Witness Interactive Marketing in Practice

A few days ago I had the privilege of delivering a session on LinkedIn at West and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce’s regular Learning Lunch event at Irwin Mitchell LLP in Leeds. Rather than deliver the typcial presentation, I decided to engage my online and offline audiences by embracing interactive marketing.

What Do You Need to Know to Make LinkedIn a Success for You?

Ninety minutes before the event was due to start, I published the post below on LinkedIn asking people to tell me what they needed to know in order to make LinkedIn really successful for them.

All they had to do was a comment and I’d cover it in the session. I even went cross-platform with interactive marketing and posed the same question on Twitter.

I took questions from the attendees of the Learning Lunch half an hour before I was due to begin my talk. I then returned to LinkedIn after the event and proceeded to record my answers to the questions that I got quizzed on, joining the interactive marketing dots. Here are just some of the questions and the responses I gave…

1) Should I post from my Company Page or my personal LinkedIn Profile?

Contrary to popular belief, publishing content through your Company Page is a failed strategy! People engage with people on LinkedIn. We build trust with each other, not with companies. Build trust in your personal brand ON BEHALF of your Company. Stand as an ambassador of the brand. Nobody engages with Company Page content.

Feel free to publish content on your Company Page and then share it occasionally from your personal Profile so more people (your Connections) see the content as opposed to just your (usually limited) amount of Page Followers. Always add your own comment or thoughts to the post before publishing it from your Profile.

If you want LinkedIn to work for you, don’t limit your activity to pushing out content from your Company Page.

To discover more about what I think about LinkedIn Company Pages click here.

2) Should I upgrade from my free account?

My short answer to this question is no! Most people are not maximising their free account to value from the upgrade. You can be very successful on LinkedIn and never pay them a penny!

However, I DO have the LinkedIn Premium upgrade and find one feature almost good enough for the £40/month cost. Which one? The ability to see all my Profile Views over the last 90 days. With a free account, you get to see only the last 5 people who have visited your Profile. That is a bit limiting, so you have to view that data every day to make sure you don’t miss an important piece of intelligence about whom you are attracting to your Profile.

To find out more about my thoughts on upgrading to LinkedIn Premium click here.

3) Do you always need to share and comment on posts that are relevant to your industry? Can you also engage with posts that interest you?

My Connection, Virtual Assistant, Mariet Cheetham kindly asked the above question and “Can your interests have a negative impact on your LinkedIn Profile?”

I believe it is better to have a strategy around your engagement on LinkedIn. Staying on message, so to speak, tends to have the benefit of improving your feed. The LinkedIn algorithms understand you better and you get more of what is relevant in your world.

So, liking and commenting (much better) is a really good thing to do. (Note: Don’t ‘Share’ – it’s a waste of time!)

However, I do occasionally allow myself the latitude to get involved in other types of content. That makes me a human being!

I do strongly believe that ‘being all over the place’ does have a negative impact on your LinkedIn experience. At best it simply doesn’t serve you well. At its worst, it can harm the relationships you are trying to build.

To uncover how to improve your LinkedIn feed by strategically commenting click here.

A Shout Out for Interactive Marketing and Sessions

As my fellow LinkedIn Trainer, Jeff Young pointed out getting interactive by encouraging people to ask you questions online that you’ll actually answer offline in a talk or at an event works well.

“You know Nigel, you got me thinking…In the over 700 seminars I have done on LinkedIn I totally prefer this method for two reasons. It is better for me because if I do it this way it never feels like the same old presentation. And, it is better for the participants because they can come back to many of my seminars and they learn something NEW every time.”

All the talks about LinkedIn that I give are interactive but often I have a thread of a subject. I am noticing that people are becoming savvier on LinkedIn and the questions are getting better all the time as a result. We are able to really dig deeper into what works and what doesn’t at each session and that makes them a whole lot more interacting and engaging!