Alright. So, again, this is the exact steps that I took to grow my own LinkedIn followers and gonna answer as many questions for you as we can. I will say we did some talking about this, and this probably is gonna need to be maybe, like, a two or three part series of workshops just because there is a lot to cover.
So if you think you’d be interested in, you know, signing up for the the remainder ones, we’ll send out a message afterwards, and maybe we’ll put a link to sign up for the next workshop. And then that way, you can all, just we can keep it going with the, you know, multiple workshops in a row. So this is also a checklist we’re gonna be sending out. So if you registered for today, whether you leave early or not, you will get this, and this will just help you summarize all the key points that we talk about today.
So that will be coming to you as well. Alright. So there’s two things that I’m gonna go over really quickly at a high level, and then we’re gonna dig deep into each one. So this is the playbook for LinkedIn content, and then I’m gonna talk about the playbook for LinkedIn engagement.
So those are the two sides of the coin. Right? The the content is the media part of social media. So what are we sharing?
What media what posts are we putting out there? This is what FMG can help you with. This is what you can outsource. This is, the part that, you know, really, really you can think about ahead of time, plan for it, come up with a strategy, and we can help you execute it.
And I’m gonna talk about this in a second. The second part is the engagement part, and this is the part that most people get wrong. And this is the part that truly, honestly, is just incredibly hard to outsource outside of your team. So, yes, if you’re the lead adviser, you can have an admin or train someone else on your team to do it, but the you know, you can’t easily just go and hire somebody else to do this part for you.
This is the part that really, really, you know, internally, it’s gonna work if someone on your team takes ownership for it. So you wanna outsource the part you can outsource and then take ownership of the things that only your firm can do. So let’s go back to the content. We wanna ideally have two to three posts for a post per week.
I have three here just because I do have a nice mix that we’ll talk about. So one of those posts should be something that’s showing off your expertise as an investment manager, a financial planner, talking about, you know, any kind of financial planning topic, taxes, estate plans, something like that. The next one should be something that gets the conversation going. So you could be talking about the World Series of baseball.
Right? Something that everybody’s interested in and that’s gonna get a lot more eyeballs on your posts and your content. So it’s not about showing off your expertise. It’s about, creating conversations that get comments going.
And then the third post should be something that is sharing some sort of personal photo or antidote.
So you it could still be financial planning related. It could be about, you know, saving for your kid’s college education, but then maybe you share a picture of your own kid or grandkid in the post itself. So it’s something that’s gonna have a personal angle to it. So that is the mix that is going to really, really work well for content to get the most, engagement, but also still show off your expertise.
Right? So we want a mix of getting eyeballs, the most eyeballs we can with also once we get those eyeballs and they go to your page, they see what you’re all about. So this mix is really important. But as I wrote here, if you don’t engage with others, it does not matter how good your content is.
I’m gonna say that again. If you’re just posting content and you’re not engaging with other people on LinkedIn, it doesn’t matter if you have the best content in the world and you win a million awards for it. You will not see any kind of growth or actual ROI.
So the playbook for engagement looks like this.
You are going to, every day, want to be commenting on other people’s posts. And, ideally, you need to pick five comments to leave on every platform that you’re on. So in this one, it would be LinkedIn.
And I’ve kinda upped the ante here. I used to just say five comments for every one thing you post. If you really, really wanna see, like, true success, I would take that one step further and say five comments on first degree connections and five comments on second or third degree connections. So those are the people that you’re not yet connected with, and we’re gonna get into that in a minute minute. Then you also wanna make sure you’re responding to anyone who leaves any kind of comment on any of your posts always.
And then you want to have at least five DMs and then three connection requests and three files, which we’ll go through, here in a second. And this this does take about fifteen minutes.
Again, if you’re doing it even four or five times a week, you know, it doesn’t need to necessarily be every single day. I certainly am not doing this every single day anymore, but this would be, like, the gold standard to really, really see a lot of growth.
Okay.
So daily. Let’s talk first about that commenting and engagement strategy. Right? So this is a rule that you’ve probably heard me talk about before. I feel like I’m beating people over the head with it. But for every one thing you post, you need to, at a minimum, be commenting on at least five other people’s posts. Right?
Because the engagement is what’s key. So let’s talk about what that might look like. You don’t just log in and choose a post and say, great post. That does not do it. It needs to be something that adds to the conversation. It could ask a question. It can give an alternate opinion.
And, ideally, again, you don’t wanna just comment on the same people’s post over and over again because that is not going to grow your network. The reason we’re doing this commenting is to expand the number of people who become aware of us. So when I comment on Daniel Crosby’s post here, anybody who he’s connected with might see Samantha Russell’s name in my post my comment, and they’re becoming exposed to it. They can click on my page and now see, oh, Samantha works with financial advisers helping them with marketing.
Right? They’re becoming aware of who I am. So you don’t just comment on the same people over and over again. You wanna comment on second and third degree connections as well.
And, additionally, think about people you really wanna work with. Maybe you can and I’ll show you how to do this in a second. You look up, hospital network because you wanna work with physicians. Look at the people.
You can filter by who’s been active on LinkedIn in the last thirty days and then leave comments on those people’s posts. So they don’t have to be a doctor themselves, but they’re probably connected to a bunch of doctors, and now your content has the ability to be seen. So the the strategy with commenting is we want more people to be kinda bump into us and become aware of us because they see our comments. Right?
So the other thing to notice is, like, on this one here, you can see my comment got fifty nine likes.
That’s an indicator to me that could be a great stand alone post for me to post on my own. So sometimes your comments on their own can be really, really great, and you can turn that into future content.
The second thing is every time you get a comment here’s an example from Nate Lewis. Right? John commented on his post, so he replied. So you wanna make sure that you’re replying to everyone.
And if they say something generic like great post, you can say, what did you find helpful about it? Right? So that you’re just keeping the conversation going. Remember, the algorithms love to see that convert, conversation snowballing and more and more people contributing.
So this is why you wanna always make sure you reply to all the previous comments. So I’m just gonna, real quick here, go into LinkedIn. And if by the way, if we’re not connected on LinkedIn already, here is my account, Samantha Russell.
And so when I come in here in the morning and I open it up, right, I’m gonna, of course, see my first degree connection. So Andy, the head of wealth at Citi, you know, he’s got a post here. Maybe at FMG, we want to do more work with Citi. This would be a great one for me to leave a comment on, and I could say something that is going to get Andy’s notice. Right? Because only one person has commented on this even though he has let’s click on his page.
He’s got thirty four thousand followers. So he’s got a lot of followers. It’s hard to stick out and get noticed. But on a post like this where he’s only got one comment, if I go and leave a comment, it’s a much better chance of him seeing it. Right? So I could say something like, Andy, I love the way you are highlighting Anne and the great work she has done.
Congrats to both her and your whole organization.
And maybe I go a little bit more in-depth. I say a few other things, but now Andy’s gonna say, who’s Samantha Russell? Right? And wanna click over and see who I am.
And that is the the reason why we do this commenting. So I keep going through and looking and seeing what else is going on. So here’s another example. Oliver is an adviser in the UK.
Maybe I want to do more work with advisers in the UK, but I’m already connected with Oliver. Right? But, Nimesh here, I is is a secondary connection.
So rather than comment on Oliver’s post, I click here. I go to Nimesh’s, page. I see, okay. Yes.
He is in London. So now I go to his original post, and I put my comment on his post, not the person I originally saw it from. Right? Because I’m trying to expand my network within people in the UK and in London.
Does that make sense to everyone? So, again, now he’s going to see that I commented.
And if I keep commenting on his stuff, he might then say, hey. I like what you’re doing for advisers. You know, we should talk more, things like that. So I’m not just DMing him and saying, hey.
I see you’re in the UK. I’m starting to work with advisers in the UK. Would you like, to set up a time to chat? I’m just kinda raising my hand and saying, I’m here over in the corner.
You know, would you pay attention to what I’m saying, basically, and then hoping he’s gonna go back and look. So this is very much a long game, and it like I said, you’re not doing this all day long. You’re going in and you’re choosing a few people to, leave these very strategic comments on. Now another thing you could think about is, let’s say, you have a client and you would love a bunch more clients like that particular client.
Right? So, let’s see. Who wants to be a guinea who wants to be a guinea pig? I’m gonna pull up your page.
Anybody here wanna be a guinea pig for me?
And I will okay. Megan Bach said she would. Okay. Let’s see. Megan? Is this you, Megan?
Okay. Megan. Yes. Okay. So I’m gonna click on her page here, and I could see you have four hundred and twenty eight connections, and we have twenty mutual connections.
Right? I can see all of that. And so I could start going through and looking at some of your posts that you’ve gotten. Or let’s say you me and you, though, were a first degree connection already, and I said, Megan is my ideal client, and I want to connect with other people that are just like her.
I would if we were already first degree okay. I guess this isn’t gonna work, Megan, because we’re not first degree. So maybe I’ll pick let’s see.
Let’s pick someone that I’m already a first degree connection with.
One second.
Okay. So Andy here. So we’re already first degree connections. Right? I can click now on all of his different connections that we have, and I can see.
Right? Okay. Here’s the second degree connections that we have, the third degree. And I can go through and start seeing who is he connected to that maybe I want to know and then click over to their page and leave comments on their content because I’m thinking Andy’s an ideal contact of mine.
These other people he’s connected to that are also financial advisers are also ideal clients of mine, so those are the people I want to leave comments on. So that is the way that the commenting that that I would go about it. It. Hopefully, that’s making sense for all of you.
So you wanna do that, and you wanna do that before your post goes up. So if you’re using a tool like FMG, we’ve really tried to optimize the time of day, and that’s usually gonna be in the morning around nine AM between nine and twelve. So if you can get on to LinkedIn first thing in the morning, you know, when you’re drinking your coffee or once you drop your kids off at school or before you open up email, spend fifteen minutes doing this. You’re gonna do what we call prime the algorithm to say, yes.
I’m here. I’m active. The algorithm loves that, and it’s going to then do a better job boosting your post to more people. The other thing that I wanted to point out is there’s two types of connections you can have.
So let’s go back to my network here. So we have connections, right, and then followers. There’s a difference. So I have twelve thousand six hundred and eighty five connections.
These are people who’ve said, let’s connect.
And when you have a connection, I am now following them, and they are following me. So if you’re connected with somebody, you’re also following them. But you can also follow someone and not be connected to them. So if we click on my page here and we see we’ve got forty thousand four hundred and fifty two followers, but I’m only connected with twelve thousand some connections.
Right? So there is a difference. So someone can follow you without being connected to you. So if you follow me, Samantha Russell, but it says I’m your second degree connection, that means we’re not actually connected.
We’re just you’re following me. So you’re gonna see my content, but we can’t, like, send each other DMs without having sales navigator, things like that. Does Does that make sense for everybody, the difference between a follower and a connection? So you only get thirty thousand connections on LinkedIn.
Most people will never ever reach that, so you don’t have to worry about it. Thanks for the thumbs up for everybody saying that.
But if it is something that you’re thinking about long term, you, you know, don’t wanna just accept every connection request from random people that are not gonna help with your business, because you will max out at thirty thousand. Now how about actually growing your network? One of the things I’m gonna pull it up here.
Is the next area we’re gonna talk about is how to be intentional intentional about growing. Right? So I’m gonna show you more great content and, you know, what to think about, but you wanna if you don’t have a network, no one is gonna see your content in the first place. So maybe let’s do this in the chat.
Tell us about how many connections or how many followers you have, that would be great, and we’ll get a sense of kind of where everybody is benchmark wise. Right? Because I’m obviously an anomaly. Most people do not have forty thousand.
And you don’t need to have forty thousand. Right? We’re not trying to connect with a million people. We’re trying to connect with the right people.
So I see everything between a couple hundred to a few thousand, and it looks like the average is somewhere between one to two thousand. I feel like those are the numbers I’m seeing the most. But you can look at everybody, what they’re putting in the chat there, and get a sense for yourself, of what where you are. So oh, and I saw somebody had who wrote that?
Twenty thousand. Good job. Shelyn. Is that how you say your name? I’m sorry if I said that wrong.
Unless that was a a typo, but twenty thousand is fantastic.
So one of the things that I did for years and years and years when I was first starting to grow out or to grow on this platform was this. Every single Friday, I would go through the last five days of my calendar, and everyone I took a meeting with and and everyone I emailed with, I would drop their name into LinkedIn and send them a connection request. And I did not even add a note because I’m thinking we already emailed back and forth. We met.
I don’t need to add a note. Now you might disagree and like to add a note. This was just my personal preference in a way to make it really easy for me to execute this. So Friday, I would do this at the end of the day every single week.
And by the end of the year, my very first year on LinkedIn, I had substantially grown by a few thousand just from this alone. Right? So this is a very, very low hanging easy fruit way to get going. Okay?
So let me just show you again what that looks like.
Oops.
You come in here and, you know, you type someone’s name in. So Darren McKee. I don’t know why he’s in my search, but there he is. So he’s a second degree connection.
If you have their their specific email address, you can add their email. And if they’re signed up on LinkedIn under that email, you will, get them there as well. So this is, again, a very easy, like, low hanging fruit way to connect with people. Now let’s say remember we did the commenting strategy.
I’m leaving a comment on someone’s post, and then they’re commenting back, and we keep going back and forth.
Then that might make sense to then extend an invitation to them after you’ve commented back and forth a few times. So let’s go through this post that I did on okay. So here we’ve got, Martin. Martin and I are second degree connections, yet he left a comment on one of my posts.
So I might click over to him and say, you know and I see we have some other mutual connections. I might send him a message and say, you know, thanks for your interest in our upcoming, event, and just wanted to connect here ahead of the webinar. Right? So this is another way that you can grow really easily is by reaching out to the people that are already leaving the comments.
Hopefully, again, that makes sense.
And I know usually we get asked this question. So if you have a free or premium account, you can send up to a hundred requests a week. If you have sales navigator, you can send two hundred and fifty a week. Sometimes it it’s a little bit less than that, but, again, most people are not gonna bump into these numbers.
The one thing to pay attention to is that right after you connect with someone or someone follows you is the best time for them to see your content. So if Bob Smith and I just become connected on LinkedIn for the next couple days, whatever I post is gonna show up probably in his feed because the algorithm says, Bob just connected with Samantha. He’s interested in her and her content. We’re gonna show him what she’s putting out there, and then the algorithm’s gonna pay attention.
Does Bob leave comments? Does Bob dwell on my post and look at it, or does he just scroll right past it? And if he starts scrolling right past it, it’s gonna stop showing Bob my content. But if Bob starts interacting with my content, he’s gonna see it more and more.
So let me know in the chat. Do you feel like the same people over and over again are in your feed all of the time and you constantly see their content?
And if so, it’s probably because everyone’s saying yes. Those are the people that you’re leaving comments on a lot or you’re dwelling to read their post. And when I say dwell, what I mean is this.
When I’m scrolling through a page here, if I have to hit more, now clicking more tells the algorithm that’s an indicator. That person is interested.
Now if I sit here on Julia’s post and I really start reading and I’m scrolling and my dwell time looking at her post on my screen is high, they know I’m reading it or they assume I’m reading it. The longer I sit here looking at it, the higher the dwell time, the more the algorithm’s gonna say she’s interacting with that post. So then they’ll say, okay. We should keep showing it to more people because it’s keeping people on LinkedIn and interacting with the content. Right? So, again, dwell content.
Right? So, again, dwell time is a big part of the algorithm. The people you’ve recently connected with are the most likely to then be shown your content, and it works both ways. So if you want to be noticed by somebody, that’s why leaving comments on their post is so crucial.
Alright.
So I’m actually gonna, skip ahead to a few more things about the algorithm since we’re just talking about it, and then we’ll go back to the other content types because because I see some questions. So I already said point number one of what the algorithm prioritizes.
The second thing is it’s going to show more content for people who have a large amount of engagement.
So if there’s a post and it’s got a hundred comments, you’re gonna be a lot more likely to see it than a post that got two because LinkedIn is assuming the one that got a hundred comments is more interesting to viewers.
It also the algorithm favors good quality comments over just a bunch of likes or hearts. So if you’ve gotten a post that everybody’s hearting it and you’re like, well, why don’t I have that many impressions? It’s probably because you don’t have good quality comments on it. It. And then this one, I think we’ve talked about before, but the algorithm prefers what we call native content to linking out to something. So let’s go back in here and show you.
Okay.
So here we have one emergency podcast episode. Keith Allen’s talking about, changes in the government, and then he in the comments here is where he links to the episode. Right? He’s not linking to the episode here itself.
That would be this is you know, it’s not native content. You are still linking out, but it’s in the, in the comments itself versus I’m sure you guys have seen people who will say, my latest blog post talks about this or my podcast talks about that. And then right in the post itself, they have a link to it. So here’s another example of native content.
You’ve got the picture and you’ve got the, text about it. You don’t need to click anything to go get the rest of the information. So this is native content. If you have a video and you say, go watch my video on YouTube and you put a link to YouTube, that’s linking out.
But if you say, here’s my video and you upload it to LinkedIn, then that’s native. Right?
So that is why we want to, as much as we can, keep people on the platform because that’s what LinkedIn prioritizes, is that native content. And we at FMG have really changed our content strategy for social media to take this native content, zero click content approach where somebody is doesn’t have to click. They are gonna get the gist of the information just by looking at your post itself. And I’m just gonna show you kinda what that would look like really quickly here.
So this would be an example.
Right? So this is a post from, FMG from our content library. So we’ve got an image here that we partner with YCharts to create. We have a bunch of information about, the image itself.
You don’t have to click over to Jeff’s website to get the gist of what he’s talking about with tax rates and will your tax rate be higher in the future. He’s giving away the information in the post itself. This kind of post is going to get the most comments because it’s got meat to it. That’s something you can actually respond to.
Right? So when you’re crafting your posts, you wanna be thinking about, am I giving away the gist of the information in the post itself? I don’t wanna make people click off of LinkedIn to go understand what it is I’m talking about. And when you’re using FMG’s tool or if you’re in our do it for me program, you’ll notice that, again, this is how we’ve rewritten our social posts to be designed, as well.
Okay. So how do we use the algorithm to our advantage? So here are the things that I would say, and then I’m gonna go into LinkedIn to show you. So number one, I feel like I’m beating a dead horse, but, hopefully, you’re getting the importance.
Engage with others as much as possible in DMs, in comments.
The more engagement that you have and the more you give, the higher your your views and impressions will be. We talked about the eighty twenty rule. Right? For every one thing you post, leaving comments on at least five other people’s posts, and then also that you should be really doing a lot of that engagements about thirty minutes before your post goes up. Now I saw some questions about personal and business pages, and I really wanna highlight this. You, of course, want to have a business page for your business, like, a hundred percent. Oops.
But just know your business page will never ever ever get the engagement that your personal page will get. So FMG has a LinkedIn page. We have about almost twenty thousand followers, which is fantastic.
We get you know, on any post, we can get up to maybe ten comments, which is great, but it’s never ever gonna have the engagement that me or Susan Theodore, our CMO, or Scott White, our CEO, are gonna get because it’s it’s a business page, and people connect with people, not businesses. So when you have a business page, just know that your expectations for the engagement will be lower. And if you’re thinking about using LinkedIn as a growth platform, you really need to identify one or two people from your team that can be the, quote, unquote, face, to get more of that engagement on a personal level.
Okay. We talked about the last two things too. So I’m going to look at a lot of the questions, next sections.
Okay. So let’s take the emoji one because that’s a popular question. Do the emojis help? Do they hurt? What what should it be?
So I’m gonna pull up just a couple of my posts and kinda go through them and and talk about them. So one of the things that more than anything else and why people use emojis is we want our posts on social media to be easy to read and easy to scan.
Scan, not scam. Scan.
So you can see here. Right? I’ve got a really great hook is the time you’re spending on LinkedIn doing anything to grow your business. And then this is really easy to scan.
It’s not a big paragraph of of text. It’s sentence, sentence, sentence. And in each sentence doesn’t go any it doesn’t wrap around to the next line. It’s just easy to scan.
Then the emojis are used here to break up the text. Right? So that is really, really helpful. And then I am tagging a few people, but I’m not going crazy with the tags.
So for some of you, you you know, I’m sure you all see posts where forty people get tagged. LinkedIn pays attention. If you tag someone and they don’t leave a comment, they don’t like your post, they don’t engage with it, they say that person is just tagging to tag, and it gets downgraded.
So if you are gonna tag somebody, make sure there’s a reason and that they will engage with the post. Don’t just tag to tag. And I didn’t even use any hashtags on this one, but you can use a few hashtags if you’re hoping, on the search side. You know, maybe somebody’s searching something like digital marketing, and you wanted, you know, your post to come up there. But just realize that for these really big broad terms like wealth management, digital marketing, there’s gonna be thousands of posts a day. So the chances of somebody finding it are pretty slim.
I you know, we still add hashtags, but their use is going like, their importance in the algorithm is becoming less and less.
Okay. Somebody asked any thoughts on short form video for LinkedIn? Yes. We are encouraging people left and right to make video. And if you, you know, are in, for instance, the FMG library right here, you could see all these different social posts that we have. One thing that I’ve seen people doing that’s working really well is they’ll pull up a post, and then they highlight, you know, what it is that we’re talking about. And so we’ve got this great chart here about the election and how the economy and the stock market fare depending on who is president.
You could have a short form video that you make where you’re describing the post that we’ve already written for you. Right? So it’s just gonna really add context and make it even more personal and engaging. And for a video like this, everyone, I literally opened up my cell phone, held it up to good light so that I’m looking into the light, recorded it, and you can add these, you know, subtitles really, really easily.
A tool that we love is called Veed, Veed dot I o. Aubrey, if you’ll put it in the chat. On this one, though, I actually just went into Instagram and used Instagram’s editing features. I didn’t post it to Instagram, but I used Instagram’s, story feature to add the captions and add this little text at the top.
And then I downloaded it and posted it here instead of to Instagram. So, again, that’s a really, really easy way to do it too.
But the thing about video that I wanna remind everybody, when you’re scrolling through, when you see me in my hotel room talking, you can tell this is not a corporate branded video. Right? There are gonna be videos in your feed that are higher production value. Let’s see if we can find one.
Right? Here we go. We can tell this is a business video. But that’s a group.
So we’re less likely to pay attention to it. We’re gonna scroll right by it. The video that people pay attention to looks like their friend posted it. So do not be afraid to just use the tool you have already, your your phone.
Again, you can use something like v dot I o. The more authentic informal video performs really, really well.
Oh, Jody said, thank you for the Veed recommendation. And, Denise, everybody who’s saying Veed, awesome.
I love that tool. And see how I just said, they even have a thing where they’ll delete any of the wells, uhs from the video as well that you posted.
So that is really, really great.
Can FMG post video? Oh, Aubrey, maybe you’ll know the answer to this. We have been working on the ability for you to upload native video and have it go directly to your social post, and it either just went live or it’s just about to go live. So we are so excited about that, Lynn.
Aubrey, I don’t remember if it went live this month or if it’s going live next month, but it is very, very shortly. Aubrey said she’s gonna check for us. It’s coming soon. It’s been a top feature request.
We know and understand. It’s It’s a lot easier, especially for all of those of you from compliance standpoint too. You want it to go through compliance and FMG, not upload it natively here.
And oh, beginning of the year, said, we hope. Thank you. So that is coming soon, and we are thrilled about that as well. Okay. So, I just want to pull up where did I put it? Here.
Oh, here we go.
One of the other things, a lot of you are hosting events, whether it’s a client event or a virtual event. There is a really cool feature on LinkedIn now where you can create an event and then invite people directly from LinkedIn to register for the event. So if you don’t have someone’s email yet, but you’re connected to them on LinkedIn, this is a great, great way to get more top of the funnel people into your network is, you know, you still set it up via Zoom or whatever platform you’re using, but then you just create an event landing page in LinkedIn.
And you can directly invite people to the event that way, and they’ll get a reminder through LinkedIn when the event is starting. So this is, a really great new feature, again, to find more people. So we’re getting a lot of people asking about, you know, converting somebody who’s following you on LinkedIn to a booked meeting. This is one of the ways that I have gone about it historically.
So, again, I’m just gonna use myself as an example. So let’s go to, you know, all of my posts here. So let’s say I’m I have a post again. Remember, we have a mix of more personal photos, stories, educational content.
So here’s one I did on the great wealth transfer.
And I’m talking all about how the great wealth transfer has been here. People are sick of talking about it. Here’s some ideas of what you could actually do to capitalize on it. And then I said, if you want a prewritten family meeting invitation email that we wrote for our do it for me customers at FMG, just comment family meeting, and we’ll send it your way.
The thing that works with this strategy is remember, the more comments you get on a post, the more, engagement that more people are gonna see it. The higher the engagement, the more the algorithm is gonna say, show this to more people. So all the people that are saying, you know, family meeting, Mike’s friends all have a chance to see that, and then the algorithm is saying more and more people should see this post. Right? But then in the DMs, I could go let me just scroll through.
You know? And I say, hi. Here’s the family meeting email you requested. It comes directly from FMG’s do it for me marketing program. Advisors who use this service are paired with one of our in house marketing concierges.
So I’m sharing something of value, and then I’m telling him where it’s coming from. So it’s not a hard sell. It’s just informational. If you wanna know more, this is one of the valuable things we offer, and here it is.
This is a great strategy to move people from just consuming your content on LinkedIn or engaging with you to being interested in the service you have. So maybe, you know, you really offer a great service where, you know, you upload somebody’s tax return to Halista plan, one of our favorite partners, and you’re looking at what tax opportunities they might have. And so you have a content piece that talks about that, and you say, you know, somebody keeps commenting on your post about taxes. And so you say to that person in a DM, hey.
I see you keep, you know, commenting on my post about taxes.
This is one of the things we help clients with. If you’re, you know, interested, here’s a blog post we wrote on it. So you’re not even saying, like, here’s a time to meet with me. Right? Again, that’s a little too salesy for the first interaction. You’re just saying here’s more information.
And the biggest tip I can give when it comes to social media is we wanna do what’s called the give, give, give, then ask. So most people if somebody connects with them, right, I have people asking to connect with me. Let’s say, I accept Mike’s or Mikel. I’m sorry.
Most people, what they do is the minute that person accepts them, what do they do? They go and they send him a message saying, hey. I see you’re in insurance. I help financial advisers and and insurance professionals with marketing.
Do you wanna meet with me and let me talk to you? Let me pitch you.
That does not work. Right? But instead, if I connect with him and I go through and I look at his content and I see some of the things he’s doing And I leave a comment and then engage. And after a couple weeks, I send him a message saying, that was a really great post that you posted about life insurance last week.
Great job. Or I learned a lot. That’s gonna open the door to the conversation. So this is why this is the part you cannot outsource.
We can handle helping you write the content, have the visuals, create the zero click, you know, content from FMG side, but the engagement part, someone on your team has to to own, and that’s the part that’s going to move the needle more than anything else. Right?
Okay. I know I’m going around, back and forth, to a lot of different things because I’m trying to answer as many questions as I can. So let me go through and pull up some more questions. And while I’m doing that, I’m just going to also show you a couple examples, of other posts that have performed well.
So, again, yes, you wanna have a strategy, but incorporating current events all also works really, really well. If everybody’s talking about something and you add to the conversation, you know you’re gonna get more comments. Right? Everyone talking about the World Series, and you can talk about baseball and ask a question about, you know, what’s the number one World Series game that you remember so vividly and you have you ever been to one?
It’s not telling anybody anything about you being a financial adviser, but you’re gonna get a bunch of comments because people go to social media to engage with people, to have fun, to take a break in their day, and so they’ll engage with it. And then your next post can be something financial related. Right? So you need to have that mix.
I already showed you this one.
I mentioned sharing personal stories and how much they can help. One of the things we do in our do it for me program is we’ll often write a post and say, hey, tip. With this post, share a personal photo of x, y, or z to give you some ideas of things you can do to really personalize it. And whenever you share a personal photo, folks, you will get the most engagement more than anything else because that’s why we’re there on social media, right, to connect with other people.
And if you are thinking about, you know, what’s gonna grab people’s attention, the more you have a solid first line, you know, we should all be spending the most attention to the first line of the post because the first line has a job. It’s to get us to read the second line, and the second line’s job is to get us to read the third line. Right? So if we don’t win at line one, we’re they’re not gonna read anymore. So we really, really wanna pay attention to that very first line or first hook, if you will.
And, the example I gave before about comment family meeting if you want that, you don’t even have to have a resource to do this. So here’s a great example.
This adviser created a Canva image, seven topics to consider, you know, when you’re thinking about working with an adviser. And then he just said to people, leave a number. Like, which number is the one that’s most top of mind for you? It’s very easy for someone to say three, six, four to get some comments rather than, you know, making them type out a longer winded one.
So if you the easier you make it for people to leave a comment, the more comments that you will get. So So we talked about the algorithm a little already. Alright. I am gonna go into all your questions.
You guys have so many great, questions, and keep them coming.
Somebody Paul said, you say it only takes fifteen to twenty minutes a day to leave these comments, but I find it challenging to find even five relevant posts to comment on. That I get it, Paul. Does anybody else feel that way? Let us know in the chat that you just find that you have the same things over and over, maybe from other advisers, and you don’t wanna comment on other advisers’ posts.
So what I would do is stop going to your home page then. It’s probably based on the connections you have. And instead, go to the search the LinkedIn bar, exactly what Denise just said. So let’s say, you know, you’re working with business owners or restaurant tours or something like that.
Right? You can search I’m not gonna be able to spell restaurant tours, so that might not be good. But let’s say I’m saying restaurant manager groups, and I’m gonna look at different posts that different restaurant managers might have and then comment on these posts. And you can even filter it even further.
Right? So you can if I go to all filters here, did they post recently? What kind of content type was it? If there’s a certain company.
So maybe you want to, you know, only people that are part of a certain enterprise or group, you can do that. Or let’s just say maybe there’s a a local hospital. Right? So Penn State, that’s where I am.
Maybe Penn State Health. We wanna go to Penn State Health, and we wanna look at employees that work there. So we can go to all filters. We can say, you know, posted by.
Do we wanna just post it from first degree connections?
Do we want to have it be just images, just videos, things that were posted in the last twenty four hours? Right? And then you could filter it and get all the results and then comment that way. So that is a really good way to find things to comment on. Hopefully, that helps you.
Okay. I read through a lot of content. I don’t feel like a lot of it is adding value, so I don’t engage with it. No.
I would not engage with content that you don’t you know, the whole point is to pick and choose things. It’s kinda like imagine you go to a networking event, and there’s a bunch of people in the room and you know who’s who. You wanna pick the people to talk to that you feel like are gonna have some ROI for your business. Right?
So you wanna talk to the people that are salespeople at certain companies or decision makers at, you know, other organizations or maybe are well connected. It’s the same exact approach here.
Choose the comments to leave very wisely based upon the goals for your business.
Okay.
Let’s see. Denise said to search wine. Okay, Denise. I’m gonna take you up on that. We’re just searching wine in general.
These are okay. All different vineyards and wineries.
Interesting. So I don’t know exactly the strategy there, but, yes, I think, again, the there’s lots of different ways you can you can go about it.
Oh, she said I said that when you could not spell restaurateur.
So, again, this is you can search all different kinds of things as you can see up here. So maybe, a lot of your advisers are into pickleball. I’m sorry. Not advisers, your clients, or if they all live in a certain area.
Right? So if I search State College PA, and that might be kind of a bad one because if if I just search Cleveland, it’ll be easier. But here, I can start seeing people that are, again, through filters, work for certain companies based in State College. And now if I’m trying to target people in my hometown, I’m going to have a lot better chance looking at content in that area.
Alright.
I am going to go back here really quickly and just say a few things about optimizing your profile.
So the first one is if you don’t already and tell me in the chat. I’d love to know. Do you have a featured section currently? So remember, the goal is we’re leaving all these comments.
We’re getting these eyeballs. We want people to land back on our page and learn something about us and how we can help them. So the number one is you you want a banner at the top of the page that, you know, really kinda highlights what you do, how you help. You can use Canva to create this really, really easily.
So I have the intersection of marketing technology and financial services.
And then under your description, you want to say, you know, what you do, many any any other ac accolades you have. You also now can have a call to action. So I have book me to speak. You can say, let’s chat about your finances or learn how we help physicians retire, you know, whatever it is, and you can take it to whatever website that you want.
So all of this now is part of your LinkedIn profile, and you can click this little pen here to edit this section. Add in the call to action that you want, all that good stuff. This is the featured section I was talking about right here. So I’ve noticed a lot of people do not have a featured section, and a lot of you are saying you don’t.
So what this is is it’s highlighting your best post or your best work that you would want if someone lands on your page them to see. And I noticed that I will get comments on these posts all the time still even though they’re months old because if someone lands on my profile, they’re clicking on these and seeing what it’s all about. Right? So this one is five reasons you’re not getting any results on social media and how to fix it.
And so what you can do for this featured section is you can just come over here and you click the pen, and now you can, you know, reposition which ones go where, drag them around, or we can add new, a new featured section. So you could add a link to your favorite podcast episode you ever did. I’m a guest on a lot of podcasts. I could add one in.
You could add a link to your website. You can add a photo. Or let’s say you have a post and it performed really well like this one did. I can say, I wanna feature this post.
And on these three little dots here, I’m gonna say feature at the top of the profile.
And now when I click over to my section, there it is, the feat in the featured section. And then let’s say I’m like, oh, actually, no. I don’t wanna feature that. That’s not relevant.
I can just say remove from featured. So really, really easy to do. And somebody just brought up a good point. You do need to turn on creator mode, which is free, in order to unlock this featured section of your profile.
Okay.
Let me also show you that under your profile, the other thing I notice a lot of people do is this about section. They either leave it blank or they don’t say something of value. So the same way your bio should be a conversation starter, this is really where you wanna position yourself as an expert. Why would somebody landing on your profile want to work with you?
What what do you offer that is really interesting or different or engaging? And that should go here in your about section. Write it in first person. It should not say Samantha Russell is the chief evangelist at FMG.
It’s not your obituary, people. It is how you help people and what solutions you provide. So make sure that you have that, really, really good. So in this, slide deck here, I’m not gonna go through all of them today, but we have information on how to set up your personal and biz business pages, how to create a good banner, how to write a good headline, all of this that I briefly went over today.
And in a future session, we will talk more about optimizing your profile to get found by more people, all of that good stuff. I just wanted to point out in the FMG library, if you’re currently using, FMG, if you search under social, you will see all these different social posts that we have. And, again, you can either, you know, schedule it out in advance or post it right now, but what’s so great is any of these posts are editable.
So if you, for instance, are were in the path of the recent hurricanes, I’m so sorry if you were, you know, you could take something like this and say, this is what happened to my family or my community. Make it personal. Turn the photo into a photo, you know, of your own family and then post it. Right? So the content’s already done, but you’re just personalizing it. And then it’s still gonna go through compliance and all that good stuff, but you can schedule it out but also personalize it.
The other thing when you’re looking at, you know, the different content that we have in here, is there you’ll see sometimes there’s these ones called sequences.
So what those are is rather than it just being one post, you can see on the left, it’s actually ten different posts.
So it is happening over multiple days. So the first post goes out, and then it says delay one day. Then the second post out, delay three days. So rather than you needing to schedule out a bunch of posts, it’s a sequence of posts that every few days, one is dripped out.
And so it’s a it’s a little bit easier to set it up once, and know it’s gonna drip out over time. And, yes, you can comment and edit those sequences as well. But you’ll notice in here, when you’re looking at these, there is a mix of, of course, things that are related to specifically finance. Right? Stronger than expected job growth. We’ve got the emojis. We’ve got it really easy to scan.
But then we also have things that are not related to finance at all. So this one is about how more people can see the northern lights over time and what that might look like. And it would be great. You know, so many people on the East Coast I know had that. You could upload your own photo, but the caption is already written for you. So, again, makes it really, really easy to just share a lot lot more content.
If you are looking at all this or listening to all this and saying, okay. I wanna spend time, Samantha, doing this part. Right? I want to spend time doing the engaging, and I need FMG’s help with the content.
And, also, once I get somebody into my prospect list, I have no plan to drip on them because that’s the other thing. You can get leads from LinkedIn, but then what happens once you get them? You gotta keep dripping on them. If you get their email, you wanna put them in an email sequence, and that’s where FNG can come in.
We also have a do it for me program because for years and years, we would host these events and then tell everybody what to do, and someone would say, can you just do it for me? So, Aubrey, maybe if you would pop up the poll. If you’re interested in learning more about our do it for me program, this is where you’re paired with a concierge on our team. Every month, they meet with you.
They show you our editorial calendar. They say this is the content you should put out based on your target audience. They would help you set up events when you wanna run events. They, help you with the email sequences, your email groups for prospects and clients.
If you are interested in that, just answer the poll yes, please, and we will follow-up with you directly after today’s event, about that. So that hopefully will be helpful, and then that way we know we’re targeting the right people after the event if you are specifically interested.
Awesome. Thank you. Okay.
I know we have just a few minutes left, so many of you need to go. I’m gonna try to just answer any of the remaining questions that came in, that might be helpful for everybody else to hear. So I’m gonna share my LinkedIn page one more time.
And, again, you’re all going to get a checklist of everything we suggest you do as well as, all the slides from today. So, hopefully, that will really help you. Okay.
I answered about that.
Oh, somebody’s asking about, like, how do I monitor my own engagement? When you click into your own, profile, oops, and you see posts and activity here, this is where you can see all of your your posts themselves. But then under comments, you can see all of the different comments that you’ve left. So this is a really great way to keep yourself honest to say, how many comments did I actually leave?
You know, who have I been commenting on? So this will give you all of your activity right there. Another thing that I love to do is I come in here, and I look back at the last however many months, and I see which of my posts were the most popular. So this one, you know, three thousand impressions.
This one, nine thousand. This one, thirty five thousand. This one, twenty thousand. And if it performed really well once, it will perform really well again.
So I’ll go back through, and anything that, again, performed well six months ago, twelve months ago, I will just repurpose it. I’ll copy and paste it, maybe change the image, and I reshare it, and it will perform well again. And remember that if you’re adding new connections all the time, all those new connections will not have seen your post the first time. But, also, people don’t remember.
I mean, think about how much content is in your feed, everyone. You are not gonna remember every little word that I wrote, you know, three years ago. I have posted this image at least once a year for the last however many years, and it always, always performs well. So repurposing your content can also work, really, really well, and don’t be afraid to do that.
Alright. Let’s see what other do we things we got in the chat.
Okay. So there’s lots of people saying thank you, and this was helpful. So I really appreciate that. Again, if we’re not already connected, please connect with me here.
If you all would like to join us for workshop part two, we will try to get that set up before we send the next replay out so that you can just register from the replay email.
And the next one, I’m gonna go deeper into more tools that you can use, AI tools, our mobile app, as well as, these other third party extensions that you can use to get a deeper dive into your analytics on LinkedIn and then also, the events, how to go through your contacts and your network and invite people directly.
So we will share more of that. I know this was like drinking from a fire hose, but, hopefully, this gave you just some really good high level insight into what to outsource, you know, being able to hire FMG, a marketing company to help you with the content and the post versus what you need to handle in house yourself. And here is the QR code if you missed the poll or you just wanna learn more about working with us. We love getting to talk with all of you, hear what your marketing challenges are, and help you in any way we can. So thank you for your time today, and I hope to see you all connecting with me on LinkedIn or working with us at FMG soon. Thanks, everybody.
