How do I you the most of LinkedIn basic (aka the free version)? What should I be mindful of when it comes to sending connection requests and InMail? What happens if I post an external link?
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Amanda: Hey, Nathan.
Nathan: Hey, Amanda.
Amanda: How’s it going?
Nathan: It’s good. How about you?
Amanda: It’s good. We’re always giggling when we start this because we’ve already said hi and chatted for a while before we actually start recording.
Nathan: You look very cozy over there in the cabin.
Amanda: Thank you. It’s very nice here in Vermont, but I am going to go back to New York City tonight, maybe tomorrow morning. I did get out for quite a few hikes. I actually went for a nice two hour hike this morning before I started my day.
Nathan: At least you didn’t right before recording, like your run.
Amanda: I learned my lesson. Let’s jump right into it. Today we are talking about LinkedIn, how we each use LinkedIn, how we’re currently using it to grow our business. I’m sure some other things will pop up here and there, but ideally coming out of this episode, our listeners will learn one thing about LinkedIn, or at least get to have a peek behind the curtain of how a small business is using LinkedIn, especially in the SaaS tech space.
Nathan: Learn what not to do on LinkedIn. Yeah. That’s not what I want for my LinkedIn.
Amanda: Yeah. So you’ve been active on LinkedIn throughout your career. You had over 500 connections when I checked, which I think is a pretty good mark. How have you used LinkedIn in the past? Up until this point where we’ve really been focusing on it, what has LinkedIn meant to you?
Nathan: It hasn’t been a real central point. When I was running my agency or any of my businesses, I didn’t really interact with customers or prospects on LinkedIn. I would accept connection requests as they came in. Sometimes I would find it was like a shortcut to get to the right person inside of an organization, because sometimes you don’t want to just fill in that contact form blindly into the abyss at some company. I could find if there’s an integration partner or somebody. I could go find like the head of partnerships and integrations at this company on LinkedIn, you know, you can search their job title. And so successfully I would just message some of those people. And I felt like I made sure I got to the right person inside of an organization that I wouldn’t find otherwise. Either to resolve a technical issue or to reach somebody in developer relations that could help me with a technical point or somebody who is in partnerships. So I think that’s really the majority of how I used it before, which was very different. I was really not trying to meet new people or build any strong connections there. Most of the people were people I knew previously offline and I would just connect with them on LinkedIn.
Amanda: Yeah. And I think I used LinkedIn very much the same way, which was really just connecting with people who were already in my network and I didn’t really think about it as a way to meet people for the first time.
Working in sales here and there over the last decade plus, I used it a little bit, but not near the extent that I’m using it right now and that I’ve been using it the last couple of months. It is quite a flip to go from almost being a repository of people you know to being what it actually is meant for, which is a network tool.
Nathan: Yeah. And I think that’s probably a common pattern. Like when I graduated college, you just kind of follow people on LinkedIn and you see what they were up to a few years later. You know, those people that I went to college with were people I enjoyed spending time with. They weren’t really in my professional circle or even in my same industry at all. So when I would log into LinkedIn, it would just be a bunch of random stuff as random as Twitter or Facebook. So it didn’t mean that much to me.
I think it was after StagingPilot was acquired by Pantheon and I started connecting with people at Pantheon after I left, seeing what they were up to. My feed all of a sudden really became much more focused around work and content that was relevant to me.
And so my feed on LinkedIn was actually a much more useful collection of links to things that were happening in the industry or relevant viewpoints. It did actually become much more of a work tool for me.
I would say LinkedIn is like 80 percent professional focus. So it became a place I would just kind of check that feed for five minutes, see emerging trends or just relevant topics there.
Amanda: How do you interact with your feed on LinkedIn?
Nathan: I will, I’ll start by saying that I historically have been very passive on all social media. Like I’m not a big social media user in general. On both Twitter and LinkedIn, I historically have rarely posted anything, but it’s a really good way to get just a sense of what’s going on and get a pulse of what people are talking about, where the industry is going, like emerging trends or just general concepts or links. It’s a good place to find a bunch of links to articles that I might be interested in and I may or may not read them, but I’ll open up in a tab and maybe read the first paragraph or maybe read a whole article.
And I think Twitter and LinkedIn especially, you know, they are people you’re kind of connected to. You can actually engage and start a conversation or reply and some interesting stuff happens in the comments of those as well.
Amanda: Have you ever unfollowed somebody so you didn’t have to see their stuff in your feed?
Nathan: Yes, definitely.
Amanda: I’ve been thinking a lot about curating my feed because there is a lot of noise in my feed right now. And I’m trying to figure out what noise is helpful so that I have a finger on the pulse, but what noise is just… noise. How do you go about that?
Nathan: Well, yeah. I use the likes and comments and engagement with the things that I do like, which I think is nice for the person who’s creating the content to get likes on their posts, but also tells the algorithm that that’s what I care about. And so over time, I’ll get more of that and less of the noise for me personally.
There’s a lot of noise in social media in general. So that’s kind of what I’m in for. I try to just limit my surfing. I actually have timers on the apps on my phone. So I can only use LinkedIn for, I think it’s 10 or maybe 15 minutes a day before my phone will come up and say no more. There is an inherent amount of noise that I’m not going to get away from, but that kind of keeps me from getting sucked in too deep on it and there’s diminishing returns, right? You could spend five hours and you’re not really going to acquire that much more knowledgeable information at the end of the day, but in 10 or 15 minutes a day, it’s pretty good to just kind of get a pulse, see what’s going on out there and let a few things around in my brain for the afternoon.
Amanda: I have heard other people say they limit it to 15 minutes and that’s more than enough. One part of me is saying that’s not enough time, being very, you know, outbound sales driven, it doesn’t feel like enough.
Nathan: So to be clear that the limit is on the mobile app, which is mostly just a consumption, you know, doom scrolling kind of thing that I’m looking to limit. Where you can endlessly scroll. And so I want to limit that.
I do spend time on it. I’ll open it in my web browser on the computer, but I’m usually in a very different frame of mind. I might be looking for specific people. I might be sending messages. I don’t do much like creation or typing on my phone. I can type way faster on my computer. I have all my other tabs, if I’m going to link to something, I can pull that up on the other side. Any actual work I’m going to do is going to be on the desktop.
So, you know, that 15 minutes is more than enough to just kind of scan and click into a few articles and see what’s going on.
Amanda: I spoke to someone on LinkedIn recently because he and his founder co-sell and they also co-market on LinkedIn. And I reached out just because I thought their content was very interesting. This kind of co-sponsored content between a salesperson and a founder.
And, there’s a lot of ways that if you have multiple people from the same company with the same end goal, but two very different roles, two very different approaches. But sort of coming together and using social media as a team.
And I’m, I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on that, or if that’s something you would potentially want to do with me someday, like team sales on LinkedIn.
Nathan: What does that look like?
Amanda: I don’t know. We’d have to figure it out for ourselves. A lot of it is this founder, he’s vocal on LinkedIn. He creates a lot of very interesting content.
He talks a lot about the problems that his solution solves and sort of his experience running this business. And then the salesperson can kind of piggyback off of that and do a lot of the networking and do a lot of the outreach so that people then see this founder’s posts, they become interested. And then they reach out to the salesperson or the founder.
There’s seeing that content and you have the founder’s thought leadership, but then the salesperson’s time and energy goes into making sure people see it. So I don’t know exactly what that looks like for you and me, but it’s something I’m interested in exploring.
Nathan: Yeah, that sounds like a great approach.
Amanda: What do you think would keep us from being successful in that approach?
Nathan: Getting me to actually post things probably.
Amanda: Do you think other founders are using ghost posters?
Nathan: Sometimes I think some of them really enjoy the limelight though. So I think some people are more attuned for social media posting.
Amanda: Like you!
Nathan: Yeah, just like me. I’ve got the personality for it. I just love posting about myself on social media.
Amanda: I think that’s been one of the most fun experiences I’ve had doing sales and marketing with you. You are so smart, but so much of your attention is focused on the product and making the product as perfect as possible. And you have these pretty massive wins and you sort of have an internal celebration and then you move on to go tackle the next problem or the next issue.
And I think you’re right. There are a lot of people who maybe spend too much time being self promotional and They have a small win and then they really blow it up out of proportion to make it seem really, really big. And then you’re at the other end of the spectrum where you have these really big wins, but not enough people are hearing about them.
Nathan: And I mean, you need, you need both. I mean, I like solving problems. I like diving deep into specific issues. I like working with people to help solve their problems. I like solving problems with software. I don’t naturally gravitate towards self promotion. But at the end of the day, I’m not going to solve as many problems for people or I won’t have that impact or be able to work on interesting things if nobody knows that we exist, if we don’t promote our wins enough publicly.
People won’t take us seriously. They won’t consider us as an option. So I think you need to do both, right. You can’t just shamelessly self promote and make stuff up that you can’t follow through on. I think there’s plenty of that on social media and I think long term it doesn’t really work out and it’s not how I want to spend my day. But we also can’t just like in a cave and make amazing stuff that nobody knows about. So, yeah, we’re finding that middle ground and I think LinkedIn is an interesting place where you can authentically engage.
You can actually write a comment. You can try to be helpful. You can give your perspective. People can take it or leave it, but you can actually engage in a meaningful conversation with somebody about a topic or try to help them solve a problem or a very small piece of a problem, or tell them what you tried that worked or didn’t work so they can avoid taking the same path or something.
I’m finding the overlap between what I find interesting and what I feel like is a good use of time and can have a positive impact, even if that’s where it stops. Like, even if it’s not endlessly self promotional, even if it doesn’t lead to a sale, like if I can help somebody in a very small way, I enjoy that process and learning more about what other people are working on. And then I think that also has a general good effect over exposure and things for the brand. So I think I’m trying to navigate that personally. And you’re navigating your side and finding out where we meet in the middle.
Amanda: I want to play a game.
Nathan: Oh, no.
Amanda: I’m abusing our podcast time so that I can get honest answers from you. So I’m going to name something that I do on LinkedIn and I want you to respond very honestly with your thoughts about it, whether you think it’s a good or a bad idea, what the benefit to the company may or may not be.
Are you ready to play?
Nathan: Okay. I understand the rules of the game. Good or bad is my personal judgment of you as a human being, or is it the effectiveness of doing it for business purposes?
Amanda: You know what? Business effectiveness, but also, you know, just your thoughts in general, if you were on the receiving end, what you might think.
Nathan: Okay. Because those things are often in conflict. There are tactics on internet marketing that have rubbed me the wrong way personally, but obviously are very effective for businesses. And there’s a reason that everybody is doing them. So will, I will try to give both.
Amanda: Okay. Posting from the BlinkMetrics company page.
Nathan: Posting from the company page is good. It shows that the brand is there and actively being worked on and maintained. A brand can have some personality. So yeah, good.
Amanda: Okay. The personality I choose to use when I’m posting from the company page.
Nathan: Hey, I think time will tell, but I think it is effective. I think people expect a little bit more neutrality from business or brand and more like people like following people. So I think we’re kind of finding that duality with the BlinkMetrics page.
I think when we get to a point where we have consistent, newsletter type content and announcements and integrations and partnerships, maybe it makes sense to have both, but, I don’t know. I’m not sure yet how I feel about that, but I think what we’re doing now is working and makes sense.
Amanda: Okay. My personal posts on LinkedIn.
Nathan: Yeah. I think they’re working.
Amanda: Okay. Sometimes I tag you in them and I think you’re often surprised. You’re like, what’s this now?
Nathan: Oh, yeah, my, my personal cell phone number. That’s not working. Not working.
Amanda: For the record, I didn’t post your cell phone number. I just posted what may or may not be the beginning of your cell phone number.
All right. Using Sales Navigator.
Nathan: I think it’s an effective tool for quickly filtering through a bunch of people on LinkedIn. I’m not as deep on it as you are on a daily basis. So I’ve seen what you’ve shown me and I understand the concept. I’ve not personally used it.
Amanda: Yeah. I’m still figuring out how useful of a tool it is because you can get pretty specific about your searches, but from a lot of the conversations we have, those are coming through, in all honesty, interest groups, right?
The groups you’re a part of and your network, whether or not you know those people. Same for me, interest groups that I’m a part of on LinkedIn, groups that I’ve joined outside of LinkedIn, Slack groups that I’m a part of, and cold outreach to our ICP on LinkedIn. We’ve had success there, but I’d have to dig into the data to figure out exactly what the success is between those groups versus, using what we find on Sales Navigator. Now that I’m saying it, I’m like, I’m going to start measuring that. I’m going to add that to my sales scorecard. Um, but yeah, Sales Navigator is one where I think some people use it and they use it really well, or maybe some industries use it and it really works for them, but I’m not totally sold on its usefulness for us. What are your thoughts?
Nathan: Yeah. My impression of Sales Navigator, it’s got that power search that just doesn’t exist on the main LinkedIn website, right? I think searching by industry, by company size, by role, that seems like the most useful part of Sales Navigator and being able to maintain these lists. I think the rest of the model that they kind of are laying out for you to follow, which is like, oh, message these people and send them in mails. And you get this many messages.
I think that’s where it starts to fall apart, at least for our industry and group. People are kind of inundated with these things. It’s always some recruiter or, you know, get an MBA at some college. Like it’s always kind of like junky stuff that doesn’t feel like a fit.
So I think there’s just a skepticism whenever you get like an InMail. By default, whenever I see InMail, I’m like, here we go again. All right, let’s see what’s in here. Usually I give it about two seconds before I close out of it. I’m like, okay, I’m not responding to this.
I feel like for us, what’s a better thing and probably better for everyone, better on the receiving end is it’s like, this is a way of identifying people that we could help, that we could, you know, could find benefit from our services or like that we just find interesting, or they might know people that would be a good fit for our services or product. And then it’s just a quick way to find them. And then we should try to organically connect with them or just look at their posts and see if their posts are good or just see what they’re talking about. One that ended up not being as ideal of a profile customer profiles, we thought like you can poke around there and see kind of competitive tools or like different ways that they’re solving the problem we’re trying to solve.
I learned about some new software that I didn’t even know existed because in my bubble, I’ve never heard of this thing. And then I find this customer profile and I keep seeing the same tool over and over. Ao I think it’s helpful from that perspective and it’s just helping you. It’s like a power search for me.
And then I think you want to, we want to continue with our normal LinkedIn engagement rather than sending cold messages, As a cold messaging platform, I’m not really sold either.
Amanda: You bring up an interesting point about Sales Navigator, because that’s how I’ve been using it. I’m using it to search and find people who are within certain parameters, but then I’m not sending InMail, because my response rate to InMail, to your point as a founder and CEO, it’s so low because people see InMail, they know that someone’s paying to get in their inbox.
And there’s something about that I think feels icky. I’d love to know if anyone listening disagrees, but what I have found so much more effective has been using Sales Navigator to refine my list, but then I’m going into all of those profiles individually out of Sales Navigator on my organic LinkedIn to send connection requests.
You can comment on posts, whether or not you’re connected, but start commenting on their posts, providing some value back, and then kind of slide into their DMs. Once you’ve built a certain level of knowing each other organically, my response rates are so much higher than with InMail alone to a non connection.
Nathan: Sure. And the InMail, like, I don’t really mind that somebody’s paying to send a message. Like it’s more the content of those messages that are so tone deaf or so generic it’s not so much that they’re paying to get into the inbox as much as it tends to be they just blast volume without any kind of specialization.
Amanda: And what sets apart an in mail that you might actually reply back to?
Nathan: If I believe that it was not a copy paste email, it was actually to me.
Amanda: When I go to LinkedIn, sometimes I look at my feed and it can feel like a lot of people talking about how successful they are and how much they’ve accomplished. And I have equal, equal thoughts of, wow, this is really cool. I can’t wait to have a post like this.
And then almost immediately after I think, will I ever be at the point where I get to make a post like this? And a lot of people give really opinionated advice and do’s and don’ts, and this is how the world works. Sometimes I go to LinkedIn and I feel like I belong there. And sometimes, most of the time, I go there and I feel like I don’t belong there. Do you ever experience anything like that?
Nathan: Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s pretty normal on social media. I’ve seen a lot of things discussed publicly, and then I’ve heard inside stories from the founders of companies or people who are working within those companies, and there’s always a lot more going on. So I take each of those posts with about a pound of salt. I mean, it’s a reaction to feel like you’re missing out or that they’ve got it all figured out, but they really don’t. And, so I try not to give that too much weight and then I’m more interested when people post about something going wrong. Or something about their massive success or something.
There’s sometimes pieces of things they tried along the way that didn’t work. Those have more useful information. In terms of specific advice, there’s just so much of it. If you get really specific and prescriptive. The more prescriptive it is, the less weight I’m going to give it. I think people sometimes give that advice and they truly believe it. But, you know, all of our memories are faulty. You know, revisionist history is definitely a thing. Our minds are very weird. We’ll draw those correlations and we’ll make a story arc out of something where there really was no story. And they can say, oh yeah, five years ago we were doing this. Then they make points in between that make this cohesive story that gets them there. But they completely omit or just forget all the other stuff they tried that went nowhere.
And then they could be like, oh, this is the exact path, which was specific to them, specific to their industry, specific to their business, specific to their personality, specific to that arc in time when that approach or solution was unique. So it might be like, oh, I scaled my business on Google Ads and pay per click in 2005. Even if you did, you can’t do that today, it’s completely useless information to do that because it’s a totally different landscape now, way more competitive, way more costly.
I find it useful when somebody shares what they did, what worked for them, what they tried, why they didn’t try certain things. And then you can try to kind of put yourself in their shoes and then you have to do your own translation layer for how that applies to me.
Amanda: Fair. We found out recently that when linking to something off of LinkedIn within the post itself, LinkedIn’s algorithm seems to suppress some of the reach for posts like that because they want people to stay on the platform so you get less reach if you’re trying to link off of LinkedIn.
And the way around it is to put the link in the comments. Although now I’m wondering if LinkedIn may have gotten smart, and maybe that still gets suppressed.
Nathan: There was somebody who posted something and they said, oh, link is in the comments. I was like, that’s weird. You’re posting that and you wrote that the link is in the comments, so why didn’t you just put it there? Now we know why. But then I was on mobile and I didn’t see his comment and it wasn’t a very highly engaged post. There’s only like three comments. So it was like, did he forget? I looked five times and because I drafted a post and was like, sorry, could you put the link? Because I don’t see it.
And then I checked again ’cause I didn’t wanna look like an idiot. So I posted it and he said, oh, you have to go look for it. And apparently they have a default sort it says most relevant.
And I tried to show more, load more. There was no way to even know this existed. I had to go from most relevant to most recent comments, which actually shows me all of them, sorting them by date. Okay. And then I had to hit the show more and then it showed up. So they really, really did not want this link to go offsite, which was kind of crazy. I don’t know if it was unique to this person or to the that it was linking to or something, but I was shocked how buried it got.
Amanda: All right, Nathan, thank you so much. This was a great conversation.
Nathan: Yeah, thank you.
