[00:00:00.430] - Speaker 1
Welcome to The Social Smarty Show, your weekly podcast for social media marketing tips, tactics, and practical digital marketing advice. Let's get you taking real action to grow your online audience, build connections and your business. I'm your host, Jodine McIntyre. Think of me as your digital marketing coach, cheerleader and wingwoman all rolled into one. Grab some of my social media marketing know how for free socialsmarty.com freebies. Now, before we dive in, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes.
[00:00:38.010] - Speaker 2
Marketing your business on social media, it can really feel like a full-time job. Of course, there are many businesses who employ full time Social Media Managers or even teams of marketers. But if you're just starting out or like me, you're just a one woman band, we need to be strategic about our marketing. We need to use our time wisely in the places that will have the biggest impact. And trying to be present everywhere, like creating content for every social media platform, well, it's not a great idea. It's tempting, but with so many hours in the day where we need to work on other tasks or actually working in our business, well, it's just not really possible.
[00:01:19.470] - Speaker 2
So when it comes to adding a platform like LinkedIn to your marketing mix, it's best to do a little research first. Like, who's using the platform? Are they your target audience? How does it differ to the platforms you're already using? How do you use LinkedIn effectively? Can you repurpose content you're already creating? These are all really good questions to ask yourself when you're thinking about jumping on a platform like LinkedIn or really any other social media channel that you want to add to your marketing mix.
[00:01:50.050] - Speaker 2
So let's go ahead and answer these questions and give you some, I guess, food for thought on whether or not LinkedIn is a platform for you to really reach and engage with your target audience. But make sure you stick around to the end. Because even if you decide that LinkedIn is not worth your effort, I have a little recommendation that I want you to hear. Great, so let's dive into question number one. Who is using LinkedIn? Now, firstly, the platform has over 830,000,000 users worldwide. I mean, that's a fair few people, not as many as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, but it's still a considerable number. Now, my favorite tool for viewing user information for social media platforms is NapoleonCat. Give it a Google. It'll basically break down the users on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn in your own country, so you can see the total number of users for your country and their ages. And for Instagram and Facebook, also their genders. Now, it's worthwhile taking a look. You could be surprised at just how many of your target audience use the platform.
[00:02:56.070] - Speaker 2
Now, another simple way to find out if your target audience is on the platform is to ask them. Sounds simple, right? Send a message to your email community, ask them to let you know if they use LinkedIn. You could create a poll in Facebook or Instagram Stories. You could ask a question on your Facebook page. There are tons of ways that you can ask your existing audience.
[00:03:19.650] - Speaker 2
Right onto the next question: how does it differ to the platforms you're already using? Well, the main difference is that the focus on LinkedIn is entirely on business. So when we use other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, there's often like a real crossover with personal and business purposes. But when we're using LinkedIn, we're generally just using it in a professional capacity. Now, the people we connect with on LinkedIn, these are people we work with, we work for, they have worked for us or we have worked for them. We've met them through our professional roles, or maybe they are the people we want to do business with or collaborate with. You know, it's all about making connections in a professional sense. We're not connecting with our friends, our family on the platform.
[00:04:06.410] - Speaker 2
Now, because of this, we wouldn't necessarily share a photo of, I don't know, like a kid winning player of the day at weekend sport. That sort of thing we would share on our personal profiles on Facebook or Instagram for all of our friends and family to see. Now, we might actually share that on LinkedIn, but we would usually write a caption that ties it into business or our professional life. Like we might share that photo and talk about how running our own business allows us to be there for every sports game. Or maybe we could talk about how your kids reminds you of what it's like to run a business, trying hard every week, never giving up, all those sorts of things. But we generally tie it back into a business sense.
[00:04:50.730] - Speaker 2
Now, another big question to ask is how do you use the platform effectively? And this is where I may have a bit of a different opinion to other social media professionals. I don't think you need to be active on the platform to get benefit from it. And that's because LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. It's a trusted platform, and LinkedIn profiles and company pages rank really highly in search results. So if someone is searching for you or your business, chances are your LinkedIn profile or your LinkedIn company page will be right there on the first page of results, telling the story of you or your business and linking people through to where you want them to go.
[00:05:34.860] - Speaker 2
Not only can this help you build your business, but it can help you connect with the media who might want to interview you or ask you questions. They might be doing some research to find out the people or find the people behind the business and this is where they find you. But of course, like any platform, the more consistent you are with sharing quality, engaging content, the more people you'll reach it's just a given, it's just how social media platforms work. And LinkedIn is really no different. So to use the platform effectively, you want to make sure you have a fully optimized personal profiling and company page. You want to understand how to build your network, you want to have a plan for sharing content that's relevant and engaging for your target audience. And you really want to understand how and when to engage with others. Now, here comes the sales pitch. If you need help with this, I will soon be opening doors to my Learn LinkedIn and 2 Hours online course. And that's going to take you through all of these steps. Join the waitlist and you'll be the first one to be notified the minute doors open. So head over to socialsmarty.co/waitlist-learn-linkedin - I'll pop a link in the show notes.
[00:06:46.840] - Speaker 2
Now onto the last question. Can you repurpose content to share on LinkedIn that you've already created for other social media platforms? Absolutely. If you've been following me for a while, you'll know that a big part of my teaching is showing you how to be efficient with your social media marketing. So saving you time to work in your business wherever possible. So repurposing content from other platforms to post to LinkedIn is definitely something I would recommend.
[00:07:15.360] - Speaker 2
There's just a couple of things you need to know about posting content to LinkedIn. Firstly, content types. Now, you can post a ton of different content types, not just images, text and videos. So for example, you can upload Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations. Because the platform is owned by Microsoft, it plays really nicely with a lot of the Microsoft content types like Word documents and PowerPoint presentations. Other cool things you can do is you can publish articles, you can even publish newsletters which get emailed out to anyone who subscribes on the platform without them even having to hand over their email address to you, which is really cool.
[00:07:59.990] - Speaker 2
The next thing you need to know about content on LinkedIn is links. So links to websites, URLs, they are clickable, unlike Instagram. Next thing is hashtags. Now, these are really helpful for reaching new people on LinkedIn, although I recommend using more broad hashtags rather than the really sort of niche or specific hashtags that we would use on Instagram. And we also just want to aim for five hashtags.
[00:08:26.110] - Speaker 2
And the last thing you need to know is the difference between company page content and personal profile content. Now, LinkedIn has been developed to connect people, so content shared by personal profiles will generally be given priority over content shared by company pages. So hopefully I've given you some insight into LinkedIn and helped you decide whether or not it's worth your precious time. But before I wrap up, I just want to give you one piece of advice. Even if you decide that LinkedIn isn't the right fit or worth your extra effort for your business marketing, I want you to do three things for me grab a pen and paper, jot these down. Number one I want you to go ahead and create a LinkedIn profile or at least update your existing one.
[00:09:13.320] - Speaker 2
Why? Well, remember when I said that LinkedIn ranks really highly in search results? Well, there's a very high chance that someone is searching for you on Google and your LinkedIn profile will appear on the first page of search results. It's even more likely on Bing because Bing is owned by Microsoft, so that's another search engine. Chances are they are going to find your LinkedIn profile and you want to lead them into the next stage of your business. Whether that's leading them onto your website or getting on the phone with you for a discovery call. We want to have those contact details in your profile there.
[00:09:48.900] - Speaker 2
Number two I want you to go ahead and create a LinkedIn company page. Again, the same reason as number one we want to give you even more opportunities to show up on the first page of Google. Remember your keywords when you're creating your page. What could people be searching for when they need your products or services? Spell it out clearly what it is you offer, what problem you solve, and use your main Call to Action button on your company page to send people where you want them to go. Maybe that's your website home page, or your product page, or your booking form. That one click to take them from LinkedIn to where you want them to be.
[00:10:28.650] - Speaker 2
Number three I want you to pop a reminder in your diary for twelve months time to revisit your LinkedIn personal profile and company page and update any information that needs updating. Make that reminder recurring so that every twelve months you'll get a little nudge to pop in and check that all your details are correct and that nothing has changed. Because the last thing we want is people finding out of date details about your business on the first page of Google when they're searching for you.
[00:10:58.350] - Speaker 2
Right, that's it for another episode. If you're an active LinkedIn user or you've decided to give it a go, come and find me. I'm pretty sure I'm the only Jodine McIntyre on there, one of the benefits of having an unusual name, I guess. But if you're not on LinkedIn or you're not keen to give it a go, you will find me on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. I'm @socialsmarty.co and as always, I would be over the moon if you would leave me a review. Click that five star rating if you're listening on Spotify, maybe even share this episode with a friend and I'll see you back here for the next episode. Until then, stay social.
