by Adam Gray | @AGSocialMedia | LinkedIn
The interesting thing about using social media to generate increased revenue, increased visibility and greater efficiency is that you already know all of the answers but you’re simply not putting them in to practice.
Often when I give a talk to an audience I get everyone to stand up and then ask “sit down if you’ve been on LinkedIn for less than a year…two years…five years…10 years…” invariably everyone is still standing at this point. Then later on during the talk I ask them if the acknowledge that every purchase in the business environment is influenced (even if only a little bit) by the way the seller looks on LinkedIn and whether they admit that 650 million members are using LinkedIn 24 hours/day, 7 days/week, 52 weeks/year…the answer is always “Yes”.
Later on when I set the an exercise – perhaps write a new LinkedIn headline – those people who want to do it when they get home I say to them “you’ve aged that LinkedIn is one of the key ways that buyers make a decision and you’ve been on LinkedIn for 10 years but you’ve not done it any other evening…so why will you do it tonight”
The thing is that writing a good headline is tricky and requires some thought…but it’s not impossible. None of this is impossible.
Tim (one of the co-founders of Digital Leadership Associates) is the world’s #1 social selling influencer according to Onalytica. He isn’t doing anything that you can’t do. He writes blogs, he shares content, he answers questions and he does this consistently. It’s nothing that you can’t do, so you could be the world’s #1 influencer in your field…but you’re not.
For an organisation the things you need to do to crush your competition are quite simple.
- Look like you employ good people. If everyone who has a customer facing role (preferably everyone) has a LinkedIn profile that makes them look like they are experts and really good interesting people that makes it easier for them to do their jobs and lets anyone who looks at your company see that you employ only good people, that’s pretty compelling.
- Make sure that everyone shares so you’re everywhere. The “brand police” won’t like this, but people buy from people not fro organisations. So your beautifully crafted corporate narrative is read by very few people and believed by even fewer. Why? Because every company says they’re good so that’s hardly a USP and all (and I mean ALL) corporate properties broadcast stuff about the brand and why you should buy it. The audience is relatively small and the engagement is relatively low. Just think about this as an example IBM has 500k twitter followers who may (or may not) believe everything that IBM says. IBM has 350k staff if each of them had just 50 twitter followers they would most likely be more engaged by the message because they would be made up of friends, partners, family…and there would be 17.5 million of them.
- Create lots of diverse content. If large numbers of your staff write content you will get much more visibility, coverage and engagement than if you write it centrally. For example if you have 1000 staff and a marketing team of 25 people, perhaps 5 of those might be “content writers” and they will produce content to go out through your corporate properties. if you can encourage half of the staff to write one piece of content per month that’s the same volume of content that you would get as if your content writers wrote 5 pieces per day 5 days per week every single week…but think about the variance in style, tone and the myriad channels that you would now have open to you if those staff all posted that on their own LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter channels. Think about the coverage…and the new audiences that would hear about your company.
I was looking for more points, but actually those three will probably do. If you can do those, consistently across the organisations, then you have pretty much nailed it.
None of what I said is a difficult concept, or possibly stuff that you’re not already doing in isolated pockets but rolling it out at scale is always the tough part.
Remember that none of these things is a silver bullet, it’s won’t in and of itself fix a broken business, but doing these things gives you an incremental advantage which may make all the difference. For example, if your software is crap will a team of great LinkedIn profiles mean you can sell against good software? Probably not. But if you are veery bit as good as the competition and when I look at your people they all look like experts, and fun, and interesting…then I am more likely to choose you.
The same if I’m looking for a new employer.
Everything makes a difference and this is something that isn’t free…but it’s a great deal better value than events, advertising campaigns and giveaways that once there done they’re done. Whereas this will leave a lasting and permanent advantage.
Think about it.
People who read this article also read these:
https://dlaignite.com/social-selling-for-lazy-people/
https://dlaignite.com/can-you-build-a-business-on-chance-encounters/
https://dlaignite.com/how-not-to-run-social-media-transformation-strategy/
