Podcast

Social Media Strategy with Abby Kelsey, episode 2

In LinkedIn Best Practices part two, featuring the brilliant Abby Kelsey, we delved deep into the art of engagement and the power of meaningful commenting in the digital sphere. From sparking conversations to building genuine connections, Abby shares invaluable strategies to elevate your online presence.

Full Transcript

[Music] Welcome to the Solspace podcast. Thanks for listening.

Mitchell: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Solspace podcast. With me again today, thankfully, is Abby Kelsey with Always Social. Abby, you're my go-to LinkedIn expert. You and I met one another through another colleague that I met at a conference recently. And you and I had a conversation that sort of opened my eyes into, first of all, the reality that is LinkedIn. My company serves the industrial manufacturing space in the form of web development, web solutions. We have other clients elsewhere, but that's really the focus right now. This space, the industrial sector, they're obsessed with LinkedIn. Everybody seems to be on it and they have a lot of faith in it, and they use it as an effective tool. So we were previously talking about kind of some overview topics about how you approach your work with your client base and how you are trying to ask and answer questions about marketing, branding. When it comes to social, LinkedIn in particular, you're trying to answer questions about why, why are you as a client, you ask your clients, why are you here? Why are you going to use LinkedIn? What are your expectations? What do you want to get out of it? And you try to press them for a really good answer there because everything seems to flow from that. And we ended the last episode talking about two examples, my company, one, and the second example was a prospective client that I was talking to just last week.

He and I were talking about LinkedIn and how we underutilize it, and we feel like we should do a better job of using LinkedIn to support our businesses. And one of the things that we ended up with, you were walking through how you help your clients determine why are you here and what do you expect from it, and trying to get them sort of motivated and fired up to engage with the platform. And you asked a question that all of a sudden piqued my interest, which is to say, what is it that you want your target customer to know that they don't know, and how can you use LinkedIn to educate them about that stuff that you think is so essential and obvious they should know, that matters so much to you that they don't seem to be aware of? So if I understood you right, do I have us going off in the right direction on where to take this conversation next?

Abby: Yes, absolutely. And I'm excited to be back and excited to dive into a little bit more of the strategic mindset and even strategy that you can utilize on LinkedIn as you're getting started to be more active.

Mitchell: Okay, great. So let me, let me lead in here with this client I was talking to that I've been thinking about, about him quite a bit over the weekend. On his website, he makes it clear that he has specific products that are ready to go, designed, ready to be put into manufacture for the power and utility space. And, in addition to that, his business is capable of contract manufacturing, which is to say, his team is capable of taking a specification from a client, or helping a client develop a specification for something to build, create, fabricate, and they can do that on contract. And what he emphasized with me on that was the terms of those kinds of contracts for fabrication and manufacturing was sort of bespoke custom activity is that if what you produce and deliver to the client, to the customer, does not meet specifications within the tolerances that have been indicated, that it's rejected. All that time and money that you spent producing that and sending it over to the customer, they reject it. And you lost all that money. He says, because of that, there's a lot of pressure on my team to be really excellent, to be excellent craftspeople in the work that they do. He emphasized that that translates into the products that they produce for the power and utility space, because that's not necessarily a priority there. Craftsmanship is not necessarily a big deal in that space. And he thinks it matters a lot. He's opinionated. He got fired up, almost started yelling at me about it. I have similar opinions about how websites ought to be used in the industrial manufacturing sector. So, with that as a background, how would you take that with one of your clients and run with it and turn that into a strategy for how to employ LinkedIn or perhaps some other channels?

Abby: What you get fired up about, what you love to talk about, that goes back into what your objectives are, like we talked about last time. So with LinkedIn, we'll use Marketing Directors in the manufacturing space. For you, that's a great example of you want to help educate them on what a strategic website can do for their business and why it's important. So that, that becomes that kind of piece one, part of your objective. Why, for your client that you talked about, why handcrafted matters. What is the difference? All of that becomes a part of the who you are, the why you do it, who you do it for. And, so that one little piece you have it as an objective, you then use that and you look at your profile and you say, does my profile talk about this? Does it answer that question? Does it tell people how I'm trying to educate Marketing Directors and how I work with them? You know, you kind of use that backwards and start to use that and put that into your profile, really creating that audience-centric profile. A lot of people, what they do is they think of LinkedIn profiles as more of their resume. That's not what we're doing here. Really, your LinkedIn profile should be similar to like of a website, you're walking them through your whole story and telling them more about who you are, who you serve, what you offer and, and what makes you unique. So you then get to do bring that into your profile. And we'll get into this in a minute, but also that one single objective of trying to educate Marketing Directors on the importance of a website, that now then goes into your content strategy on LinkedIn. It also helps you then navigate who you start to connect with. You're going to start connecting, and reaching out, and building your network with Marketing Directors in manufacturing. You know, so this one little piece, literally then starts to build all of the rest of your strategy for LinkedIn.

 Mitchell: Draw a circle around profile, aLinkedIn profile. What, what's included in your description of profile?

Abby: So your LinkedIn profile is when they land on that, that page that is LinkedIn slash your name. That entire thing needs to be optimized. I divide this into three different areas. I call it first impression. So within landing on your page, within three seconds, what can people tell about you? That typically has to do with your profile picture, your banner image, and then your headline. So this is a whole, I don't want to get too, too tactical, but if you're someone out there, or if you yourself simply just have your title as your headline, we need to update this. That is something we need to use that area to explain more to your audience about what you do and what you specialize in.

So then you have the first impression as you go down the page, we look for ways to build credibility. So I have a whole section that focuses on how you build credibility with your audience, and then your experience. So this is, those pieces are of LinkedIn are what experiences do you have that nobody else can duplicate? That is your uniqueness, so that could be things such as where you love to volunteer, projects that you've worked on, the experience within your past jobs. Those are things that we really then make unique and bring out those more resume-ish type builders into that section. But the rest of it should be focused on your audience and your clients.

Mitchell: I feel like I tricked you into giving me a bunch of free consulting and that wasn't really the intention, but, I'm not going to stop you. I'm not going to stop you from doing this. The sort of way that you've defined your practice and how you serve your clients, it's just really valuable. I mean, myself and this client I was talking to, we both feel the same way about LinkedIn. We're overwhelmed by it. We know that it's a necessity. I even had someone posting on my behalf for half a year because it was just like, I don't like social media at all, but I can't deny the power of it. And what you said of why, why are you here? What do you expect out of this? When we couch it in the terms of what do you get annoyed about, Mitchell, that your Marketing Director, manufacturing, industrial manufacturing clients don't know about, that they should, then I'm motivated. Then I want to show up and tell them something or show them something. I sort of feel like I had this insight when I was at the conference where I was mentioning that I met Danielle, who is our connection. At that conference, we were in a bunch of presentations like you see at the conferences. And I was imagining everybody around me were prospective clients, all Marketing Directors in the industrial space. It was like, how next year, can I reach these people? What would I present on? Like, what would I talk about? And it dawned on me that this market is so underserved by my discipline, the digital discipline, web development, our kind of web developments, complicated, highly integrated websites that interact with a whole bunch of other systems. What could we bring to a market that's so underserved? And I realized that a really simple message might resonate. And for me, this would translate to LinkedIn too. It's basically anything on the theme of, did you know. Like, did you know that you could do this on a website next week? Did you know you could do this on a website? Did you know that this is available? Did you know how inexpensive this is? Did you know that this is a best practice? Like, I could stay motivated for years just communicating that stuff with people out there. If I knew that I was helping one or two Marketing Directors at these agencies, whether they hired us or not, I would feel satisfied. So let me ask you, am I on the right track? And the other question I want to ask you is, one of the things I'm seeing as, as I focus on marketing and branding questions is the simpler, the better. When I find a way to simplify a marketing strategy, I can see that that's progress. I wonder what you think about those two things.

Abby: Yes, absolutely. So you are 100 percent on the right track. And the reason why is because you just talked about how do you provide value to your network? That's what you just described. How do I share value? How do I share my expertise so that somebody else can utilize that to help them in their job? When you start to approach your content like that, that is what people are attracted to. That's what people want to engage with because it is that, wow, this is great. I'm going to save this for later because I need to come back to this, or I've never thought about something like that, or I didn't even know that was possible. Those are types of feelings and going back to that brand.

Remember we talked about brand in the last episode with Coca-Cola and how does your brand make you feel, right? That's a part of that feeling. They already then are starting to build trust with you. You are the person who is letting them know how they can do something better, educating them on things that you've spent years learning about, and you're summarizing it and giving it to them for free.

That is how you start to build trust and authority on LinkedIn. And I want to add in, you also have your niche. You're not just going in and talking one day about this, one day about that. You have that, that target audience in mind that you can continue to create content for. So absolutely on the right path for that.

The second piece I would say the more you can simplify anything, I personally think the better. Anyone can Google what's included into a marketing plan and get this big, long list of things and questions we have to answer. But if we can take that and we can simplify it for a specific objective or business, that's really when it starts to get less overwhelming. I think a lot of times, and I want to say the same thing for LinkedIn, so many times people are overwhelmed when they get on the platform because they don't have a simplified plan to kind of work off of, of one step at a time.

And here's what you need to know. So that's personally what I do. I try to, on my platform, on LinkedIn, share with people what to focus on. How do you simplify your LinkedIn strategy? And so I definitely think there is power in trying to simplify things for your audience, because they're not in that world every day.

So it's, it's kind of, you know, the more you can simplify it down and make it so that they can easily understand it, not only them, but then take it to the next level that they need to and feel confident in explaining something. I think that's huge. And you just, you gave an example of how you could do that for websites.

How do you put that in the language that a Marketing Director understands, but then also can go advocate for, to their executive level.

Mitchell: Let me ask you this. One of the things we're sort of, um, kind of skirting around is this question of being overwhelmed. And I can definitely vouch for LinkedIn feeling overwhelming to me. The client I was talking to, he feels the same way. The evidence is he hasn't posted at all. It doesn't use the system at all. One of the things I've noticed as I've spent probably the last, well, quite a few years, but certainly the last six months really intensively focusing on marketing and sales activity and strategy at Solspace. One of the things I've noticed is how overwhelmed that discipline feels to me compared to how not at all overwhelmed I am by solving problems on a website. And I, I can remember some occasions in my career where clients have come, because we have an expertise in a certain platform they're using, they've come to us with an emergency, like the website is literally crashing as they're talking to me on the phone. There's, and they're like, it just happened again. The website crashed again. We're totally overwhelmed. We cannot have this happen. We're losing major amount, like it's panic. It's really overwhelming. But for me, it's not. It's not scary at all, because I totally know where to look. I know what log to check. I know what to log into. I know how to troubleshoot and isolate the problem.

It's just it's not scary. I was totally calm on the call. And they still talk about those moments. I feel the same way about marketing, marketing and sales. There's so many different things you could do. The strategy is so diverse. There's so much that can change over time. How do you track it? What are the tactics? Totally overwhelming. But when I talk to people who have some expertise in it, like you're talking about how to structure it, how does take the first step and the second and the third, uh, there is that sort of phenomenon. So the reason I bring that up is I want to know on LinkedIn, what strategy do you recommend to to do these two things simultaneously, which is reach into that client's pain point. Like I know you're frustrated and overwhelmed by the website, or I know you're frustrated by the crummy stuff you have on all of your substations in so and so region. And I know it hurts and it's overwhelming, but relax. Let me tell you how you can solve it. Let me tell you how you fix it. Like, how do you approach that question? If it makes any sense at all.

Abby: Yeah. So I think when we think about, how do we approach that when we feel that overwhelm? It's how do you simplify it? Like we just talked about. So, for example, instead of telling your audience, here's how you fix something. Maybe it's how do you identify something is going wrong? Like, how do you really put it in terms of like, how do you know you need a new website?

Here's a checklist for you to look at versus here's why you need a new website. So again, it's that how do you get them engaged? How do you get your audience engaged and just thinking differently? I will, one of my biggest things that I love to do is when I can get a sales team to just start thinking a little bit differently about LinkedIn. That is exact, like that's when I win. So I, I think it's, necessarily, it's yes, educate, it's, it's simplifying, it's educating, but then also it's getting them to think differently about a problem, and then you provide that simplified solution for them. So that would be kind of, you know, that would be my approach to something like that.

The sales and marketing example you use for, um, you talked about. Sales and marketing is a huge area to focus on. So when you get overwhelmed, when you need to dive into that, we'll focus, what is the one thing with sales and marketing, and maybe it's your own internal process, maybe it's just the alignment in general. What's that one thing that you can hone in on then start to learn about, really understand, and then you can expand to the next thing.

Mitchell: Okay. Well, let's get tactical because we're, we're at a place where I can ask you some questions like we, we haven't even touched on the fact that with social media platforms, you have an ability to measure, and to validate, and to assess whether your efforts are successful or not, whether there's traction, whether there's interest, whether you're, you know, your connections are increasing or they're flat or whatever. Not only that, but there's also the tactical question you talked about what the LinkedIn profile is and why that matters. But we haven't talked at all about the different forms of content and publication that are possible on LinkedIn and tactically, which one of those matter and which of those you don't think is important, like what goes into that tactical mix? Let's imagine someone like me who is, has barely ever used LinkedIn, just now starting to take it seriously. What should I be doing? Should I be doing video? Should I be posting just articles? Like what, what's the mix there and how do you track it? How do you measure success?

Abby: Yes, that is a great question. That's also a very loaded question. So I'm going to kind of take it step by step. So let's talk about the content piece first. There are so many different ways that you can post on LinkedIn. You can use long-form content, which is just simply typing out. You see the see more, there's no image or video included.

You can post images, multiple images, you can post a single image, you can even do a PDF, you can do video, polls. So when we think about the types of content that the platform lets you utilize, we have a ton. So what I like to think about is, when you're creating a post, what is the purpose of your post? If it's to simplify something, maybe you do need an image that then goes along with that context that that simplifies it for them and they can visually see it. If it's something more of a step-by-step process, I think then we'd use a PDF, so the PDF is kind of similar to the Instagram carousel where you can scroll through.

So if you upload a PDF into a one-to-one image size to LinkedIn, it will act kind of like that Instagram scroll. So that can tell a story. If it's here's five things that you need to know, or you need to check, tell it in a story. If it's something that is going to be more engaging and a little bit longer content, use video.

So really think what is my message and how do I want my audience to consume it? What's going to make it easiest for them to consume. That's then how you pair what type of creative would go with it. And I think this is an area of people overthink so much. If you aren't versatile, and let's say you don't have a creative team, you don't have anyone to create graphics or that PDF, and that's not something you want to learn how to do, then just focus on video or long-form content.

You don't need all of the creative expertise in order to produce that type of content. So that's kind of where I say from the content perspective is really think about how do you want your audience to consume that specific post content and what's the purpose of it.

 Mitchell: How do you track? 

Abby: So with that, there's different paid versions of LinkedIn, so what you can see will vary based on what version of LinkedIn you have. But LinkedIn gives you all of that information. You can see how your content is performing. So an example of that if I posted a pdf, and my goal was to get people to scroll through that PDF to learn something that was the purpose of the post, I'm going to go see what is my engagement rate? What's my click through rate? Those are the types of things I'm going to measure. If it's something more for awareness where you just want people to see the video, or, really spend time and read your full post, then you're going to look at also impressions. Are you reaching more people with that type of post? And so when you start to post more consistently, what you're able to do then is say, okay, what posts are actually performing really well? What ones are not performing well? And that's going to be based on mainly your engagement rate and the amount of impressions that your post is reaching.

Mitchell: Okay. So you, you touched on the fact that LinkedIn has some paid tools. It's a business, you know, they're, they're generating revenue with their tool. I use it as a free tool. so I just post organically. What do you think about some of their paid offerings? The two that I'm interested in asking you about, first of all, are, sort of paid posts, like, whatever the equivalent of the LinkedIn ads are, maybe you could explain what those are. And also the other thing is I know that LinkedIn offers something called Sales Navigator. I wonder if you could talk about those things?

Abby: Yes. So, LinkedIn's campaign manager, that is the platform that they utilize to run all of their paid ads from their paid ads perspective, that has to be from a company. And so, I do think it's beneficial. I am a big component of incorporating LinkedIn ads into your overall marketing strategy, not using it as a standalone tactic, but really having a strategic play into where it fits into the buyer's journey and what you're trying to reach, and what that content looks like.

You also have the opportunity now to utilize thought leadership ads. This is a huge piece that I think people, we're starting to see more companies take advantage of. But this is where your company's campaign manager, so where your company runs ads from, you can actually select thought leaders in your organization and then sponsor or put money behind one of their posts.

So this is basically a way that thought leaders' post gets put out to a specific target audience. So let's say we utilized a post that you did about the importance of, or a checklist maybe for manufacturing companies for their website. Instead of that coming from your brand, you could then use a thought leadership post so that it's actually you that's sending that sponsored content out there into the feeds of your target audience. So kind of some examples of LinkedIn campaign manager I am a big fan of it. I think that I've seen a lot of success when done right. It also can be an expensive platform because you are able to get so strategic with the audience that you're trying to reach.

Sales Navigator, 100 percent one of my favorite tools. I use it personally on my day to day. I train sales teams on it. I think it's an important and strategic tool into your sales process. A lot of times where I see people make mistakes with Sales Navigator is they use it as just to research and search people instead of actively using it as a sales tool of how to indicate when to reach out to certain people, how to strategically engage and nurture your prospect audience or your current clients.

So happy to dive into more detail on Sales Navigator, but really the tool allows you to find prospects. It allows you an easy way to engage with your target audience. It also allows you to get insights on accounts and people, and pulling in all of their LinkedIn activity and what's happening within the organization. But let's, if there's anything else I can answer about Sales Navigator, I can dive into that.

Mitchell: These two sort of paid offerings by LinkedIn, the campaign manager and the Sales Navigator. The theme here is that you can reach out to the audience that you've earned by your organic works. So the connections that you've made in person at trade shows, or conferences, or other events, or connections that you've made through networking with other people on LinkedIn. You're free to get content in front of them because you've earned that. Sales Navigator, campaign manager, these are tools provided by LinkedIn that you pay for to get your, get yourself in front of other people that you haven't necessarily organically earned. 

Now, maybe that's my characterization and it's not accurate, but is that, first of all, is that fair to say? I have another follow up question after that.

Abby: Yes, I would absolutely say that that's fair to say, especially with a campaign manager, you're building those audiences. So if you wanted to go target to every single Marketing Director in the manufacturing space in the United States, and narrow it down even a little bit more, you could. They don't know you, they've never met you. It doesn't mean that you will show up in their newsfeed cause you have to pay to play, but it gives you the opportunity to do that.

Mitchell: Okay. So let's imagine that the client I was talking to last week, he's got his hands full. The budget he's given us is pretty small. I can't imagine he has money to spend on LinkedIn. Far less than that, is does he even have time? Does he even have time to think about it? Imagine that he thinks what he should do is just try to build his audience organically. What do you recommend for that? How is that done?

Abby: Absolutely. That's the first place I would always start with anybody and any company is what does your organic presence look like? And as we talked about specifically, if that's you and your personal brand, and you are that face of the company. You are an executive or the sales and marketing person in one. And you are talking to clients. It's really important that we're building that brand presence up. So one, it's making sure that you're finding people. So utilizing LinkedIn, search function too, because a lot of the, the features that even Sales Navigator has, there's some free versions of it on LinkedIn.

So, searching for those that you want to bring into your network and not pitching them right away when you find them, but strategically identifying them so that you can nurture them and then invite them to connect. That's one way to start growing your audience. 

Mitchell: What does nurture them mean? How do you, how do you nurture someone who you don’t have a, any sort of connection to otherwise?

Abby: Yeah, so, it's kind of, uh, like sales cues, right? So, you visit their profile, you kind of learn more about them. You take that information in. You then also see, you know, are they posting? If they are posting, you can strategically engage with those posts. Their company. What is their company posting? Start engaging with that. 

And so I, this whole strategy that I call, it's called, kind of getting into the inner circle and it's a nurturing process that that's exactly what you do. You start to engage with your target audience, but then also people, maybe outside that they're connected to, and with their brand.

And so the more that you're starting to engage with that, the more likely that your name will start to show up into their newsfeed before you're even connected. My biggest piece of advice is whatever you do, do not find somebody, send them a generic message that says, I want to connect with you because here's what my company does and here's how I can help you.

Do not sell them right away. That is not the point of LinkedIn. So, really be strategic with the way that you're reaching out and asking people to connect with you.

Mitchell: Okay.

Abby: Another, piece for, for continuing to grow your network, so it's finding and identifying is piece one, two is making sure that you're following up with those that you're connecting with already.

If you go to a networking event, if you go to a conference, if you have a sales call, making sure that you're every single person that was on that call, you're then connecting with on LinkedIn, that's a really easy way to get them into your network. Hey, thanks for your time today. Let's connect on LinkedIn. Or even prior to the meeting, looking forward to our meeting on Thursday. Would love to connect on LinkedIn. Those types of things where you can start to invite those that you're actively meeting and involved with into your network to continue to support you and build those relationships.

Mitchell: I spoke to someone at the conference that I where I mentioned meeting Danielle Alexander, and one of the presenters there, I really liked what she had presented. She was on a panel, and I just like the way that her mind worked and how she put together things. And, at one of the sort of the cocktail parties in the evening of one of the days, I went up to her and I said, I really liked what you said. It was really good. How'd that work out? And she turned to her friend and she said, look at this, my LinkedIn is blowing up. So the fact that she presented at a conference in front of an audience, apparently for her, one of the purposes of doing that was to drive her sort of LinkedIn connections. She just had so many connection requests from that. I would imagine you'd recommend that too.

Abby: Absolutely. If it's a podcast that I'm on, if it's an event I'm speaking at, or if even if it's just presenting to an organization, I always have my information out there of here's what I talk about on LinkedIn. I would love for all of you to connect with me. And I always make sure that I provide my QR code for my LinkedIn profile directly, my name, make it really easy for people to connect with you.

One tip I love to share when people are at conferences, if you have LinkedIn on your phone, if you go to the search bar, there's a little QR code that pops up. So rather than saying, oh, yeah, let's connect and oh, how do you spell your name, oh, yeah, I'm going to put that person in my notes and then you never go back and connect with them.

You can click that QR and it brings it up and they can simply scan that or you can scan theirs and it brings you to their profile right away so that you can connect right there on the spot. I know I personally have done that before. I've been like, oh yeah, let's connect on LinkedIn. And then 10 minutes later, forget their name and had no idea.

I'm like, that was a great conversation. Shoot, you know, and so that's always, I always say act, especially when you're in a networking or, um, conference, act right away. Say, yeah, let's connect. Here's my code. Just scan it, it'll take you right to my profile.

Mitchell: I was advised to do that at this conference. I was just surrounded by marketers and every one of them said that very trick. 

Um, what do you think of newsletters in LinkedIn?

Abby: So LinkedIn definitely has an opportunity for audiences who want to utilize their newsletter function. I think it's great because one, you get to build it right there in LinkedIn. You get all the stats for it. It goes out to your target audience and people who are opting into that. And so I say use it as a brand awareness piece.

.And so maybe that's your entry point to say, oh, if you want to get even more into these details, then subscribe to my customized newsletter for Manufacturing Marketing Leaders. Or then it's like some of that really broad educational awareness pieces, but then you get another step and then you get to invite them to actually subscribe into your email marketing platform as like a phase two. And I do know LinkedIn, I believe, is coming out with more features for the newsletter. So that will be really exciting to see.

Mitchell: How much can I legitimately offload to a professional to manage my LinkedIn profile for me? Like how much has to be actually me and how much can somebody else do so I can focus on doing my job?

Abby: I actually am very passionate about this topic. I understand that a lot of times, thought leaders, business owners, executives, they do need people to help them be more consistent because it's very important to be consistent on LinkedIn.

What I get cautious about is when people offload or have others go create content for them, it takes away that, again, this is supposed to be a relationship building platform. So if you're not the one trying to build the relationship and somebody else is doing it for you, it kind of takes away the importance of it. So if you're a leader and someone's just posting for you, but you're not going on the platform to see, you know, who's connecting with you? If people are tagging you and things if you're not even engaging in it, then what does that post really do? It's just kind of out there, right? And so I, I caution people to if you do have someone help you create your content, which is fine, I think that makes sense and would recommend that if you are tight with time, but have a say. Really be the one to think about why am I posting this? What do I want to say? And then if it's like, hey, here's my idea. Now, let's put this into, let's optimize this for a LinkedIn post. Yes, that is a great way to outsource some of that work. If it's simply just to post and you don't even know what's going out or what the plan is, or if it's even strategically making sense within your content plan, that's when I say probably not, because then again, it's just kind of like a ghost writer doing that for you, which doesn't create that audience engagement.

Mitchell: It's fake. It's a fraud. It's phony. Not, not real.

Abby: This is supposed to be your authentic brand, and if you're not being authentic with it yourself, people are going to see through that. The same with using ChatGPT. I use ChatGPT or AI. I mean, I use it all the time in my work. But I make sure that my posts always have something which is my unique point of view. Instead of posting a general how to post, you want to focus on how I. So here’s how I have done this, instead of just here's how to do this, because anyone can go Google something they want to learn how to do. What's your unique positioning or your unique expertise that you're bringing into that post that you're sharing with them?

Mitchell: Okay. Well, it's probably a good stopping point. I feel like we could get even more into tactical stuff and measurement, and how you better leverage LinkedIn as a platform, but some sort of top level stuff, I feel like we, we covered really well between these two episodes, Abby. 

Abby: I have one more strategic tip, and then I'm really done, I promise. When I talk about strategically engaging with content, a key tip that I love to share with people is if you use LinkedIn search function, you can actually search by post, and then you can either type in companies or you can type from member and type in people's names.

So let's just say that you were trying to really keep up with LinkedIn strategy and tips. Okay, well you can go there and you can either go to their post, the search in their post, and let's say you put in my name and then maybe you add a few more people to that as well.

Then you bookmark that with your URL on top in whatever web browser you're using. And then anytime you want to go engage with content about LinkedIn, that audience is already created and you have some of your top people there. I use this for sales teams all the time. Create a list of the people that you're having upcoming meetings with, right? And then go engage with that strategically. Same with prospects, you can even make a prospect list of, of the people in specific companies and that way you don't miss anything, and it then that list is strategically bookmarked. So I love sharing that tip. Bookmark the search results, and then you can go back to that at any time.

Mitchell: That's such a good idea. That's so cool. That's inside baseball for sure. I would have never found that out.

Abby: Yes. Yep. Those are the types of tips I love to give because it's again, those, even something so simple like that, right? 

Mitchell: Do you post these on LinkedIn like this?

Abby: I do. Yes.

Mitchell: Good. So I just want to thank you for giving me your time and giving me a bunch of free consulting. I don't know how many thousands of dollars I owe you by now, but, well, you can send me a bill, I guess.

Abby: Absolutely. It was my pleasure. And I encourage you, if you're listening to this, connect with me on LinkedIn, Abby Kelsey. And, I'd love to just connect and, and hear your thoughts and know how I can help you with your LinkedIn strategies.

Mitchell: Great. Thank you, Abby. I appreciate your time.

Abby: Thank you.

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