In case you missed the live hangout, here's the full replay.
What We Covered:
- LinkedIn limited group messaging to 15 messages per month to group members who are not your first level connections
- LinkedIn restored the export connections feature and I showed how to use it.
- I showed how to request a full download of your entire LinkedIn account history
- I showed the process I use when accepting invitations to connect including how to tag connections and how to easily send them a simple thank you message that gets replies about 40% of the time and drives traffic to my website.
- We briefly toured the new LinkedIn ads dashboard
- I answered lots of great questions from the attendees
Here's the full transcription in PDF format
Here's the full transcription
What’s New on LinkedIn Hangout – July 31, 2015
Ted: Hey everybody, finally. It took me 25 minutes to get on. I don't know what was going on I had to try different browsers, rebooted, but it looks like we're going live. Give it a couple of seconds here. It looks like we got people coming in. There's never a dull moment with these webinars, whether it’s GoToMeeting or Hangouts. You never know what's going to happen each day. Let me share my screen here.
LinkedIn is just changing faster than ever right now. It's going crazy. Every day I log in it seems like there's different updates. What I'm going to do is just go through and share what I found and ways we can use this, and then we can answer all your questions that you have. If you have questions along the way just type them in the chat window.
Let me jump on here, and we'll share our screen here. This other window open, let's share the right screen for you here, okay, there we go. That looks better. Let's go full screen here. If you can see that okay, go ahead and type something in the chat window. What we want to do here ... I'll just take you through what I'm seeing on here, on the big updates, and then we'll take your questions.
Everybody seeing this layout here? As I scroll through this you see it's really important to have that good profile picture now because they feature you off to the side. You also want to have your professional headline because this is where you're going to grab a lot of attention. Let's get down here. I've seen ... What they'll do is they'll show you when your second level connection or your first level connections are connecting with new people.
Here are some Pulse articles that are popular today, and here are some premiums. Here, they're talking about people in your network that are rising in ranks. These are people that are being more active on LinkedIn, so you may want to start looking closely what they're sharing and see what they're up to. I saw these people, their rank has improved tremendously.
I'll show in a second how you can check your rank. It's not showing up right now. It's random, but they'll show you is when your first level connections are connecting with people then there's a button you can just connect directly with them. Now I want to see if something comes up, but then they have a feature over here when we can easily, you can just say like or you can comment on his anniversary or birthdays.
That's a really good way to get more profile views. It seems like when I like it, Dov will not get notified that I liked his anniversary and he'll look at my profile. That's pretty cool. Here I'll show you what's going on with the profile views, who's viewed your profile. This is good. With the premium account they'd give you more data.
I was on vacation here at this point. I was less active on LinkedIn but I still have profile views. Now things have really spiked up because I've been more active. I'm adding more connections, endorsing people, liking updates for people, and sharing more contents. The more active you are ... I really don't spend more than 20 to 30 minutes a day on a week like this.
I was on vacation. I wasn't doing much, but on average I spend 15 to 30 minutes throughout the day, just scrolling through, and seeing now who are these people that are viewing my profile. This is really great ways. You could just connect with these people if you're not already connected.
It then tells you what companies. This is great stuff. I've been targeting a lot of sales people lately. Here are people, different sales positions I've been targeting, and then what locations. Business owners, I target a lot, small business owners because they need to use LinkedIn. Here are some small business owners, so I could just reach out to these people.
This is really valuable. Here's how you rank for your profile views. This is like a game we play. There's a few of us here. We keep leapfrogging each other. LinkedIn takes 100 people they think are similar to you based on your profiles and they rank you for your profile views and quality of your profile. They say how much action you're getting on your profile and how active you are.
Then here you can see where you rank within your connections. This one will be great if you're at the top of that. I'm number 74, and it bounces around, depends how your connections ... I've been adding a lot of people to my network lately so it's changed a lot in the last month or 2, literally. I've almost doubled my connections since the beginning of the year.
I was very conservative about my network but I've been expanding it, so it's been working a lot better. Other things up here under interest you'll see ... There's always been companies and groups you belong to, then Pulse, education is a new thing and they've really ... This is where they're trying to get high school kids to sign up for LinkedIn and then they say what colleges they want to go to as they're looking at universities, so perspective students can actually start following companies.
Let's say I want to go to University of Pennsylvania, possibly, so they'll start following that. Then University of Pennsylvania will check out the high school person, then they you all through while you're in school. Then when you become an alumni the recruiter starts recruiting you.
They're going from high school all the way through your career, which is pretty powerful. This is great way for you to actually find people that are just coming out of school, if you want to hire people right out of college.
SlideShare, is anyone using SlideShare? I've been using it for years. You post usually just PowerPoint presentation, now you can post lots of different content there. LinkedIn bought them a couple of years ago, because it's a great content site. Then you can post that content directly in your profile from SlideShare.
You're getting lots of exposure on SlideShare, and you're getting lots of exposure on LinkedIn. As you can see, scroll through SlideShare. Definitely check out SlideShare. It's a great way to get your content seen by lots of people.
Then there is Lynda.com. I don't know if you're familiar with this site, but you can pay a monthly and LinkedIn bought them last month. Now if you want to sign up you can sign up and pay, I think it's $30 a month and you can take unlimited classes and lots of different ... If you do their $30 a month you can watch unlimited content here.
There's literally any kind of lessons, and you can post your own classes up here for your company if you want. If you want to learn Photoshop or game design, literally there's tons, data analysis, business skills, these are all online classes you can take. You can post your own content up here too. Every time people watch it you get a little percentage of it.
LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn said this is going to be a lot of the foundation of LinkedIn going forward. They want to be a content site. A one-stop shopping for people that want to enhance their careers and just trying to keep learning, which you have to do these days. You can't stop learning about whatever your industry is or your job. You got to keep learning. LinkedIn is really embracing this. Definitely check it out.
People have any questions along the way here. I'll take a couple of questions now. Robin, "Do you have to be a premium member to connect to small business owners?" No, you can do it for free. The premium account gives you more data about who's viewing your profile and it gives you some InMails if you have to use InMails to connect with people, also, a LinkedIn Open Network it's called.
Once you're a premium member you can reach out to other premium members even if you're not connected. You don't have to use InMails. Premium's worth $47 a month. I'm a big advocate about the $600 a year you spend for that. It's well, well worth it. Robin wants to do a search for small business owner. Yeah, I'll do that after I get through some of these other examples.
Farmer John says, "You can't see all that stuff with the free account." Yeah they'd give you a little taste. That's the problem. They're teasing you, but the data is very valuable. You can see who you're targeting, definitely certain job titles and companies that I target. It tells me if I'm reaching those people or if I'm reaching the wrong people.
Farmer John read an article, Lead Accelerator to bring in good revenue for the second half. Lead Accelerator? I'm not familiar with Lead Accelerators. There's a lot of third party products out there that work with LinkedIn now that lets you use the data. We can take a look at that after I show some more LinkedIn examples.
Okay. Let me show you ... See, I have ... One of the big announcements LinkedIn made this week. Here, I'll show you. If you got blog.linkedin.com you can see a lot of their updates. They don't post a lot of stuff on here. It's interesting. This came out last week, or this week actually. A big announcement that everybody's complaining they're getting way too many emails in LinkedIn, especially if you're in a lot of groups, you get the daily summaries, or the weekly summaries.
You can turn it off but most people didn't know how, where a lot are getting hundreds and hundreds of email every week from email. People are not happy about that. They've consolidated the group emails into one ... If I'm in 50 groups I get 1 email every week about my group activity. I was just watching someone's demonstration yesterday how they use groups, where what they'll do, they post content in a group between 8:30 and 9 in the morning and it would always show up in their email, summary email.
They take a few random posts, but they pull up between 8:30 and 9 in the morning. Now that tactic doesn't really work as well, since they only send 1 summary for all groups. That was a good name to get your name in front of lots of group members, if you posted and showed up in that email. Just as they scan by they would see your name. This is something they've cut for every 10 emails, they used to send, they removed 4 of them, now they're actually into a lot more.
That's good news and bad news because I do get most of my business by messaging people after we connect. We start conversations and then it turns into a phone conversation. If they start limiting the messages we can send to people we're connected with, that could be a little harder to do business on LinkedIn. We'll see what they do.
What's happened is, I'll show you my inbox. Literally, I have 500 unread messages, 90% of them are just people soliciting. They don't try to build relationships. LinkedIn has to do something about that. I was talking to someone the other day and there's a quality score for InMails. Most people don't know that, but if you use an InMail it can cost $10 to send the InMail to someone you're not connected with and they rate it.
LinkedIn did rates if they open it or they respond to it, and you get a score. They could possibly do that with messages that we send to each other, even people we're connected with. First step here was if you're not ... You used to be able to send unlimited messages to people in groups and even before I'm connected with. I'm now looking at 15 messages a month.
If you're in 50 groups you can only send 15 messages total for the whole month for people you're not connected with. I connected with a lot of people doing that, just emailing people in groups, sending them a message saying, "Hey I like your posts. Let's connect and see if we can do business together." That's a big thing for LinkedIn to do that.
Yeah, it's good to go through this. They really don't post much on this blog. It's just where they post their big announcement. They have their earnings, it just came up. This is puzzling because there was $712 million for the quarter of revenue. You think about what Facebook's generating and Google is generating, billions and billions of dollars every quarter.
LinkedIn has 380 million members now. They're basically getting about $2 per person in revenue, which is very low. They're leaving a lot of money on the table. We'll see what they're advertising. There's lots of ways they can make more money. We'll see what happens there.
Let's get into here. Here's my ... Lots of activity. The more active you are the bad news is you get more activity. The good news is you get lots more business. Here's people that has sent me invitations, 14 invitations in the last day. I'll show you how I go through them. This is one of the new features. We're actually going through your inbox.
Here are some of the messages, but let me just do the invitations. Here's the people that sent me invitations. Here's something they added back that they removed for a while. If I don't know Oren, I could reply and ask him, "How did you find me? Why do you want to connect?" It can vet people before you accept their invitation.
Most of the time I'll accept the invitation, we have 22 shared connections. It looks like he is a legitimate person. I would accept that one. Here is something ... They've recently added this. I can start a conversation right there. Before you'd have to go to a different screen and find the person you just connected with to start a conversation, but what I do, I have a Mac and I have this program called TextExpander. I have little canned messages I put it.
Here's the subject line, "Thanks for connecting." Then I'll say, "Hi Oren." I'm actually teaching my assistant to to this so I don't have to do it every day, but I have this message that I send. I say, "Thanks for connecting with me. I look forward to learning more about you and your business. If you want to connect with any on my network, I'd be happy to be a resource for you. In the meantime, if there's anything I can help you with, please don't hesitate to ask."
Then this is something I started doing a couple of week ago. "If you want to learn more about me and my business, I created a page just for my LinkedIn connections, at Ted Prodromou all LinkedIn friends." Here I send them to this page on my website where it's saying Welcome LinkedIn Connections. It's very specific to them.
They can click on here and send me a message on this graphic. I tell them a little bit about myself. They can download a free chapter of my book. I have free one-hour LinkedIn course that they can take. These are way I generate leads. Then I just say, "How can I help you? Can you schedule a call with me?" Speak at my event. I'm going to add some videos in here and some more content.
This is just a way for them to get to know about me and my business. Also, what happens is I have Facebook tracking codes on here. I'm actually building a Facebook custom audience so I can send Facebook ads to them in the future, very cheaply. It's a good way to drive people to your website, and then obviously ways you can connect. Always add your phone number, then I'll send this message to him.
That's it. Then I just go through this, and I'm actually teaching my assistant a lot of the canned messages. Here, JP Clark, I just met him. I spoke in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago in an event. He's a coach for the LA Clippers. What I would do is I'll accept because I met him. I know him. Then send him a personal message not just the standard message.
I'd start maybe with that same subject line. I would just ... Just like we're talking to each other at Starbucks. I would send him this. I can't type today. I know they are just starting out. There, that's what I do. Just go through your whole list of invitations. This is good, easy stuff for assistants to do unless you've met the person.
You have to go through these. Takes literally about 10 minutes a day, especially when you have the canned messages then you can customize the messages. I can start with the boilerplate. I have 3 or 4 different messages I can send to people in this TextExpander program just by a couple of keystrokes. Then customize it for each person. It works really, really well. I get lots more traffic to my website and my email list has almost doubled in the last 3 months since I started doing these simple little things.
In here we can see, the message is 493 unread messages. Here's a person, just connected with him. He wants me to become an SEO reseller partner, and look he's sent a mass message to people. There's a little button. If you're sending a message through all of your contacts, you can send up to 50 at a time, there's a box you can uncheck you don't see everybody else's.
Then when people start replying all to this, you start in this conversation. You can't get out of it. It's frustrating. This is probably about 90% of the messages I get. That's why LinkedIn's going to be limiting a lot of these messages.
Here is somebody I just met, connected with her. I sent her this little message, so she reached out and I can start a conversation with her and see if there's any way I could help her. She could possibly come to one of my classes. This thing is getting good response. Just a simple little message, it takes seconds to do. It's very effective.
You go through it and these people want to hire you right on the spot. Here's another one, use this thanks for connecting, they're replying. These simple little messages get a tremendous response. Here is another one. All of these are just really from that one message I sent out. Here is somebody who wants to interview me for their radio show, need your services.
Those messages keep you in front of these people, and then by sending them to you website. The fact that it's the same information that's on my website already, but what's interesting and I just say Welcome LinkedIn Friends. They, "Oh, this is just for LinkedIn people." It really gets a lot of attention. Use those messages while we still can.
Terry wants know, "Is the assistant who is helping you same office or remote location?" I actually have one assistant that's on Connecticut and another one is my daughter. She's 26, just moved back from New York. While she's looking for a job she's being my assistant to do this kind of stuff. This stuff works really well.
I've tried the offshore ones. They can do the same thing, Philippines or India. They can do the cut and paste stuff for you. Sometimes they don't know to customize certain things. It's a drawback. You pay less but sometimes you have to manage them more.
Let me see, what else do we got to cover here. Oh, exporting contacts, that was a big thing. Has anybody export their contacts in the past, and that feature disappeared. Let me show you how that's done. They removed it and everybody was just really upset, because they want to be able to export things.
What you can do is go up to this little gear under connections. Right here it says, "Export LinkedIn Connections." They took this away for about a month or 2. You could just export and then to different file formats, which is awesome because then you have all of your LinkedIn connections, all their contact information. It's very, very effective.
You can start messaging them directly from your computer. You can import contacts too. There's just so much you can do with this. LinkedIn really doesn't show you how to do this kind of stuff. I've got lots of contacts. I've connected just to test. My account is kind of a mess. I've got all these different things. I just try to connect to see how they work.
[Inaudible 00:24:40] so I can help other people do it. It's really a good thing. Oh, let me show you one more thing before I forget. This is another thing you can get a habit of doing or have your assistant do. Here, I'll accept Bryan, then I'll send my message. Let's go through the whole process, what I would do. I left that one step.
We send that and then ... Gosh, it went to a different screen that time. I'll go back to this other screen. It should've taken me back to the other screen. LinkedIn doesn't always act the way you want. Here, these are people we have just connected with. There's Bryan. I tag them so you find out what he is, an account director of so. I'm assuming he's in sales. I'll tag him as sales.
This is powerful. I created a lot of different categories for people I connect with, and I'll just tag him as management for now. You can go through and tag all these people. Chief customer officer, realtor, I connect with a lot of realtors, so I just say real estate. The advantage of doing this, I can go through my contacts and filter by the tags.
Let's say I'm doing a class on LinkedIn for sales professionals, I pick sales and here is all of the people I've tagged with sales. I can select all or select a portion of them, and then I can send them a message. You have to uncheck this box. You send them a message saying, just a nice invitation, say, "Hey, I'm doing a webinar for sales people to show them new features on LinkedIn." They could send this as a personal message to them, and then they won't see each other's contact information.
This works really, really well when you do this. You just want to make it very personal message. You can't put their first name in here unfortunately, but you could just message these people and they respond quite often from this, except when you forget to uncheck this box which is crazy. That's how we do that.
Let me do some questions. Make sure you tag all your connections. It's tedious but that's the thing the virtual assistants can do really well. The tags, you can create unlimited categories. Let me get under mine again. Here, when you click tag you can ... Okay, way too many. Okay, manage your tags, so you can delete them or you can add more here. I've got quite a few.
There's just so many different ways to categorize people, but it's really powerful because you can sort it. Like I'm going to do an event in San Francisco, I can email everybody that's in the San Francisco area and say, "I'm doing a LinkedIn live class. If you'd like to attend, here's the information." That works well.
Farmer John says, "You can create up to 200 tags." Yeah, it's really hard to manage them because of the drop-down works. If you have 200, you just have to scroll. So far, I probably got 100. Imagine scrolling through 200. There's no way to search for them to find them easily. It's something I would love to have them to add.
Kent says, "It'll be useful to have map tag identifying people you've met in person." Yeah, you could also us put notes in there Kent. If I look at Eric's, you can actually put notes how you met, how did you meet, how we met. You can put a little note here. You can put reminders or a just a regular note. This is good, then say who introduced you. It's only visible to you. That's a handy little feature too. It's a full time job keeping up with all your connections when you have thousands of connections.
Kent wants to know, "Hi, do you have your VA differentiate your personal and non-personal messages?" Yeah, I go through it first then deal with the personal ones, then just leave the rest for her to handle." Terry wants to know, "Do you have any remote log-in connection with different IP address?" Yes, LinkedIn is actually monitoring where you log in.
I've had person in the Philippines help me. The first time they log in they get a message to enter a code, then I'd have to send the virtual assistant that code. They just really don't want multiple people logging in from a lot of different places, but they're not really doing much about it yet.
I think it was under here, under setting. I actually saw this, this kind of a crap-shoot. They keep changing all these setting. The other day I saw some really cool things in here, and now, today, they're gone. If you're going down here to manage your privacy and settings, then they ask you to log in here again. Somewhere up in here where you're logged in, see where you're signed in under active session.
Here, that's interesting. I wasn't logged in from Dallas. I don't have an assistant there. It thinks my office is in San Jose, when it's really here. This is my home area. It tells you what devices you're logging in on. It's interesting. They're kind of random where they are. Haven't been to most of these places, but different location, different offices I've logged in on, or different place.
They're monitoring it, they definitely are. If they're going to crackdown it a lot, mine says I'm signed in to 30 sessions, but obviously it doesn't drop them out. I should clear those out. I was visiting Brooklyn, interesting. They are watching it. I don't know what they're going to do with that.
A couple more questions here, John wants to know about small business owners too, but you need premium. Let me do some searches and show you that, why it's worth the $600 a year. Go to Advance Search. At the Advance Search, everything in yellow here is premium. If I want to search company size, so I want to work only with companies under 50 what I would do is search second connections maybe and group members.
I'm looking for a small business owner, current. There's 129,000 people with that company size that are either second level connections of mine or group members. This is great. You can start reaching out to these people. Here's a shared connection, then I could find out who I'm common. Adam, I could just contact him and say, "Adam could you introduce me to James?"
Here we've got 11 shared connections. This is how you find small business owners or smaller business. You have to search different titles too because they don't have owner in there, sometimes they'll have CEO, or you can just leave the title out and do that search. These are all people that work for a company under 50 employees that are second level connections and group members. These are ways you can reach out to these people. Let me get rid of the group.
It's important to join a lot of groups, especially bigger groups because it expands your searchability through here. It says there's almost a million people, or 924,000 people. Interesting that Reid Hoffman would show up as the company size of under 50. It's not perfect, but the advantage of the premium account is you get all these extra fields to search on.
Then, also, this is the biggest advantage of the premium account, you can save those searches. Now I can save 5 searches. Here is, in the last week I found 310 people that have coach. I work with a lot of coaches and I work with a lot of sales people. These are specific searches that I've set up that run 24 hours a day. You see how many leads I got just this week, which is way more than I need. Basically it comes with the premium account.
Here's 307 people, sales executive, and that's all the results, lots of people that are in sales that I can reach out to connect with and help them with LinkedIn. Sales people are always wanting to learn about how to sell more using LinkedIn. Robin, no, you don't need a premium account to do small business searches ... Well, yeah, actually if you want company size you do.
You could get around that by targeting keywords, but the easiest way is the company size or join groups that are target just small business owner. Then connect with people through that. Let's what else we got, there's the big things. The ads too, if you're on LinkedIn Ads, they totally, totally changed the interface last week. I do a lot of ads for clients, when I get on one day and it's like wow, everything is different.
It's getting a little slow here. Here are some ad accounts. They just totally changed the whole look of this. You probably haven't seen this before unless you run ads. It's a whole different look. I'm still trying to figure some of it out. Hopefully it'll be better. Just for ads we've been running. Anybody have any specific questions other than we've shown. Let me get back to you.
The search, you see how easy it is. One problem here is you used to be able to customize the messages and it's pretty random, like here. See, it automatically sent the invitation, so I didn't have the chance to customize it. I could do an InMail, but I really don't need to use an InMail I could find out what group she belongs too. Let's say I want to connect with her.
A lot of times if you just view their profile they'll connect with you too. I could send her an InMail, you always have to check this little drop-down. You can get introduced if you have a common connection. You can save her as a contact, but sometimes they give you the option to customize the message by just sending a message or we could just look at her groups.
She doesn't have her groups displayed. Join the same and start building your relationship, connecting with them there. Right here, so just by doing these Advance Searches and saving them you're going to have ... You can set it up to find only small business owners or people in small businesses owners or people in small businesses with certain job titles and automatically they send you these leads every week.
She's not sharing groups either. Terry wants to know, yes the replay link will come automatically to you in the follow up email. I think it's in 3 hours, it shows up. Let's see if Bill has groups. Nobody's showing their groups here, they're hiding them. He's got a pretty incomplete profile, only 5 skills. This is somebody I would probably reach out to.
Connect with him and then ... he's a sales manager but he's got very little information in his profile. I saw that more and more people check out your LinkedIn profile before they do business with you, or if going to meet with you, they're definitely going to look at your profile. If you have an incomplete profile like this and you're in sales people have a little lower perception of you. It's just the way it is, because they're expecting to find out some information.
He's a mortgage sales manager, mortgage and loan office, not much information, not much skills. He's in the mortgage industry, doesn't mention about mortgages or finance in here. Here are loans. Here, I'd have him move this stuff up higher because those are the ones you want to feature. Okay, any other questions?
Charles, export connections, let me show you again real quick. Go to Connections, just the top menu item, don't go to add connection. You'll see this little gear over here. All these little hidden things, you can add a contact here. Here is Settings, and right here you can export LinkedIn connections.
Another way to do it, this is what they made us do. I'm not sure why this exists. You can actually have your whole account exported. Request an archive of your data, this ... Any time you've posted in a group, the whole time you've been in LinkedIn, everybody you've connected with, any messages you've sent, you can request this archive date.
They'll send it to you. It takes anywhere from 24 to 72 hours. It's just a bunch of spreadsheets compiled with tons of information. All the contacts, all your connections with full contact information, it's actually a goldmine of information. That's 2 ways to get all of your information.
Do I do this all manually, Steve wants to know. I have my assistant do a lo of it. It's just too much to do every day, but I set up those automated searches. Since I only work with a handful of people at a time for clients, I don't really use the 300 leads a week I get. I'll connect with those people because you'll never know. I'll have my assistant start connecting with those people.
Let me go back and show you how easy it is. I can't believe our department's dream come true. Doug wants to know where do you find someone to fix or update your LinkedIn profile. Funny you should ask Doug I have a ... Actually this weekend there's a flash sale where I go through your profile, I do a full video review of it with recommendations and then I send that to you, and then we schedule a time to go through it on a one on one call, then we update your profile.
We update your professional headline. We update your skills. We update your summary. We go through your whole profile and do that. If you're interested, instead of $497, it's $297 right now. You should get an email about that, for that sale. If you have one, email me at ted@TedProdromou.com. I can show you some sample profiles I've done in the past.
Let's see. Go to TedProdromou.com LinkedIn makeover and that's where you can find that. Let me post that in the chat. To that we do ... You get about a 15 to 20-minute video of your profile depending how complete your profile is. I'll help you find out who you're targeting. If you want to do Advance Searches, I'll help you set those up. It's very comprehensive, then you get one on one time follow up. I follow up a month later to make sure you update it, because most people don't do it.
Bev Lasrado, yes there is an email. You'll get an email from the system automatically. Farmer John, "Do I post messages and comments in your groups?" Yes, I used to post a lot in groups and be very active. To be honest I've been lazy, and I haven't done as much because, probably, 99% of the stuff posted in groups, people are just blasting content they're not really having conversations anymore.
The advantage of posting it, you might show up in that LinkedIn summary email. Now that's a moot point since they only send one a week for all your groups. The groups do work but I try to find groups that actually have conversations going on, which could be quite challenging. Let me show you some of the groups.
If you're in sales, Jill Konrath has a really good group. We actually have conversations. If you look at them, a lot of them don't have a lot of conversations. Here's 86 discussions, 96 updates here, 10 job postings. You have to join Fresh Sales Strategies, that was a good one. Jill moderates that really well.
If you're in sales, this is a good one. She's always posting good content, and then people are actually having conversations. This is one of the best groups I belong to. It's not that big. It's only got, 14, almost 15,000 members. There's real conversations instead of people just blasting content. That's one of the things LinkedIn is trying to crackdown on is people who's just blasting content.
I'm from Hootsuite, I can just blast articles and content into group, but it doesn't add any value to the group. Think about using LinkedIn as you're sitting face to face with somebody at Starbucks having a cup of coffee. Use that same tone, in conversational tone and show genuine interest in learning more about them and helping them.
It makes a huge difference, because ... I'll show you some of these other groups. People would just blast content. Here Media Professionals Worldwide, this has 400,000 members. This is interesting. This guy has this comment, Introduce Yourself and 17,000 people have done it. Here, people are just putting content up there. Maybe it's useful content. A couple of people have actually comment on this, just self promotional.
Most of the groups here are just like this. People are just blasting content. A few people may like it, one comment. Find those groups where people having real conversations. It's much more effective. The fact that you can only limit ... Now you can only send 15 messages to group members, that's a different way. I used to connect with people, so now I have to go away from that strategy.
A lot of times I just view people's profiles. Actually here, so these are people. I've viewed some of their profiles, and they come back and say, "Oh, I see you viewed my profile. How can I help you?" That's a really effective way. Take care of this kind of person. I don't know about these banners and the stars. I think that just tacky.
This stuff, most of these are big scams. This one maybe has some, Blog Talk Radio, Amazon. I've been to all of those places but this kind. This is just a scam. If anyone tries to sell you package where you get this banner to put on your picture don't do it. They charge you like $1,000 to $2,000, and what they do, they send out a press release with your name in it.
A lot of these affiliate stations for NBC and CBS pick it up automatically off the internet and they post it on their website. They post the press release. Then these guys say, well now you can say you were seen on CBS because you were on some really small TV station in Montana, posted into their website. You can say you were on CBS. Don't do that. Don't fall for that trick. It's just a scam. This looks so tacky to me.
John wants to know, "To post promotions to get people to view your profile." I don't know anyone that actually looks at promotions tab in groups, maybe you do. We get so many promotions every day. I've got 500 messages in my inbox, most of them promotions. I don't think anyone does it. A lot of groups, if you post certain things like inviting people to a webinar they'll move it in to promotions, and very few people for that stuff anymore. I know, I haven't had much luck recently. I used to, but they're to limit spam in the groups.
Something they implemented a couple of years ago with the groups, if you get flagged by a moderator in one group, that means every post you do in any group has to be approved by the moderators. I've had some people that posted a lot in there, and now they've been flagged. They have a really hard time. They have to find the one particular moderator that flagged them and get them to remove that block.
Treat it like you're face to face with somebody. You don't want to meet with somebody, you go to a networking event or a conference, and have people selling to you. People don't go to LinkedIn or networking events or conferences to buy products, usually we go to sell our products, or meet people that would buy our products. Think from that perspective.
Kent wants to know, "Any other suggestions for profile pictures." Get a professional headshot. Spend the money. Look this guy's got behind a wall. He's standing behind the wall. These people, they're not the right size. These are professional pictures here. They make a good first impression. That's the first thing people see in your profile.
As you're scrolling along, your profile picture shows up right here in the news feed and find a place where there is on the sides. The system's getting slow again. Let's have a look at Jill's. This is the first impression you get. Eye-tracking studies prove it. They see this, then they're going to look over her. Then also do this back banner to get their attention.
Then you also are going to show up here in common with Jill. You're going to show up and these people are similar to Jill. This is where people are going to see you. They see your picture so you want a good professional picture so they can see that you are a professional. Then, also, people similar to Jill will show up in the sidebar and a lot of places.
It's not showing up right here. It depends on what screens you're on. Definitely spend the money. You can get one anywhere from 100 or a couple hundred dollars get a profile picture done. Make that good first impression.
Okay, I think we got through all the questions. If you want to do that profile makeover I'd be happy to work ... There just doing one for Johnny Rodgers, the Heisman Trophy winner. I'm helping him with his LinkedIn profile. He wants to get more speaking engagement. That'll be fun. If you go to TedProdromou.com/LinkedIn-profile-makeover, we can get that for special this weekend.
Thanks everybody, the replay will be posted. You'll get an email from the system in a couple of hours. Thanks for coming. We'll see you on the next one.
