Lessons

Lesson Info

Class Introduction

We're gonna talk about my favorite topic in the world, which is LinkedIn. How many people have or are on LinkedIn? Woo, look around real quick, social proof, nice. Anybody not raise their hand? Great, all right, yeah, perfect. Sorry, this is gonna be a really awkward class. But hopefully I do my job well and you like it. So, we're gonna go through a few things today. We're gonna go through LinkedIn. I wanna build a case for why you two lovely people should be on LinkedIn, why you should pay attention to it, maybe some stats that you may or may not know. I also wanna get into optimizing. So, not only are you on LinkedIn, but there are ways to do it right and do it well and get the most out of it. I also wanna talk about growing. Growing is big, growing your influence, growing your user, like, user, no, growing your connections, more so, so growing all your connections, make sure you're connecting with the right people. I also wanna talk about leadership, thought leadership, what it look...

s like to distribute content, to position yourself as a thought leader if you have something new to say, because not everyone's a thought leader, but we can also follow them, we can share their knowledge, we can learn from them and then, you know, take it and make it our own. And then finally, the habits, right? The things that we do on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis to get the most out of this platform. Does that sound good with everybody? Great, so here we go. There's a big difference from being on LinkedIn and using it, and I think we just, how many people here feel like they totally use it to the fullest it is optimized? Look around again. Now, how many people are on LinkedIn, raise your hand? Yeah, okay, good, so I'm in the right place. And it's not just you, okay? There are about 546 million people on LinkedIn, so the majority of them are all like you. They're like, "Yeah, I'm on there, I got a profile picture. "That's it, that's all I got, I don't know what else to do!" So, we're gonna get into that a little bit today. I'm gonna teach you how to actually use LinkedIn to your advantage. So, there's a lot of different things, a lot of different words, and people will describe it in different ways. So, I've heard it described as a credibility place. Like, this is where I'm gonna show you I went to Harvard, I have more connections than just myself, and my neighbor, and my mom. Right, like I have things I'd like to show you, and I've done professional, I have accreditations, et cetera. People have also thought about it as a brand. Like, my personal brand, okay? My personal brand that I am a great speaker, I wanna get an idea out in the world. They also use it for trust. That comes up a lot. Like, if I connect with you, it means that I trust you a little bit more than when you were an absolute stranger. So, stranger danger, right? Jobs, people get jobs on there. For how it started, it was definitely a resume site. I mean, you were like, "Hey, I wanna get a job, "this is where my online resume lives." That's what LinkedIn was for a really long time. It's evolved a lot, but you still can get jobs on there. There are tools that they make it so easy for you to connect, look for jobs, look for people that you want to employ. It's a fantastic place for that. Leads. Anybody out there own a business or work for a business? Yeah, okay, great, that's all of us, right? Some of us are like, "I own it!" I don't know. "I'm a freelancer, I'm a barista." So, basically, you can also do leads, and leads are fantastic because they're people that you wanna connect with to eventually become your customer, or your client. Partnerships, gosh, can't do it alone, right? And a lot of the times, we feel like we get cagey, and we don't, we wanna kind of get to a level, we have a vision for where we want our business, our life to go, and partnerships are actually a way to expedite that. But to connect with the right people, and to be able to look at their situation, and their business, and make sure that it's a really good opportunity for us. And then knowledge, right? I go on and I think every day, my routine is I wake up, I clean the throw up off of my two-year-old or my four-month-old, right? And then I go and I read LinkedIn. I read the news feed, I read articles, I consume it constantly. In fact, I have a ton of books in my office. I spend a lot of time reading on LinkedIn. Content. It's an amazing place to distribute content. Take content you've already written. Blogs, yes, other photos, or anything, videos that you've done, it's a great place to distribute it. And then you're also building out your network. You're building out a trusted network of people that you wanna connect with that you've personally met, or people that you've met online and you've built up relationships with, and people that you want to build relationships with. Support. A lot of times, we, anybody in here an owner of a company? Yeah, at the top, it's hard to really complain this way, right? It's hard to be like, "Excuse me, support person, "I just had a really hard day." Right, it's not like that. You're looking for peers. So, you wanna connect with people that are like-minded, that are also business owners, that are also kinda in the stage of life you are, and you're looking for those people that you can have peer to peer relationships with. And you can get that support, you can get the affirmation and get a lot of that. And then, even dating. I know this is funny to say this out loud, but it's one of the only ungated places. It's like, if you go to Instagram, you have a private account, if you go to Facebook, you can have a private account. You can't have a private account on LinkedIn, so everything is out there for everyone. So, if you're swiping left or right, I don't know what we do these days, up, and all of a sudden you go and you look at these people, you can check out their whole life. So, I, and the only reason why I say that is I've asked my teams about this a million times and they're like, "Yeah, we use LinkedIn "for dating all the time," and I'm like, "What do you mean? "What are you talking about?" He expanded and they're like, "Yeah, yeah, "I check them out, make sure they're a decent person, "they have a job, that's a good one, right?" So yeah, so here are the facts about LinkedIn. Some of the ones that have stood out to me that really made me, that's been crystal clear for why we should pay attention to it. So, if you're not active on LinkedIn, you are missing 80% of your leads. 80%, because the actual research that they did was, the studies show that 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn, and 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content. 94% B2B here, okay? Let's keep going. On average, 46% of social media traffic coming to B2B companies is from LinkedIn. Is that surprising? Half, almost half of all social media traffic is coming from this giant, this LinkedIn, this platform, right? And again, like I said before, 546 million people, 200 countries, and two every second join this network. 546 million people on this thing, y'all! So look, okay, so, I'm not from Texas. I live in Texas now, and I've been really trying to put this whole Texas motif on a little bit. I have a pair of cowboy boots. I don't wear them that often, but when I do, I kind of like to embody it, so you'll hear me say this. I'm trying to do, instead of saying "you guys" all the time, "y'all" just sounds right, so for our purposes today I'm gonna say "y'all." All right, 260 million LinkedIn users are logging in every month. Okay, so not only the 500 million, but you've also got 260 million of those people are logging in every single month, so they're actively using the platform. And we have 40% of those using it daily, right? So it is very active. It's becoming more and more active. LinkedIn has a user goal, so they're not done. 546 million sounds like a lot. In fact, most people would be like, "Wow, hey, we've arrived." But their goal is actually three billion, three billion people. That means, and their goal is to have every single person a professional in the world who has a job to be able to have a profile on LinkedIn. That's their goal. That's a pretty ambitious goal. So, the reason why I say that is that 546 is still a work in progress. It means that it's not too late. You all that sat there and said, "Hey, I'm on LinkedIn, "but I haven't optimized it, I haven't used it." Some of us aren't, but even then you're like, "Well, maybe it's I'm just too late into this whole thing." There were some early adopter people like Marcus up there. Like, they get it, they use it. No, the time is now, it really is, because it's only picking up momentum toward that three billion mark. Millennials, let's talk about 'em. I always laugh because it seems to be a hot topic right now. What are they like? How do we get to them? How do we get in front of them? What are we gonna do? They're online, they're running the world! Yes, there are two billion of them, okay? Two billion millennials, and they're hangin' out. 87 million of them are active on LinkedIn, and they're talking about stuff they like, right? If you wanna get in front of a millennial buyer group, there's no better place than just to go on LinkedIn and start scrolling through the feed, because everybody's talking about it, and most of the people who use it are, on an active daily basis, are millennials, right? So, if you're sitting there thinking about how to target them, they're talking about it. And it also goes against what a lot of people think about millennials, since LinkedIn is a professional site. Believe it or not, millennials are professionals. (laughing) Believe it, believe it or not. And they care about where they're going in their careers, and they're showing up more, and more, and more, and a lot of the data shows that they're continuing to be that on LinkedIn. 63 million unique mobile users monthly. So, mobile's becoming a massive piece for any platform. I'm gonna show you in a second as I work through this deck that there are a lot of tools that LinkedIn continues to make and bake into their platform that are making it more friendly on that side, and helping yoU to understand how to be able to pull out your phone and capture something and be able to explore the platform mobilely. But 63 million unique mobile users monthly is a fantastic thing, and growing and moving into that space. So, there is an opportunity here, if you do focus on mobile, to be a part of that early movement as well. Nine billion content impressions in the LinkedIn feed every week. Nine billion. Now, here's the crazy part. So, if you do the math there, that's 460 billion per year, just content impressions. That's people sharing content, right? Or distribution, or where it shows up on the platform. And heres' the crazy part: so, only three million share content weekly. So, are you doing some more math in your head right now? Yeah, me too. So that means that 530 million total, 530, that's 550 million people total on LinkedIn, 250 million monthly users, three million are actually sharing content, which is 1%. So, for us, if you're putting that together, that means that three million people are getting nine billion content impressions. Are you sitting there going, "Should I share content on LinkedIn?" The answer is yes, okay? The answer is 100% yes, because you can get ahead of this now. Now, remember, three million people are the only people sharing content. Three million, and nine billion impressions, which will only grow, and getting in right now into this content game is massive, right? That is a holy crap, wow moment of, like, "What did I just?" Anybody here blog at all? A couple people, great. Yeah, anybody else distribute content, share content in a different way, video, et cetera? Yeah, so using, has anybody used it for LinkedIn, has anybody distributed on LinkedIn? A couple people, right, yeah! So, I want you to understand you can get in now, okay? Also, just some more stats for you, just platform comparison. I'm not saying Facebook and Twitter aren't great, or Instagram's not great, or any of that stuff, but I'm talking about LinkedIn now, so I can rep it a little bit. 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn first, 13% on Twitter, 7% on Facebook. So, do I have your attention now about LinkedIn? Does this feel like? You feel like we should probably be paying attention to it a little bit and trying to figure out how to use it? Perfect.