Social Selling Trends for LinkedIn in 2021
It’s no surprise that LinkedIn continues to grow its audience and the engagement on its platform. LinkedIn is uniquely positioned as the only large social platform focusing on business-focused content, networking, and relationship-building across industries and markets. A whopping 260+ million people use LinkedIn on a monthly basis and roughly 40% of them use it daily. The companies’ ability to create this space and build a growing niche audience since their launch in 2002 is a testament to the longevity of their social platform and should clearly show that they are primed for continued growth.
How to maximize your time on LinkedIn
Many people use LinkedIn as their source for prospecting new clients; doing research to find decision-makers and influential people that we can network with, collaborate with, and sell our services or products. Here are the top 10 trends I’m seeing for selling and connecting on LinkedIn in 2021. Consider all of these and how they fit with your current selling strategies. Which of these are you already doing and what needs your attention? What is your outward perception of others on the platform and how can you more genuinely connect with the people you want? Hopefully, these will push you towards your growth goals.
1. LinkedIn Stories
We’ve seen LinkedIn roll out their story feature in the second half of 2020 and so far it’s a bit lackluster. But of course, this is to be expected with any new feature on a widely used social platform. There is potential to this new feature in connecting with your audience and staying top-of-mind and you should strongly consider sharing through this medium. As we’ve seen through the Coronavirus pandemic and throughout 2020, the genuine outpour of ourselves and our businesses are warmly received. People’s lives have changed in difficult ways and we find solace in knowing others are going through this storm with us. LinkedIn Stories seems like the perfect way to push some of that genuine nature and show some behind-the-fold content around your business and what you’re doing to move forward in a difficult time.
One major fault of this new feature is the fact that it is mobile-only (For real? Come on LinkedIn!). It makes sense, of course, that this content would be created from your mobile device since that’s the closest camera most of us have at any moment. But to not have stories included on the desktop view of LinkedIn seems a major downfall for this new feature. Hopefully, LinkedIn will change this in the future because a large number of users do still use the social platform from their computers and not purely through the mobile app. As with any content, you want your audience to be able to consume easily wherever they are. We see this with Facebook and Instagram which both have story features available to watch from a desktop platform.
2. LinkedIn Live
The power of live streaming to an audience is undeniable. We’ve seen throughout 2020 that it’s been a necessary tool to connect and bring people together when in-person events are limited. As society (hopefully) returns to a semblance of normal and we can start to gather in large groups once again, the value of live streaming will remain, although we may see a change in the content being broadcasted or a mixture of in-person and virtual. A plethora of live webinars, events, Q&A’s, and speaker presentations have been a pivoting factor for many businesses to engage and, more so, stay in sight of an audience they wish not to lose.
I’m not going to go into the specifics of how to actually facilitate a LinkedIn Live stream, you can check out this great Hootsuite article for that. I do want you to know that, unlike other social platforms, you need a 3rd party streaming tool like StreamYard, Socialive, or Restream to actually bring your live stream to LinkedIn. This brings a bit more complexity to the job of the facilitator but ultimately brings a higher level of video streaming with more intentional content streaming. The unique aspect of live streaming is the two-way communication that isn’t available in standard video. LinkedIn, themselves, tote an average of 24x more comments for live videos. Think about that level of engagement for a minute, because that’s a serious bump in interaction.
3. Personal Branding
Personal branding is not a new phenomenon, yet it remains increasingly prevalent. Building your personal brand increases your value to the company you work for and to the market overall. It helps solidify your perception to your clients, your followers, and your prospects. You may wonder “what is a personal brand?”, and that’s a fair question. Some people are confused by branding and what that entails. Here is how I see the personal brand:
“Your personal brand is a clearly-recognized perception of you based on your expertise, competencies, experience, and your achievements within the industry, market, and community that you work.”
You’ll notice that perception comes up a lot with branding. This, of course, is the whole point. To build a uniform perception about you, your character, the experience of engaging with you, and what you contribute to the world. As a commercial photographer, I continually harp on the value of perception. It can be a powerful way to position yourself and your business within a market and will absolutely help to gain the trust of potential clients.
4. Better Profiles
This really tags along with personal branding. If you’re looking to building a better brand for yourself, you obviously want to build your professional profiles to a higher standard. This means having a top-quality headshot that conveys your genuine character and which brings a level of intrigue. The same goes for your banner image; how are you utilizing that space to most creatively engage with the viewer? Are you adding branding elements into that banner or are you just filling it with a photo or graphic?
Along with high-quality imagery, you should consider optimizing your profile summary. It’s always said that distilling down any piece of writing to its core message is the most effective way to deliver your message. Get to the points of value that a viewer will care to read. No need to share your entire work history or how awesome your pets are. Instead give just enough info for someone to understand your outlook on the world, your expertise in the market you serve, and maybe a simple call-to-action like getting in touch.
5. Video Messages
This is a relatively new way to connect with people but incredibly powerful. Through services like Vidyard, you can create personalized videos that will send through LinkedIn messaging. What a great and unique way to connect with prospects! Not only will they not be expecting a video message, but they’ll see you and hear you as if they were standing in front of you. It’s much easier to ghost someone through text or email, but when a person has the impression that you created a video just for them, you are very likely to get a response.
This brings us to the point of hyper-personalization. Creating individual videos for each prospect will take more of your time, but the efficacy of your messaging will go much farther. We’ve all had cold emails and messages that go unanswered and it can get disheartening. By spending a little more time building a personalized video message, you’ll show that you put in the effort to go above and beyond and you’ll win over hard connections by thinking outside of the box.
6. Video Pods & Studios for Creation
I’ve seen a number of businesses start to create mini studios within their space for video and podcast creation. This seems like a win-win situation, as the investment of the business goes towards branding development and higher engagement, and the employees or users of this creative space can more easily create quality content for social media and advertising. With access to this type of space, you can build consistency into your content creation and your messaging. For businesses like banks and coworking spaces, having small creator studios can bring more people into your doors and delivers unique value that they won’t necessarily find in other places. Check out these images I photographed at Monona Bank’s Atwood Ave. location, where they redesigned the interior of their 100-year-old location to include community spaces for meeting, creating, and podcasting. Click through the images to see more.
8. Marketing Sales Pros
A trend we’ve seen continue to grow is that of professionals needing to wear more hats in their everyday work-life. Often times our clients are expecting great communication and writing, and great creative content on our social platforms. It’s also proving incredibly valuable to have marketing and inbound lead-generation skills. Obviously, we can’t all be experts at everything, and there comes a time where it’s more valuable to outsource and delegate these things to professionals. But having the base understanding for these skills will first help you win new business and will later help you communicate to professionals how you operate and what your goals are.
We see this value on LinkedIn through quality posting, with well-written copy and genuine, creative content. If you’re wondering why nobody cares about the blog post or case study that you shared, look at what you’re including with the post. Does your writing connect with your audience? Are you actually trying to provide value and solve problems for your audience or are you just trying to get clicks and traffic to your site? You absolutely have to bring value first and that starts with the copy you write and the content you share in your posts.
8. Selling 24/7
This is something I first considered when reading “The 4-hour Work Week” by Tim Ferriss. He mentions his success with bypassing gatekeepers and connecting with decision-makers by contacting them before 8 am and after 6 pm. There is a strong correlation with LinkedIn right now where we see a large number of people active before and after their “workday”, and overall, a social platform designed around professionals and networking thrives on 24/7 communication and connection. People are always looking to connect and have a conversation, especially with limited in-person networking. You should consider this when you’re trying to gain new connections and get in front of prospects. Even when posting content to LinkedIn, it's valuable to consider these times as active segments for LinkedIn users and your particular audience.
9. More Social Selling Across Social Networks
This stays on topic with #8 as we see a strong trend of increased social selling. Be warned, though, that people really hate being sold to and they are increasingly getting tired of ads and salespeople filling their DM’s. As will all sales, in-person or digital, strong communication and delivering value first will be your keys towards making meaningful connections. You should consider aligning your personal brand across all the social platforms you use and creating unique content that works best for each platform. Also, note that it’s not actually valuable to be on EVERY platform. Find where your audience is and go deep with those specific platforms.
I'll give a few examples of how Crimson Sun Studios uses social selling, and I would call our strategy soft selling since I’m never pitching anyone right off the bat. Through LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook the strategy is to show final products (high-quality imagery and video used for marketing and advertising) with some insight on how they were shot, who the client was, and how it benefited that client. This is almost like a short case-study proving how the media helps and what the general ROI is when investing in high-end content.
Another aspect of our social selling is to share behind-the-scenes videos showing how we work on production, what it’s like to be on production, and what post-production and retouching look like through screen-captured time-lapses of the editing workflow. These have gained immense traction and our audience continues to engage and react to this content. From that engagement, I can target prospects who seem interested in our work and I can develop ideas to pitch to them specifically. This is also a slow roll towards building relationships online with folks you would like to turn into clients.
Lastly, Crimson Sun Studios has a print store featuring landscape and travel imagery that we promote over social. Creating posts with this feature imagery, along with the imagery shown hung on a wall in-home or in-office, where we ask questions about the images, specific travel locations, or opinions from the audience, we build a stronger following of users who want to engage and see this type of content. Of course, there’s always the mention that prints are available with easy access to the print store and that specific image for sale at the bottom of the post.
10. Social Selling Tech
It makes sense, following all of the trends I’ve listed, that social selling tech can be a game-changer for how you interact and manage your social branding and selling. You should strongly consider which, if any, tech you want to invest in and learn, as this will be a time-suck to educate yourself and become proficient with sites or software. Here is a shortlist of some valuable tech you can start implementing right now:
What do we do now?
Start first by taking stock of the social platforms you are currently using. Create notes for each on what you need to improve and where you want to be. What are your goals for each platform and what steps do you need to take to get there? Are all the social platforms you currently use generating meaningful connections with the people you want to sell to? If not, abandon those and focus purely on the ones that are bringing meaningful connections. Create a content strategy that helps develop unique content for each platform with specific projects, deals, or unique features that you want to showcase.
With some thoughtful work and goal-oriented focus, we can all build a better personal brand and maximize our time on LinkedIn and other social platforms. I appreciate that you’ve read until this point and hope you’ve found value in what I’ve written here. What are some trends you’re seeing on your favorite social platforms? What have you found to bring the most genuine engagement with your followers? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.
