales
When setting up LinkedIn ads, it’s tempting to go straight for the sale. However, prioritizing engagement can often yield better long-term results. By focusing on engaging your audience first, you build a foundation of trust and interest that can lead to sales down the line.
Steps to Prioritize Engagement
- Set Engagement as Your Goal: When creating your ad campaign, select engagement as your primary objective. This will help LinkedIn’s algorithm show your ads to users more likely to interact with them.
- Create Interactive Content: Posts that ask questions, offer advice, or share valuable tips tend to perform better in terms of engagement. Encourage your audience to comment, share, and interact with your content.
- Monitor and Adjust: Keep an eye on your engagement metrics and be ready to tweak your strategy based on what works best. LinkedIn’s AI can provide valuable insights to help refine your approach.
Broad vs. Narrow Targeting: Finding the Sweet Spot
When it comes to targeting your ads, the debate between broad and narrow targeting continues. Our experience has shown that sometimes, going broad can yield better results than hyper-specific audiences.
Tips for Effective Targeting
- Start Broad: Especially when testing a new campaign, begin with a broader audience. This allows LinkedIn’s algorithm to find the best match for your content.
- Refine Gradually: Based on initial results, gradually narrow down your audience to focus on the segments that show the most engagement and interest.
- Utilize LinkedIn’s Targeting Options: Take advantage of LinkedIn’s robust targeting features, including job titles, industries, and company sizes, to hone in on your ideal audience.
Consistency is Key: The Power of Regular Content
To truly harness the power of LinkedIn for B2B marketing, consistency is crucial. Regular, valuable content keeps your audience engaged and positions you as a thought leader in your industry.
Building a Consistent Content Strategy
- Develop a Content Calendar: Plan your posts in advance to ensure a steady stream of content. Include a mix of articles, videos, and thought leader posts.
- Leverage Video Content: Video content, such as short tips or insights, can drive higher engagement rates. Tools like Descript and Kapwing can help you create and edit professional-looking videos quickly.
- Engage with Your Audience: Don’t just post and ghost. Engage with comments on your posts, participate in discussions, and show that you’re an active member of the LinkedIn community.
Team Involvement: Amplify Your Reach
Encouraging your team to get involved on LinkedIn can significantly amplify your reach. When your employees engage with your content, it increases visibility and extends your brand’s reach organically.
Strategies for Team Involvement
- Share Content Internally: Regularly share your LinkedIn posts with your team and encourage them to engage. This could be through comments, likes, or shares.
- Highlight Employee Contributions: Showcase the achievements and insights of your team members. This not only boosts morale but also positions your company as a hub of expertise.
- Create a Supportive Environment: Foster a culture where employees feel comfortable sharing and engaging with content on LinkedIn. Provide training or resources if needed to help them get started.
Conclusion
LinkedIn continues to be a vital platform for B2B marketers. By leveraging thought leader ads, focusing on engagement, experimenting with targeting, maintaining consistent content, and involving your team, you can transform your LinkedIn strategy and drive significant results. Stay ahead of the curve and make the most of these innovative LinkedIn strategies to elevate your B2B marketing efforts.
Converting Clicks to Customers through CRO Episode Transcript
Rich: My guest today is back for her third time on the Agents of Change podcast, so you just know that she’s got some dirt on me. No, obviously it’s because she’s the real deal. She is shaping the future of digital marketing, one conversation at a time.
As an award-winning CEO, she’s the visionary behind B Squared Media, a boutique digital marketing agency that’s redefining social care for industry giants such as Brother International, Endless Pools, and BCU.
Dive into her insights on the pages of her book, Conversations That Connect. Or from one of her two digital marketing courses that she teaches at the University of California, Irvine. I am excited to bring back my good friend, my fellow agency mastermind cohort, and all-around expert, Brooke Sellas. Brooke, welcome back to the show.
Brooke: Hello. Your secrets are in their vaults. I’ll never share.
Rich: I appreciate that. Okay, this interview is over. No, I’m just kidding. All right. So as I’m looking at your bio , the one you sent me and not the one that I ad-libbed, but I noticed that it doesn’t include your Brooke Bytes, your video vignettes that you post to LinkedIn. Nor does it mention your popular web show, The Marketing Agency Show, which is produced by Social Media Examiner. It also doesn’t mention your love of horses either. How do you get so much done?
Brooke: I don’t know. This is my clone. Brooke’s asleep somewhere, like in a pod or something. No, I just love what I do. And I think, it’s cliche, but when you love what you do, it just is easy to say yes to most things. Not all things. I say ‘no’ strategically, but I love doing what I do. So I say ‘yes’ a lot.
Rich: All right. Today I asked you to come back on the show because I want to talk to you about LinkedIn and your B2B strategy, and what we can all learn from you on that. Because from my perspective, you are absolutely crushing it on LinkedIn. Plus, you’re always dropping these amazing insights during our agency mastermind sessions. What do you feel is the most effective B2B strategy on LinkedIn right now?
Brooke: Right now, LinkedIn is running or have introduced what they call ‘thought leader ads’ or ‘thought leader advertising’. And essentially what they’re doing is they’re encouraging companies and brands to build brand equity by sponsoring thought leader posts. So a thought leader could obviously be Rich for Agents of Change, or Rich for flyte media, or Brooke for B Squared Media. But there’s so many use cases that I’ve been thinking of as we’ve been testing out these ads.
But essentially we’re doing these tests right now to amplify our sales efforts. I’m the only salesperson on our team, so to me, it’s a really interesting take that LinkedIn, above all of the other platforms, is investing in this. Because they’re basically saying that they realize people want to connect with people, not with brands. So I feel like this is a really interesting way to start to run some sort of paid media on LinkedIn.
Rich: So I did want to talk to you about the thought leadership ad. So let’s just dive into that right now. So tell me a little bit, breakdown for me what you’re doing on your thought leadership ads. Are you creating organic posts first, and then you’re just boosting them? Or is it more like you’ve created a whole layout for what’s going on for the month of July, August, September, and these are the ads that are running? Just walk me through how you’re making all those decisions.
Brooke: Yeah, so we came up with a plan to start just with engagement. So obviously, like many other advertising platforms, you get to pick what your goal is. So our goal that we’ve been picking for B Squared Media through Brooks Sellas is engagement. And one of the things we started with was our social media mystery shop, which is a digital product that we have. So I posted kind of a story about back in the day when I was in real estate, we used to get shopped with hidden cameras that were in people’s glasses or their buttons and how I was always so scared to get shopped. But it was one of the biggest learning tools that we had to deliver a better customer experience when somebody came in to tour the apartments. So I likened that to our social media mystery shop.
And then we ran the thought leadership ad. So it’s a boosted ad through B Squared Media of Brooke’s content. We essentially ran it for a week on my LinkedIn profile, and we spent a total of $70, which is actually really cheap for LinkedIn. So we got 112 engagements. And so that equaled out to about 63 cents per engagement, which is also very cheap for LinkedIn, and we got over 2,000 impressions.
So the ad definitely worked in boosting engagement, but it didn’t result in anybody booking the free consultation for our mystery shop. So while it was a fun test and a cool test and we had great data for it and it did meet the goal of engagement, it didn’t result in any sales just yet.
Rich: Okay. So when you’re doing this, so when you say the objective or the goal was engagement, I know from setting up social ads in the past that you can set your goal ahead of time and that will actually help the platform decide who to show the ad to. So did you go in there and say, my goal is engagement, or was that just your own goal and you told them you were looking for sales?
Brooke: No. So I actually went in and said engagement. And it’s interesting that you asked that question, because LinkedIn, their AI when you’re running ads now provides tips right on the ads that you’re running and their AI kept saying, “Hey, you should probably run a lead ad.” And we want to, and we are now, but in the beginning we really just started with engagement because we wanted to start seeing who we were getting in front of and as far as job titles and companies. And what we found was LinkedIn was actually really good. At a broad match for the particular people that we were trying to target. So we were happy about that, but we wanted it to be more of a full funnel campaign where we’re starting early with like awareness and then engagement.
So we did awareness, we did engagement, and now we’ll be moving into those lead type ads to see if we get any sales. I will say though, here’s something interesting. Even though we didn’t get any sales for that particular mystery shop, which was the only one that we ran for sales, right? Since it was a digital product.
What happened while we were running these ads, you brought up Brooke Bytes earlier, which is a video that I put out on LinkedIn every Thursday, and it’s essentially just social care tips. I’m literally trying to be helpful about this service that we have in the hopes that someone will reach out.
So as we were running these ads about a month in, 30 days in, I got an InMail on LinkedIn from someone in South Africa who saw those Brooke Bytes videos, watched a bunch of them, and then reached out and asked about a virtual training for her team in South Africa. The fact that she’s not connected to anybody that I know, she’s in South Africa, which I don’t really have a big presence there. My guess is, even though I can’t directly attribute that InMail to this job, I think it came from probably some of the engagement or the impressions that LinkedIn thought leadership ads sent us. And by the way, this is like a $15,000 job I just booked.
Rich: So it’s paid for itself.
Brooke: It’s already paid for itself and then some. And I don’t know if it’ll always stay this way. It’s so cheap. We’re spending, that one campaign for them for the mystery shop was like $70 bucks, but I think at most, and we’ve done the minimum of the $15, all that kind of stuff you have to do on LinkedIn because it is more expensive. We’ve only paid a few hundred dollars for each campaign.
Rich: And how much targeting are you allowed? Because I have yet to do the thought leadership ads. I was definitely planning on doing it this summer, I’m falling a little bit behind, as a way of ramping up towards Agents of Change. I wanted for the conference Agents of Change, not the podcast. And because we tend to attract more of a local audience for the in-person events, which makes sense, I wanted to make sure that the ads were only showing in New England. Or even Northern New England, where we feel there’s more than enough people to fill up our conference hall.
But spending money on people from Texas doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, even though they should come, but chances are it’s a little bit of a far flight for them. So are there that same level of targeting options with thought leadership ads than you find in other typical ads?
Brooke: There are. So you still have those options. And we started with a much narrower audience when we first started running the awareness campaigns. And what we found was once we went broader, we actually saw better results for you and your specific use case. I think that’s smart just because you’re wasting money, right? So I would still try it.
But I love that you brought up the Agents of Change conference, because I think for events, this is such a cool way to sponsor your speakers. So if you have an amazing keynote or somebody that has a large following who’s going to be speaking at Agents of Change, flyte could sponsor that individual on LinkedIn and run ads through that individual’s account for the Agents of Change conference to help fill seats. I think that’s such a layup way to use thought leadership ads.
Brands that work with thought leaders or influencers, obviously they could come up for a strategy for boosting the creative content of that influencer that supports their brands, products, or services. And then if you have clients who have large followings on LinkedIn, asking them to do some sort of testimonial post for you, and then sponsoring that through the person from the brand. I think those are three amazing use cases. So I’m actually really excited to see if you run some for AOC, because I think that is so cool. Something that will do very well.
Rich: All right, let’s walk through this. So let’s use our mutual friend and agency cohort, Andy Crestodina. He’s always posting incredible content on LinkedIn. So what would be the right way to approach this? Should I just get something that he’s posted and then we basically boosted as a thought leadership ad. Do I ask Andy to create something specific about his presentation that then I say, would you mind posting that to LinkedIn? And then we’ll. Treated as a thought leader, how might we approach that?
Brooke: I love that. Yeah. So if it were me, I would go to Andy and say, “Look, we’d love to run these sponsored thought leadership ads through LinkedIn with you. That means you have to accept us.” So what happens is you send a request from the flyte new media page to Andy. He would accept it. And then yes, exactly what you said for the second part. I would have him write one of his own. He’s going to his post talking about what he’s going to present at Agents of Change. And then make sure that somewhere within that post, or even in that first comment area, he’s posting a link to where people can buy tickets and encouraging them to sign up. And then you can boost that post.
Okay, so let’s talk about the negative side real quick, since we’re giving this scenario. These are new, and I’m hoping LinkedIn will change this. But LinkedIn’s really funny about the types of content you can sponsor through Andy for flyte. So you can’t do a LinkedIn newsletter, which I’m like, hello, LinkedIn. That’s like low hanging fruit for them. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t let you. Anyways, you can’t do articles that are included in newsletters, you can’t do celebrations, you can’t do documents, you can’t do polls, you can’t do carousel polls with multiple images, and you can’t do re-shared posts.
So yes, the best bet is to have Andy, just a text only post with that link. And I would maybe even put it in the first comment section.
Rich: Wait, text only? We can’t even do videos or photos?
Brooke: You could do an image, you could do a video, but not multiple. And what we noticed in our video ads is they didn’t do as well as the text only post. This could be different, we’re still testing.
But then once he does that, you sponsor it. And Andy has a large following on LinkedIn. So hopefully what would happen is people would sign up after seeing his posts. Some of his followers who are in the northeast would see it. They would see that link, they would click through and sign up.
Rich: All right, that sounds awesome. All right, I want to shift gears a little bit because we did talk a little bit about your Brooke Bytes. So you, as you mentioned, it’s a Thursday post. You do a video post on LinkedIn, very informational, very helpful. Tell me a little bit about where this idea came from, what kind of content you’re posting, and then any other things that are helping you reach your B2B audience.
Brooke: Yeah, that’s a great question. So when we were together at Social Media Marketing World, not this year but in last year, so 2023 we were there together. And that’s when Pat Flynn did the closing keynote. And Pat Flynn was talking about Pokemon, and he was talking about all of these videos that he does. But essentially what we’ve been hearing from people like Pat and other people for several years now, is that we really need to be doing video.
When our mastermind group that we just mentioned went to MAICON, which is the Marketing and AI Conference last year, we heard even a lot more that because of AI and the way zero click content works and SEO is going to change, that you really needed to get your face out there. So say yes to all the podcasts, but also how can you get your face out there?
So at that point I knew that I really needed some kind of video strategy, even though I hate video. So what I decided to do was a two minute or less tip on social care, and I created these Brooke Bytes posts. And I use Descript. If you haven’t heard of Descript or don’t use it, it is an amazing tool. And essentially, I film right on my computer.
I filmed an intro and music that I all put together in Descript. I saved them all as templates. So literally I just film this little two-minute tip every week, and then I pop in the other stuff that I added as the intro outro bumpers. I set it to music, and then I publish that every week on LinkedIn, but also on YouTube.
LinkedIn’s done far better for me than YouTube, but essentially those tips are just my best advice that I can give for anybody who’s trying to implement social media customer care through their company or brand. And then, like I mentioned, that’s how Solange in South Africa found me and we got this $15,000 training deal. But I think honestly, it was a mixture of the organic video and the thought leadership ads together, even though I can’t prove it.
Rich: So when you’re putting this content together, obviously you sell customer experience through social media the support group. So you’re giving good advice, you’re helping people out, but obviously you’re also establishing yourself as an expert. Are there calls to action at the end of the videos or in the text description, or do you just hope that people find you?
Brooke: I try to do a call to action in every single post. It doesn’t always work. This is something I’m also getting better at. I’m not an aggressive salesperson. And I feel like with the times we’re in right now and have been in for the past couple of years, I need to be more aggressive.
So what I tried to do was talk about something related to some sort of call to action within the video or within the script. Which is like, “Hey, if you like this subject, read more about this in my book.” Or, “Hey, if you loved this talk about tagging and social listening, make sure you download our free social listening workbook.” So it’s not always book a call with me to sell you on a service. It’s little, tiny calls to action.
And every now and again, I will say, “Hey, you should book a free chat with me. It’s totally free. There’s no strings attached.” But for 30 minutes, I can help you understand what’s going right or what’s going wrong with your program. So yes, I try to do a call to action every time. I haven’t gotten any definitive bites on those calls to action other than Solange, but I’ll take it.
Rich: And the other thing is on organic, sometimes it’s hard to tell. Some things that we don’t actually get us business for three months, six months, or even a couple of years. I see this all the time with the Agents of Change conference. When I ask clients, “Hey, how’d you hear of us?” after we’ve signed them up, and they’re like, “Oh, I’ve been attending AOC for years.” So all of these things definitely help.
And I believe you actually take the video that you’ve created, even though you’re uploading it to YouTube, you upload it natively to LinkedIn, correct?
Brooke: Yes, because if you play around on LinkedIn, they’ve recently reduced the imagery and reach that comes along with posting any links that lead people outside of LinkedIn. So every other social channel, they want you to spend your time within LinkedIn. So I upload those videos natively to LinkedIn.
Once you do that, it’ll let you know when the video is uploaded and then it gives you the ability to edit the captions within the video. And I always recommend that you do that. Because every time it calls me Brooke Ellis instead of Brooke Sellas, so just always check those captions, make sure you update those. And then obviously if you have that call to action that comes through in the caption as well.
Rich: Yeah, I’m using a tool called Kapwing, which is a lot like OpusClip. So I actually added my own dynamic captions. I always shut off the LinkedIn captions automatically because I just find that the ones done by Kapwing are just far superior.
Brooke: So how do you even spell that?
Rich: K A P W I N G. A lot of people love OpusClip. And I tried it, and I just found that there’s more tools on the Kapwing side. Where OpusClip was nice in the fact it was all automatic, but then I couldn’t do much once the clip was created. And maybe I just don’t know how to use OpusClip. But for Kapwing it was like I had a full suite of tools, which I like messing around and working on the details.
Brooke: That’s actually really good advice. You just gave me advice. So I can do that in Descript, I can add those?
Rich: That I don’t know.
Brooke: I know I can. You’re giving me a tip by saying I should probably add those right into Descript, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about it in LinkedIn.
Rich: Absolutely.
Brooke: And then now I’m just creating more work for myself. Anyway, see, this is why you need to listen to Rich’s show. Because he literally just gave me a tip.
Rich: This is what you need a VA for. Okay. Anyways, let’s keep moving on, because I know that you have a LinkedIn newsletter. And what kind of content do you share in the newsletter, and how has that worked in your overall LinkedIn strategy?
Brooke: Yeah. So we have a blog post. We’ve had a blog post forever and a day, and we always publish weekly. And if you are listening and you have a blog, I am sure you are going through the same thing that I am. Which is people just don’t read blogs anymore, or at least not like they used to. The commenting on blogs is gone by the wayside. It’s all spam now.
So what I do, it’s really a very simple strategy. Every Wednesday we publish our blog to our website. But then every Friday I take that exact same blog and I copy and paste it into a LinkedIn article for our newsletter there and send it out. It’s literally the exact same piece. The only thing that changes is at the end of the newsletter, I have a call to action that varies based on the blog post. So some of them are like, buy my books. Some of them are, download the free social listening workbook. Some of them are, join this free webinar. Some of them are, book a consultation with me.
And I send those out and that’s where I get all the traction on my blog post now, is actually on LinkedIn with my network there. We’ve been doing this for about a year now, and I think we have close to 1,700 subscribers on our blog on LinkedIn. And the great thing is it not only goes out on LinkedIn to all the people who follow you, it also sends them an email. So they do get it in their inbox when it comes out on LinkedIn.
Rich: All right. And how aggressive are you pushing this out? Yeah, LinkedIn puts it. But I also know from looking at my own connection requests that about every third one is talking about I should subscribe to somebody’s newsletter.
Are you actively going in and suggesting to your connections that they subscribe to your newsletter?
Brooke: Not as much as I should be. On B Squared Media, we have reoccurring posts that do that often, but I just, I don’t do it personally for my page as much as I should. So that’s another win for you giving me a tip that I should probably put a little more stock. It’s like once a month asking people to subscribe to my YouTube channel newsletter through me personally on LinkedIn. And then hopefully LinkedIn will update thought leadership ads. Because I feel like LinkedIn newsletters will be such a great place to run those thought leadership ads.
So say for your example, Rich, you had Agents of Change coming up. Maybe you emailed Andy to talk about something. You could then use that LinkedIn newsletter to run a thought leadership ad. Like to me, if I were LinkedIn, this is a no brainer. I’m not sure why they don’t do it, because people aren’t leaving their platform to read LinkedIn newsletters. So hopefully that will change. But yeah, I need to post about it more often myself.
Rich: All right. Now when it comes to frequency of posting and what kind of content posts, have you found the perfect solution, or is it a consistently moving thing where one year it’s one thing and the next year it’s another thing? What are you doing now when it comes to consistency and frequency, or is that just not part of your plan?
Brooke: So it’s interesting. If you really pay attention to LinkedIn, they tell you exactly what to do. So under ‘discovery’, which is a part that you’ll see on your LinkedIn profile, they’re always giving you tips and tricks. And so under ‘discovery” all the time, you’ll see something that says, people who post to LinkedIn one time a week, get 4x more reach than people who don’t. Which is great, right? So that’s telling you right there, you should at least post one time a week.
For me personally, I want to do better than 4x. So I post Monday through Friday, usually without fail every day. I don’t post on the weekends, because we’ve tested the weekends, and they just don’t do as well as the weekdays. But that’s what’s happening on our side. I always tell people to test.
And then what I found for me, our posts that spark conversation – which is our whole mantra at B Squared Media, think conversation, not campaign – tend to do very well. Guess what popped up in my discovery? I have screenshots of all of this by the way, so I can back it up with LinkedIn proof. It literally said in my discovery, “Posts that spark conversation on LinkedIn tend to do better as far as engagement”. So I try to do text only posts. Because of what I found in trying to have more of those conversations that text only posts for me, for whatever reason, tend to work far better then any other type of posts.
Obviously they’ve reduced the reach of outside links on LinkedIn. So instead of having that big, pretty picture like you used to, that’s been shortened, and I don’t use pictures that much. I see people who do that and have images. But for me, for whatever reason, my text-only based posts do the best, and my text-only based personal posts do far better than my text-only based professional posts.
Rich: A lot to break down in that or unpack there. So one thing I’m wondering is, when you say they perform better, what is the KPI that you’re using to decide that they’ve done better?
Brooke: Engagement. It’s just straight up engagement. If you were to ask me, engagement is the number one social media metric. I don’t care about impressions, because that just means eyeballs. I want to know that people saw my content, and they did something about it. So engagements matter most to me. Conversation.
What you’ll see on LinkedIn is if you’ll notice the posts that go haywire have a ton of conversation happening in the comments. So what I try to do is put out a post that will spark conversation. And then if Rich comes along and writes a comment, as quickly as I can – so I’m checking LinkedIn often – I will respond back to Rich. Usually with a lot of my friends on LinkedIn, we’ll get some dialogue going. And once that dialogue starts happening, you’ll notice all of a sudden that your post starts getting a lot more engagement on it. And some people won’t comment, but for the people who do, they’re giving you that boost into other people’s feed. So engagement, engagement, engagement is always the top posts that I would. be looking for.
And here’s what LinkedIn said. LinkedIn actually in the ‘discovery’, part of my profile the other day told me that if I post one time per week, leave three comments per week on other people’s posts, and contribute to one of their contributor articles every week, that I would do better with my profile visibility. So now I know that every week I’m going to post my five times a week.
Again, maybe it’s the one for you. I know that commenting on other people’s posts, their metric is three times, three other posts within a week. I do more than that. But again, that’s the bare minimum. And then one contributor article every week also helps with profile visibility. So at least go do one of those. I know they seem stupid, but LinkedIn’s literally telling you what to do to have your profile get found.
Rich: All right. So I have a couple of questions. One is these contributor posts, contributor articles. What is that exactly? Maybe I know it and I just don’t know it by that name.
Brooke: So LinkedIn has AI come up with these, they’re called ‘contributor articles’. And basically you’re allowed to contribute to them. So it’ll have different sections, and you’ll be able to go in as Rich.
Let’s say it’s SEO. You’re really good at SEO. You know how to answer these questions. You can come in and leave your own advice on that particular post on SEO. Once you do it enough and enough people like or engage with the contribution that you’ve made, you can get a badge on your LinkedIn profile that says you’re an expert at x.
So I currently have the customer experience expert.
Rich:. Top voice.
Brooke: Yeah. Because I try to answer all of the contributor articles for customer experience, specifically. I used to have customer experience in social media, but I let social media fall off. Again, this is just me. You can have as many of those as you want, but I feel like it diluted the way it showed up. So I knew that I only wanted one to show up. And so therefore, I’m going after customer experience versus social.
Rich: And I believe at this point in time at least, you can only have one. Because there was one point where I was posting to a lot of these contributor articles and it said you can either be a top content voice or a top marketing voice, but you can’t be both. So I believe they may have changed that and it’s one or the other. And then if you don’t keep up with it, as I discovered…
Brooke: Yes.
Rich: I have not been able to get back my top voice. But all right, that’s on my goal list for this week.
Brooke: So that is why I think they literally, again, they’re telling you what to do. That’s why one a week, according to them. So if you want to be outside of the norm, try for two a week or three a week.
Rich: So I want to get back to your thing about comments and engagement. So what have you found? You mentioned that for you at least, text-based posts spark the most engagement. But have you found that within that milieu of posts, that there is certain things like asking a question, or you mentioned personal versus professional. What is it that you found is the secret sauce for sparking that engagement?
Brooke: Yeah, so I’ll say I always try to go with what I call a ‘lead in’. So I’m like, “Help me solve a debate, yes or no. What would you do if…” It’s leading, because I’m leading people by telling them right away without telling them directly that I need them to give me an answer that I’m looking for a conversation or an answer or advice from them. “Advice needed!” And then I say something.
Those always do the best. Because listen, we love ourselves, right? We think we’re the smartest people in the room. I don’t, but a lot of us do. And we love giving other people advice. So when you ask for that advice, typically you will get it.
And then the personal type posts. I don’t get super personal on LinkedIn. But for an example, I went to my sister’s bachelorette party in Vegas this past weekend. And before I left, I posted a picture of the weather, because it was like 118 degrees every single day. And I said something like, “Pray for me. Not only is it super hot, but I’m going to hang out with these really young girls in Vegas. I’ll be lucky if I make it back alive.” Or something like that. And that got a lot of engagements within four figures, whereas most of my posts will get engagements within three figures.
The other posts that do well are obviously those lead ins for asking for questions. But then I’ll also just give advice. I’ve been using the hashtag #entrepreneurthoughts. But I’m just giving what I would call entrepreneur leadership influencer thoughts around what it means to be a business owner and how hard it is, and talking about who you should include in your network and how you should network. They’re just musings from me, but those typically do very well.
Rich: All right. Now I know your in-house team is primarily you and Alex, and then you have a lot of contractor workers. So I don’t know if this is the right question for you, but what advice do you have for getting your team involved on LinkedIn, as opposed to just you?
Because I love LinkedIn, like you do. I just find it to be the only social media platform that doesn’t make me feel ill after using it. And I’ve encouraged members of my team as themselves to post on LinkedIn, as well as we do some stuff for flyte and for Agents of Change.
What recommendations would you have for people to get their team involved, and maybe work together, to grow their LinkedIn presence?
Brooke: Again, I’m not a super aggressive, salesy person. So what I started doing when I really started concentrating on LinkedIn about a year and a half ago, is when I would put out a post that I thought was really good, I would share it into the group message where all of our team members exist. And I would just say, “Hey, I posted this thing on social care today”, which a lot of our team, our CMGRs, our community managers, so they work in social care. “So if you’re up to it, go give it some love.”
And I did that enough times that I think what happened was I got into their LinkedIn feed because they were engaging with me, but I was asking for them to. But now I’ve noticed after doing that for a few months, again, they must’ve hit that engagement button. So now I’m shown in their feed, and organically they’ll come over and comment or engage with the post that we have.
But if it’s a big post, again, I still make the ask. So I think it’s like less of forcing people to do it and more asking them to engage with you, and making sure that the content relates to them in some way. So I’m not asking them to go comment on that post about Vegas. But I know that the majority of our team works in social care, so when I post something about social care, they find it interesting.
Rich: Makes a lot of sense. Brooke, this is great. I’ve got so many to do’s. I feel like I need to cut the interview short and just start to get to work. If people want to learn more about you or about B Squared, where can we send them?
Brooke: You can Google search Brooke Sellas, B R O O K E S E L L A S. It’s the easiest Greek name on the planet. I think I’m the only Brooke Sellas on the planet that I’ve found so far. Or you can just go to bsquared.media and find out all about B Squared, and that’s where you can find me as well.
Rich: Great. And we’ll have those links and links to Brooke’s LinkedIn profile account as well in the show notes, so be sure you check them out. Brooke, always great seeing you and thanks so much for stopping by.
Brooke: Thanks so much for having me. It’s always fun to be with you.
Show Notes:
Brooke Sellas and her team at B Squared Media focus on customer-centric strategies for their clients, and she believes that every conversion starts with a conversation. You can connect with her pretty much everywhere, including LinkedIn, her podcast, her short video series, and of course be sure to check out her book.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.