Leveraging LinkedIn for Leading CMOs

Drew Neisser: Hey, it’s Drew. I’m excited that you’re here to listen to another episode of Renegade Marketers Unite. And if this is your first time listening then welcome. This show is brought to you by CMO Huddles, the only marketing community dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness. And that has a logo featuring penguins. Wait, what? Yeah, well, a group of these curious, adaptable and problem-solving birds is called the Huddle. And the B2B marketers and CMO Huddles are all that and more, huddling together to heat up the coldest job in the C suite. And now that CMO Huddles has three membership tiers, we’re ready to inspire B2B Greatness at all levels. To learn more, check out CMOhuddles.com. Now before we get to the episode, here’s a shout out to the professionals at Share Your Genius. We started working with them over a year ago to make this show even better and have been blown away by their strategic and executional prowess. If you’re thinking about starting a podcast or want to turbocharge your current show, be sure to talk to Rachel Downey at shareyourgenius.com and tell her Drew sent you. Okay, let’s get on with today’s episode.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade Drew Neisser.

Drew Neisser: Hello, Renegade Marketers. Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, the top-rated podcast for B2B CMOs and other marketing-obsessed individuals. You’re about to listen to a Career Huddle, a specially curated Huddle providing career development insights for B2B CMOs. The expert at this particular Huddle is Beth Granger, social media coach and CEO of Beth Granger Consulting. She joins us to discuss how CMOs can get more out of LinkedIn, both for their personal brands and their companies. Let’s get to it. 

Hello Huddlers, and welcome to a special Career Huddle on LinkedIn for CMOs with Beth Granger. Beth is a trainer, consultant, and speaker who works with organizations and individuals who grow their businesses through referrals and want to unleash the power of LinkedIn. I have a ton of questions for Beth and welcome yours as well either via chat or on camera. If you’d like to come on camera, just remember to raise your virtual hand. And with that, hello Beth!

Beth Granger: Hello there!

Drew Neisser: How are you? And where are you this fine, warm summer day?

Beth Granger: I am well, in air conditioning, on Long Island.

Drew Neisser: In Long Island, awesome. So, I know you’ve been advising folks on LinkedIn for quite a while. Can you talk about how you sort of became this expert and how you’re staying on top of all the changes and nuances?

Beth Granger: I became an expert completely by accident, to shorten a long career history. About 13 and a half years ago, I was looking for a new job. My networking group knew I was starting a business. I started without a business plan. I just started taking freelance projects on and one of my clients said, “Hey, Beth, you know, our sales teams coming in next month, can you teach them how to use LinkedIn?” And I thought, why do you need to be taught to use LinkedIn and you’re gonna pay me to teach you? And it just led me down this path to where I narrowed my focus over time. And I love it.

Drew Neisser: The good news is you bet on the right platform. Had you sort of been the Twitter guru that wouldn’t have worked out so well. Good choice. LinkedIn actually brings you in, they recognize you as someone who is extremely knowledgeable. And so that kind of gives you an insight edge and keeps up your expertise.

Beth Granger: I’d love to beta-test things. So I’ve been able to beta test a lot of new features like LinkedIn Live, LinkedIn Audio, newsletters, page messaging. Other times I’ve had the opportunity to go in when they’re looking for feedback from users. 

Drew Neisser: Got it. Alright, let’s talk trends in the general sort of LinkedIn trend area.

Beth Granger: There are trends, they are providing new features or things like that. And then there are trends from users. So what I’m seeing from them, they’re beta testing quite a few things for premium users, features just for people who pay them. You may have noticed your follower count going down because they are removing inactive accounts and fake accounts. And one of the biggest things I’ve noticed the past month, I’ve spent a huge amount of time helping people get their account unrestricted, so they lock down people’s accounts, they can’t get in, they’re freaking out. It’s happening more and more. The thing that I’ve noticed that will get your account restricted more likely – having someone else log in as you. Someone I know was here in New York, someone else logged in as them, their assistant in another country, they got restricted. Opening too many pages at a time makes LinkedIn think that you’re using automation or a tool to do that and anything that scrapes data, those are the big three.

Drew Neisser: Interesting, I know that some folks are using these automation tools, we’ve been looking into Lead Delta, which just looks so cool, because we’ve got a LinkedIn Navigator account, we’ve got a regular LinkedIn account. There’s multiple inboxes and this one tool allows you to have one inbox, which is really appealing. What’s your experience with some of those tools? And are you pro, con, reluctant? What’s the story?

Beth Granger: We all know that nobody reads the terms when they sign up for a new platform. So a lot of these tools go against the terms so they can get your account restricted. So I tend to look at them to see what they do. But I’m very unlikely to recommend using them without realizing that is a risk that you’re taking. There are some really cool features in that particular product. But then there are some features that in order to use them you are scraping data. So it could be a problem.  

Drew Neisser:  Interesting, I think if you are exploring that tool, don’t try to post 100 accounts at the same time, that would probably be a bad thing. Let’s pull back for a second. We’re specifically talking about CMOs managing their profiles. What do you think are some of the common mistakes that folks make when it comes to their LinkedIn pages, and there’s sort of two general categories we would look at – one is just sort of their profile, and how they set up their page and what kind of information and then there’s the whole content and content posting, let’s start with the profile area and mistakes that you commonly see. 

Beth Granger: So, on the profile, the mistakes I see are less mistakes, and more just things that could be done better. A simple one, having your about section in third person, because to me, the whole idea is to make it easy for somebody to start a conversation with you and vice versa. And third person, it sounds like you don’t want to talk to anybody. It’s not “I”, it’s “Beth”. So it’s a small thing, but it’s subtle. In your headline, which is the text under your name, some people will have just their job title. And to me, there’s so much more that you can put – I think of it as your 220-character elevator pitch, but you want to be found. So be sure to have the words that you want to be found for in that headline. 

Drew Neisser: The challenge, though, that I have with that is, there are certain keywords, and they’re like revenue driver, B2B and SaaS, and so forth. And so if all the CMOs here were to put those same words, their profiles would look the same. And that’s problematic. So how do you balance the keyword thing with I want to stand out as an individual?

Beth Granger: When recruiters use the recruiter platform, while it does search the headline first, I think it searches throughout the whole profile. So your skills, your about section, your descriptive text, anything in the profile is essentially searchable.

Drew Neisser: So you don’t necessarily have to have every keyword that you care about in your headline, think about a few, and then create the personality that is your true differentiator.

Beth Granger: And no block of keywords at the bottom of the About section. 

Drew Neisser: Oh, okay, that’s interesting. Don’t do that.

Beth Granger: Do it conversationally.

Drew Neisser: Right. Just get them in. 

Beth Granger: Bulleted lists, things like that. 

Drew Neisser: Alright, I noticed a lot of folks don’t have very good backgrounds in their key picture, and I loved yours. Do you have any sort of recommendations on that image? What is that called, by the way?

Beth Granger: Background graphic. So I believe in using all the real estate that LinkedIn gives you on the profile. And to me, that’s like your personal professional billboard. So absolutely use it. Some people don’t know what to put, they put a picture of New York City. To me, that doesn’t mean anything, but maybe it’s better than just nothing. I’ve seen quotes, if you’re gonna put a quote, put your quote, don’t put a quote from somebody else. So it can be anything, it can’t be a video, any link is not clickable, but it really sets you apart. Even if it’s just a simple graphic. If you want to do more speaking, for instance, a photo of you speaking. You can change it as often as you like, I know people who when they’re promoting, for instance, a book or something that they’re doing, they’ll change that background graphic.

Drew Neisser: I’m not sure it matters that much. I have a funny one I was looking at today. And it’s a wide image but they forgot about the fact that their picture would be going on top of the image. And so instead of being “disrupter,” it was just “ruptor”, what’s a “ruptor.” So I do look at where you put your words relative to the image because if you stretch it across the bottom, all the letters won’t show up and you can end up with some interesting words. How should folks assess their profiles and content and engagement and how are they doing?

Beth Granger: It depends on what your goal is for using the platform. I like to look at who viewed my profile. And is it the right kind of people? Is it people who are just trying to sell me stuff? Is it people that could hire me? I like to look at, of course, engagement with my content. Those are really the two main ways and conversation. So are people reaching out to me, not just with a sales pitch, but to have a conversation in some way, whether it’s a comment, a direct message, whatever it might be?

Drew Neisser: What’s funny, I look at that, and I see that three out of four of the people who are looking at my profile are trying to sell me something. And then the other 25% are hardcore senior marketers who are interested in the content and the whole CMO world that I happily exist in. Obviously, it’s nice to have followers, because that matters to some extent, it’s nice to see who looks at your profile. It’s hard to get engagement, you notice that a lot of folks post, and they don’t get a lot of engagement. And that seems to me, it’s sort of like the problem. So let’s talk a little bit about engagement. And the challenge of getting engagement. Even the CMOs, who are respected in the field, will post something and it’s crickets. 

Beth Granger: There are a couple of different factors. One, because LinkedIn is a career site, there are people who might be interested in what you have to say but don’t want to comment, because they’re not sure who’s going to see their comment. Maybe they didn’t see the post to begin with, because of the magic of the algorithm. Maybe it didn’t interest them. And I always think about what content gets me to stop and engage and that’s the kind of content I try to share but sometimes there’s no way to know if it’s overly self-promotional or overly salesy. People find it boring. But sometimes it’s just a weird thing, maybe nobody saw it, maybe try that same content in a different format to see if somebody wants to watch a video.

Drew Neisser: Let’s put it this way, a lot of CMOs will post something that their company posted. And they will repost it because they feel like they’re good corporate citizens. They’re promoting the brand, their high-profile individuals, but it doesn’t get any engagement. Unless it’s something pro-social, there’s probably a way you could have made that interesting and not boring. Let’s make those interesting. 

Beth Granger: To me, there’s a straight repost where you don’t add any content to it. If somebody’s trying to hire somebody, and they put it, that’s the kind of thing I’ll do there, I just want to get it out to my network, I don’t have anything to add. But if I’m going to reshare something that is a little boring, or whatever it might be, I’m always going to add content, why I shared it, or add something to it, that makes it more interesting. The people who make the content for the company page, maybe they’re doing the same content in multiple platforms, and they don’t have the time to make it more LinkedIn worthy, if you will. So adding your own thoughts or why you’re sharing it, it’s more likely to get engagement.

Drew Neisser: It’s business, but it’s all about personal. We talked about this too and this is the sort of, interesting balance, because many of the CMOs in our community also are responsible for managing social sits underneath them, and they have an obligation to manage the company brand. But you and I know from looking at all these things that individuals versus companies get so much more attention on LinkedIn, we want to engage with individuals, it’s really hard to sort of bring yourself to engage with companies. So given that, it feels like the CMO could be another spokesperson for the company in a really positive pro-social way. That would be good for the individual, the CMO on their personal brand, and good for the company.

Beth Granger: So, sharing content as you the individual is always going to get more engagement. If you’re talking about something that’s related to a project you’re working on, or something related to your company and it’s okay to share that publicly, your company can actually reshare your posts to the company page. So I like when I see that when the company page shares things from their team. But of course, not everybody on the team knows how to use LinkedIn. So maybe they need to be both trained, given the power to talk about things on the platform. The larger the company, the more the company page will be used for recruiting. If I’m looking for a job at a company, I’m gonna go check out that company page who works there, what are they talking about? What’s life like at that organization? The company page is much more for recruiting than the personal page would be.

Drew Neisser: Which would change the strategy and the way folks think about it. Obviously, in the old days when Renegade was an agency and we did manage social profiles for companies now that I think about it. I feel like they were wasting money spending a lot of time creating content for the corporate page versus creating content for the executives, if you would switch that if 80% of the dollars went to working with the executives, getting them to create content or creating it on their behalf, I think the company would get a lot more exposure. 

Beth Granger: Yeah, the one thing that does both that I’ve seen be successful is when a company page hosts a LinkedIn Live, and maybe it’s someone from their organization, not necessarily the CEO, whoever it is interviewing somebody else, or having an event. So that’s a little bit of both, you hear from the actual people in the organization. I actually worked with somebody who did a lot of webinars, and then their company page did a LinkedIn Live and promoted it on all the different ways that they do. And it got more attendance than all the webinars they had been doing previously. So to me, that’s a way to bridge the gap.

Drew Neisser: Interesting. Of course, in order for LinkedIn Live to work, you need a decent following. And people need to register because that’s the moment when people “Oh, so and so company is live.” And if you don’t have a decent following at that point, it’s hard to build an audience.

Beth Granger: Definitely, you have to build your followers first, and promote it off the platform. So promote it through email, through every other way that you communicate.

Drew Neisser: I seem to recall, you were one of the first people that I saw on LinkedIn Live. And in fact, that’s what sparked me to apply to get on LinkedIn Live, what’s your feeling at this point in terms of LinkedIn Live as a content/engagement channel.

Beth Granger: To me, If you don’t worry about how many people actually join you live, it’s a great way to develop content that you can repurpose elsewhere. Because a lot of people, they’re not spending their whole day on LinkedIn. But the fact that you can take that video, chop it up, do other things with it, send people to the replay, it still can be worth it. But for me personally, for the first year and a half that I did it, I went live every week, I haven’t gone live in months. 

Drew Neisser: For CMO Huddles Studio, we go live on LinkedIn but again, all of our audience ends up being through the podcast and the YouTube channel that we repurpose later on. But there’s no reason not to go live with it. But it is not going to necessarily save you a lot. Okay, we have a question about, we sort of covered LinkedIn Live, let’s talk about newsletters and your perspective on that.

Beth Granger: I love them, especially because the very first one that you do invites your entire network, all your connections, all your followers to subscribe. And because people can subscribe, every time you send one out, they’re notified both by email and on the platform but you don’t get your list you can manually go through. I often get asked “Well, I have an email newsletter and I have a LinkedIn newsletter, do I share the same content? What if I have the same people on both?”.

Drew Neisser: It’s funny because we’ve had an email newsletter 15 years or so. And we decided to use LinkedIn newsletter maybe a year and a half ago, and we have a really good audience. So anyway, I thought it was really easy to build an audience, we were thrilled that we got over a couple thousand in a month because it took a long time to build that sort of size.

Beth Granger: It sends it to people both by email and notifies them on the platform. It didn’t always but now if you start a newsletter, it puts something in your featured section with a subscribe button right there. So if anybody comes to your profile, they can subscribe. But if you’re anything like me, I subscribed to way too many of them and I don’t have the time to read them. And they’re testing something you may have noticed in your email, instead of it saying the title, it’ll just say “Jay Baer just published an article.” So it doesn’t tell you the title. So right now they’re testing, is it the name of the person more likely to make you read it, than the title?

Drew Neisser: The content itself. Now we’re into this sort of personal brands. We both know, Jay, we love Jay. And he has a strong personal brand. But am I going to take time out of my day, stop right now, and click on that? I don’t know, one of the things that we have done and found really useful for LinkedIn newsletter is we have a backlog of 15 years worth of newsletters, and we can recycle them and they feel new because most people hadn’t seen them because they’ve gone through a different list. So it is a way of extending your reach. Okay, so we haven’t talked about content, you know that we create a fair amount of video for CMO Huddles, our Tuesday Tip series is shockingly popular. Again, this is from an individual CMO standpoint, they may or may not have someone else helping them create content. Are their formats that they should be thinking about? I noticed a comment in chat about pictures are working great. Let’s talk about the format of posts and what kind of content we should be looking for.

Beth Granger: LinkedIn doesn’t often tell us about the algorithm and what they’re going to show to people. Anything I tell you is either from my observation or from my community of people globally that do what I do. We share everything with each other, which is great. Occasionally LinkedIn does share what they’re promoting or what they’re working on and they recently just shared a post that they are making some changes to the algorithm. I haven’t seen it to be true yet, so it may be rolling out. How many of you have seen posts that say LinkedIn is turning into Facebook? Enough people complained that LinkedIn says they’re going to not reward that kind of post anymore. What they said is they’re attempting to stop people from trying to game the algorithm. I don’t know how they’re going to assess whether it’s an authentic post, or somebody’s trying to game the algorithm. I do know that when they launch a new feature, they tend to promote that. So when they first launched polls, suddenly you saw it everywhere, because it was a new thing and they were trying to promote it. They’ve also said that they are looking to highlight expert knowledge and advice. I think that means from their part is if you have keywords on your profile, if you’re in creator mode, for instance, and your five hashtags, if you talk about those things, they will think you’re an expert in that, so they’ll promote that content. If I were to suddenly do a post about manufacturing of pens, that’s not my area of expertise, assume they wouldn’t promote that as highly. That’s what they’ve said recently. In terms of content type, I think it’s your network, right, you have a subset of people who like to watch video, you have a subset who like to read. For me personally, I find that images with text work really well. But that could just be me. So I would experiment like you do with anything else. 

Drew Neisser: What is creator mode? 

Beth Granger: So there are two types of profiles. There’s a regular profile, which you have connections and followers, just like you would on the creator mode. But creator mode changes a couple of things. It highlights your content over your About section and moves your activity section up and your About section down. It allows you to pick up to five hashtags that are the topics that you talk about. And then it immediately gives you access to LinkedIn Live, LinkedIn Audio, and newsletters. So you used to have to apply for LinkedIn Live, now the minute you turn on creator mode, you get it. If you’re going to use those things, creator mode sounds great. The one thing that is frustrating to me is it forces the default button on your profile when someone doesn’t know you yet. When they come to your page, it says follow not connect, if they want to connect with you, they have to know how to do that through the three dots.

Drew Neisser: It’s so worth it as far as I’m concerned, being creative mode, it really opened up a lot of things. We applied for LinkedIn Live. I’m curious about posting frequency, when they suggested in a call with us that posting three times a day wasn’t a problem. What’s your feeling about frequency?

Beth Granger: So I have this theory about LinkedIn, they tell you what they think is right but the people who make the algorithm or do whatever, they don’t talk to each other. I don’t know for sure. Maybe do a little experiment for yourself but I’ve noticed that when you do a post, and it’s getting engagement, if you then post again, it’s like saying to LinkedIn, hey, ignore that one. Look at this one now. Maybe I’m promoting something or whatever but I’d like to let it go until that engagement fizzles out a little bit.

Drew Neisser: I wonder – so, I was at an event last night, I took some pictures of the event, there were a lot of people that I met there, I could tag them immediately. I think there have been a couple probably posted at least twice already that day. This was later in the day so I think all the other ones had grown through. And because everybody else who was there was still up, it got a lot of engagement. And it was probably the third post of the day, so I think it is interesting. When you say a post is doing well, what you’re really talking about is you’re noticing that the impressions of that post are growing pretty quickly. So obviously one of the keys that made that one work is I tagged probably 10 people who I know were active and cared about that particular topic. Talk a little bit about tagging, how to use it, when to do it, when not to.

Beth Granger: Yeah, it’s funny, I have a webinar called Nine LinkedIn Landmines, and one of them is inappropriate tagging. So years ago, I went to an event at LinkedIn called the Group’s Listening Tour, where they asked all the right questions about groups and then didn’t implement any of those things, unfortunately. Someone I met there started tagging me in every single post he did. If it was about groups, or about how we met, it would make sense but he could be doing a post about how he learned to change a tire and he was tagging me. So to me, that’s inappropriate tagging, trying to get me to engage with his content so that my network will see it. Appropriate tagging, you went to an event, you met people. If I do a post about this event today, and I tag you. That makes sense.

Drew Neisser: That makes sense. And I wonder if you tag someone and they don’t engage with you? Do you get penalized? 

Beth Granger: We don’t know for sure. But I have a friend who’s just not active on LinkedIn. I just don’t tag him. What’s the point? 

Drew Neisser: There is no point. So be careful about that. But there is no doubt that if you tag the right people and they’re interested and they engage, and they do it in a relatively quick period of time from the time you posted, that’s going to accelerate, it sends a signal to the algorithm, right?

Beth Granger: Plus people in their network who don’t know you may see it. So years ago, I was hosting a panel discussion and I did a post. I said something like, “I’m excited to be moderating a panel discussion on social media and healthcare, tech Northwell, for hosting us, thank you, tag the panelists. If you haven’t signed up yet, here’s the link.” One of the panelists wrote back and just said something like, “I’m looking forward to it, see you then”. Someone who didn’t know me yet, but knew her saw that, clicked through to my profile, at the time my phone number was right there, called me on the phone and said, “I see you speak about social media and healthcare, we have a conference this fall, what’s your speaking fee?” Could that please happen every day?

Drew Neisser: It’s amazing. When those things happen. It’s just a wonderful thing. And you love the platform, I do have a report from the team, you can see not only the number of followers but the number of impressions, views, viewer demographics per article, on your newsletter. That’s good news. 

Beth Granger: I’ll add to that. They sent the entire newsletter by email. So there are people who may read it on email and not click through to LinkedIn.

Drew Neisser: Okay, we talked a little bit at the beginning about behavior that can get you in trouble or affect your reputation. I think it’s worth revisiting that.

Beth Granger: All of you have been the recipient of bad behavior. How many people send you salesy messages the minute after you connect with them. And these are just human nature things, so I know you wouldn’t do any of those things. The automated tools that seem like they can help you, they can affect your ability to log into the platform, if you get restricted. The way I like to look at it is, it’s hard to automate relationships. Can you automate posting to the platform, of course, there are tools that you can use to make sending messages that you want to send to multiple people easier, but doing it one by one, as opposed to using a tool that’s not personal. And I know, we all want to be able to do things more easily but it’s a relationship-building tool. I always think of it as if we were in a room together. And this was a networking meeting, and somebody said something to you, you could just walk away from them. So it’s kind of the same behavior. 

Drew Neisser: Thinking of the Franklin quote, if you would be loved, love and be lovable. The same thing applies, obviously, to social behavior. Okay, so we’ve talked a lot about individual profiles and I think what we could summarize by saying, be authentic, be you, be social, engage, share interesting content, don’t worry about the format so much, but maybe think about consistency and posting that engaged with other people’s content with the hope of a quid pro quo. We said newsletters are fine. Are there any trends from a company standpoint that these folks need to be aware of, whether it’s recruiting versus marketing or anything else?

Beth Granger: Yes, but one thing you just made me think of that I wanted to share related to personal content is content that you develop your own original thoughts, much more powerful than sharing something, the same article that 20 other people shared from some newsletter. Okay, company trends, we already talked about how you can have a LinkedIn Live from a company page, I think that’s pretty cool. I do like when companies share posts from their team, so I think that makes the content better. And I don’t know how many of you get all day long or at least at the end of the month, when people are trying to use up their 250 invitations to follow a company page to get a million of those in your inbox or the page where those come in. We want people to follow the company page, but we don’t want to be annoying about it, so those are the main trends. Plus one thing they took off the video tab, I don’t know why they did it, where you can sort the posts by type, they took off video.

Drew Neisser: Alright, speed round, quick response. Yes, no, waste of time, LinkedIn groups.

Beth Granger: 99.9% waste of time. 

Drew Neisser: Okay, collaborative stories? 

Beth Granger: They’re trying to get into AI in any way they can. It’s interesting, of course, I’m testing it. If you want somebody, for instance, in your organization, or you feel it would be valuable to have a yellow top voice badge if you engage with a lot of collaborative articles, you can earn those badges, it’s different than the blue one that you have Drew. So I didn’t love them but when I went to the event at LinkedIn, they had a panel discussion and one of the people said, “You know, we’re all comfortable sharing content in this room. There are people out there on the platform who aren’t and by adding their thoughts, it’s like joining a conversation rather than starting one” that has some potential, so I’m not sure yet.

Drew Neisser: So they’re really pushing it in the top voices community and honestly, I’ve read them and I don’t want to be anywhere near associated with that. That’s like, you went on ChatGPT, asked the question, grab the quote, put it on there so you could participate. It just didn’t feel thoughtful or considered. 

Beth Granger: The articles themselves are very much like that. 

Drew Neisser: Yeah. 

Beth Granger: The comments that people are adding I am seeing are real.

Drew Neisser: Okay. So the comments are fine. 

Beth Granger: Yeah.

Drew Neisser: I’ve been asked to contribute to these stories and it’s like, “Oh, no.” And you know, part of it is, I don’t write that way in the moment, you’re going to notice it says, “Hey, comment on this.” It’s like, “No, I need to think this through.” And as part of, you know, if you want disposable content look at a collaborative source. Anyways, live streaming, we talked about blogs, used to be a thing. LinkedIn, you know was sort of putting like a blog post, relevant anymore?

Beth Granger: I do a newsletter over an article.

Drew Neisser: Number of posts a day?

Beth Granger: Like I said, I like to let them take their course but for instance, if I’m at an event, and I want to post another time, I will, but you don’t have to. Plus, if you have a network of people who aren’t active, or they’re not connected with a lot of people who are active, they might see all of your posts and say it’s annoying. Whereas if you have a larger network or people who are very active, you could post five times a day, they might only see one of them.

Drew Neisser: They might see the one that’s relevant to them if the algorithm is working. We talked a little bit about lurkers and the wonderful value of them, speak to that.

Beth Granger: Yes, I think you’ll like this story. So 13 years ago, before I started my business, I thought I was looking for a new job. Saw a job posting on LinkedIn, found who I thought was the hiring manager. At the time, if you were in a LinkedIn group together, you could reach out to somebody with a message, I reached out, asked for an information interview, we had an amazing phone call, she wasn’t the hiring manager but we’ve stayed in touch all these years, but not a lot. She’s never commented on my posts. Maybe we met for lunch once a year. Last fall, she reached out she had a new role. She was the head of marketing for an organization and they were having their first all hands on deck in person event since the pandemic. And she said can you come speak to our group about LinkedIn, I had no way of knowing she saw my content. So those lurkers, we love them. We can’t look at the data about them, we don’t know but they’re there and hopefully turns into something wonderful.

Drew Neisser: Yeah, it’s sort of like the dark web in the sense that in the buying journey, you don’t get to see them. And then suddenly, they raise their hand, interesting. So it does speak to sort of long-tail relationships, the role that LinkedIn can play there. So let’s talk about where people can find you, we’ll put your LinkedIn profile in chat, but where can people find you and what should they hire you for?

Beth Granger: I tend to be all over the place, not so much on Twitter anymore. I’m on threads because it feels like Twitter in 2011, I have a website but LinkedIn is really where I hang out. The way I work with individuals and organizations is to take them from confused to confident on the platform in all different ways, so that can be working with individuals, content guidance, like a personal trainer on the platform, if they’re uncomfortable, different types of trainings, speaking, developing employee advocacy programs.

Drew Neisser: And one thing we didn’t talk about is the whole Sales Navigator training program and so forth, it still seems like folks aren’t using their salespeople, they want to sell and yet this is about nurturing and relationship building, do you do training in that area?

Beth Granger: I do. The thing for me that is great about Sales Navigator is you can do more specific searches. If, for instance, the size of somebody’s company is important to you, you can only do that on Sales Navigator.

Drew Neisser: If you were a CMO looking for a job,  would Sales Navigator be worth the investment.

Beth Granger: I’m not sure maybe because you can do more specific searches but if you’ve never had one of the premium products, you can get it for a month free. But there’s also a learning curve so whereas premium just gives you more features in regular LinkedIn, Sales Navigator is this separate product that sits on top of LinkedIn and sometimes it can be confusing, in my opinion.

Drew Neisser: Yeah, it also means you’re maintaining two inboxes That to me is bizarre still that they’re separate inboxes.

Beth Granger: But now we’re like that all the time? How many times do you say, “Where was I having that conversation? Was it on Instagram? Was it a text message? Was it Slack?”

Drew Neisser: Beth, you’re a great sport to join us and share your wisdom on LinkedIn. Clearly, both of us are gung ho on the platform as a way of not just building your personal brand, but building connections across a wide swath of industries and jobs and so forth. And it just feels like LinkedIn of all the social networks continues to be a really powerful place and I don’t think any CMO can ignore. Thank you so much for joining us. 

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and our B2B podcast partners Share Your Genius. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!