The Essential LinkedIn Playbook with Louise Brogan Transcript

Greg Wilkes (00:01):

The construction industry can be a tough business to crack from cashflow problems. Struggling to find skilled labor and not making enough money for your efforts leaves many business owners feeling frustrated and burnt out. But when you get the business strategy right, it’s an industry that can be highly satisfying and financially rewarding. I’m here to give you the resources to be able to create a construction business that gives you more time, more freedom, and more money. This is the Develop Your Construction Business podcast, and I’m your host, Greg Wilkes.

Greg Wilkes (00:42):

So on today’s podcast, we have a LinkedIn lead generation expert, and her name is Louise Brogan. Now Louise, throughout this podcast is going to offer a ton of value and we’re going to be focusing on the four things you really need to be focusing on to ensure you can generate more leads from architects, structural engineers, main contractors. And remember, LinkedIn is a completely different platform to Facebook and Instagram. So if you’re not currently using LinkedIn the right way, Louise is going to show you exactly what you need to do and how it can benefit you. We’re also going to look at how LinkedIn can potentially help you find and attract good talent for your business. And it’s always a struggle to find project managers and QSs and estimators, things like that. So if you’re looking for those type of roles, your LinkedIn profile could be exactly what you need to be able to attract those type of people. So have a listen in and take some value away and you’ll probably need to listen to this again on replay. There’s so much here. Louise Brogan, great to have you on the show. Appreciate you being here.

Louise Brogan (01:41):

Absolutely. Greg’s delighted to join you today.

Greg Wilkes (01:44):

Really pleased to have you on. And I was fascinated, actually, I have to say this on the podcast immediately because when you first joined this Zoom chat, I was looking at a picture of King Charles and yourself. So what was that all about? Give us the story behind that.

Louise Brogan (01:58):

Yeah, so last November I was invited to Buckingham Palace as part of a reception to celebrate small business contribution to the UK economy along with 399 other people. It was ridiculously exciting. And when I got there, it turned out that I had been pretty selected by the King’s team. Sounds so bonkers to meet King Charles and Prince Edward and two of the Dukes ahead of the rest of the rim. So it was me and Mary Portas, The Queen of Shops, Anne Boden, head of Starling Bank, Peter Jones from Dragons Den and other people who I am not really sure exactly who they were, but I remember standing in the lineup going, why am I here? This is crazy. And then met the king and he was just absolutely lovely. Surprisingly about the same height as me. I’m not super tall. And just the whole thing was amazing. They kind of went down the line, asked us about ourselves, our businesses. I’ve got a plugin for Northern Ireland because that’s where I’m from. It’s always very important to showcase Northern Ireland around the world. And then they went down the line and once they finished talking to you, you were kinda spun out through this red, literally a red velvet rope into the state room. And we all stood there and went, what just happened? Because nobody knew in advance it was going to happen. So it was very exciting and so therefore I have framed the photograph and it’s my screensaver on Zoom and all that stuff.

Greg Wilkes (03:34):

I don’t blame you. I’ll have that absolutely everywhere. So yeah, it is just such a great story to begin the show with. So appreciate you telling us that. I was wondering whether you’re allowed to actually tell us, because I think prime ministers aren’t allowed to say what they talk about with the king. Aren’t they? Or with the queen.

Louise Brogan (03:48):

Oh Gosh. Well, I’m not sure that he knew. I’m sure he possibly knew what LinkedIn was, but did he ask me? Honestly, it was just so exciting and the adrenaline was so high. If you ask me exactly what we talked about, I don’t really remember, but I do remember making a point about being from Northern Ireland.

Greg Wilkes (04:07):

Awesome. Well what an amazing experience. Absolutely fantastic. So as I said, brilliant to have you on the show today, and it’s a topic today that I’m looking forward to discussing because LinkedIn is such a powerful social media tool, but I often find those that are listening to this, your construction business owners that are trying to grow their businesses. Sometimes you’ve got to think about Facebook, Instagram, TikTok potentially, and LinkedIn is another one. We think, wow, how am I going to master this? Is it for me? It’s just another platform I’ve got to learn. So what I’d love to talk to you about today, first of all Louise, is why you think LinkedIn is a marketing platform that construction business owners should really be considering seriously?

Louise Brogan (04:51):

Yes. So I actually started out my business covering all social media channels. Now, we didn’t have TikTok when I started 10 years ago, but I was an accredited Facebook and Instagram trainer here in the UK and I went to Facebook’s HQ in London and got all their training and support. Why I niche down to LinkedIn and why I think companies should really seriously think about focusing on LinkedIn as their core platform is because people go to LinkedIn in a business state of mind, we open up Facebook to connect with friends and family. We don’t open up Facebook to see what local businesses are doing. And Instagram is honestly, I find it a bit exhausting. If I was trying to create content for my own business on Instagram to make serious impact, I think it would take up a lot of time. So LinkedIn has a lot going for it that it is a business platform.

(05:47)
So people are there because they want to connect with other business owners, other people in their industry, potential clients, potential collaborators, thought leaders in their industry. But also you can make a huge impact on LinkedIn with a lot less effort. So I don’t know if you know this Greg, but about 95% of people who have LinkedIn accounts never post anything at all. So the platform has I think 950 million accounts as we are recording this and all of that, only 5% of those accounts are actually sharing any content. So it is still a really, like what they call it, a blue ocean is a place where you can make your mark quite effectively by just simply posting once or twice a week. So I think that appeals to a lot of business owners.

Greg Wilkes (06:39):

That really does. So that’s an interesting stat there and I hadn’t really thought of it from that angle, so that’s quite fascinating really. So LinkedIn is obviously a platform that is mainly used for B2B, I presume you wouldn’t be going on there for business to consumer stuff generally. So people listening to this just to give them a bit of guidance, they’re probably going to want to be using this to connect with architects, structural engineers, main contractors, that type of partnership so that they can get a collaboration. Maybe I could just ask why do you think some people give up on LinkedIn and don’t have success with it and struggle with it? What do you think? What mistakes are they making or what are they not doing?

Louise Brogan (07:15):

I think what you said there is they are making mistakes because there’s a lot of advice out there that I would try and avoid about using LinkedIn. So an example here is a client that I’m working with. So we create content for our clients for LinkedIn and a client that I’m working with, he was brand new to LinkedIn and I think that might be true of some of your audience that they maybe were like, maybe we should try LinkedIn so they might be brand new to it. And what he did was he created his account with my support and then left his own devices for about two weeks. He went off and connected with as many people as he could. So LinkedIn froze his account because that is not how they want people to use the platform. They want people to start to build a network of people who you are connected to, interested in, have interesting things to say with those people and build a real network of business relationships.

(08:11)
So they froze his account and he actually had to upload his passport to get access back to the account. So I would say try to connect with people because they are people you’ve met, people in your industry, people you’re interested in, maybe previous clients, people you’d like to work with as opposed to jumping in and trying to connect with as many people as possible. Because what happens then, Greg, is if you connect with, say you go to LinkedIn and you say, right, Louis says not to connect too fast, but I’ll connect with 30 people a day for the next couple of months, but I don’t really think about who I’m connecting with. When you go to LinkedIn, your newsfeed is going to be full of content from those people. So if you’re connecting with someone because you heard them on a podcast and you thought, oh, they’re on LinkedIn, they’ve got a hundred thousand followers, I should follow them.

(09:02)
But what they share doesn’t interest you, you get bored really fast and you go to LinkedIn you think, oh, this is really dull and boring and there’s nothing of interest here. Or maybe you connect with people and they share stuff that’s not related to what you care about or what you’re interested in and you think there’s nothing for me to connect with here. Nobody’s actually going to comment on anything that I do, but that’s because you connected with the wrong people. So that’s the first thing I would say is connect thoughtfully. So people you actually want to have business relationships with.

Greg Wilkes (09:35):

Just to dive into that a little bit further then, so how does LinkedIn make connection easier? So I know that there’s certain searches you can do, isn’t there on LinkedIn, you’re not just randomly picking out names, are you? So how does LinkedIn help?

Louise Brogan (09:47):

So there’s a couple of ways here. You can do a search on your industry in the search box, which is so powerful. You could type in architect and if you click on the search button, a row of filters comes across the top of your screen. So if you’re on desktop, you’ll see some filters appear on your screen. And I have videos on this, Greg, if you want to go and check about it on YouTube, how to search on LinkedIn. So it might say location. So you’ve architects and you might select location and Peterborough or Brisbane or whatever. So it filters out to only show you architects in that area or it might be a country, it might be architects in France or whatever. And so it narrows down the number of people it is showing to you. So you can scroll down those people and if those people have somebody who is also connected to somebody in your network.

(10:38)
So say for example Greg, you go in and you type in people YouTube and you type click UK and say I appear in the search results and it might say second beside my name and underneath my name it might say somebody who you are already connected to. So you could say that they’re called Bob, you could go to Bob and say, “Hi Bob, I see you’re connected to Louise Brogan, would you mind introducing us?” Or you can think, oh, Bob knows Louise. Okay, well then I’ll connect with Louise because if she knows Bob then she probably knows what she’s doing. So using those filters to filter out people. The other thing is if you go to LinkedIn and you type in somebody’s name who works in your industry, so you’ve met somebody in a networking event and you put their name under LinkedIn, LinkedIn shows you down the right hand side, people also viewed, so if I’m looking at somebody who is a well-respected architect in Melbourne or London, it will show me down the right hand side, probably five or six other people that when someone views that person, they also view these people and those are suggested people that you might want to go and look at and see, do I want to connect with these people as well?

(11:45)
So it does help you quite a bit in sharing the right people to you that you should consider connecting with.

Greg Wilkes (11:51):

Fantastic. So that’s tactic number one then is to try and connect with the relevant type of people. So I know I made a huge mistake with LinkedIn when I first started and I think I’ve got, I don’t know, well over 10,000 connections, but when we first started it was just like a race to how many connections we get and it’s just anyone and everyone and I should really have a purge and just get rid of them.

Louise Brogan (12:14):

My tip there. Greg honestly is I wouldn’t unconnect with those people, but I would unfollow them so that you’re only following people in your newsfeed that share stuff that you actually want to comment on or who are a good lead or source of referrals for you.

Greg Wilkes (12:31):

Yes, that’s good to know, for anyone else that’s made that mistake like me.

Louise Brogan (12:35):

I hear it all the time, honestly don’t beat yourself up.

Greg Wilkes (12:37):

No problem. So when you initially spoke and we were talking about topics that we could discuss, you mentioned a bit of a framework that you have surrounding four pillars. Do you want to just introduce what they are, Louise?

Louise Brogan (12:49):

Yes. So to look at LinkedIn as a way to get on there and really build your profile and your business, I like to look at it in terms of four pillars. So the first pillar is your LinkedIn personal profile and that really is the foundation of everything. If you have a rock solid LinkedIn profile that shares how you can help people and what you want to be known for. So it’s not like you’re old fashioned, here’s a history of everything I ever did since I left school. So if you’re in business, there’s just reverse slightly there Greg. If you’re in business, I approach this completely differently to if you are in a corporate career and you are climbing the corporate ladder, use it more traditionally in that way. But if you are in business, I would redo your profile in a way that when someone looks at your profile they think, oh yeah, that person could be somebody we could work with or we could talk to about potentially having some kind of partnership with. So you write it for your reader as opposed to writing it for a recruitment agency. That’s the first core piece of work that people need to start with. And if you haven’t got a really good profile, all the other activity that you do is walking with one leg tied behind your back, you’re not helping yourself to the best of your ability. So get the profile rock solid for the first thing and then the other three pillars are…

Greg Wilkes (14:08):

Let’s dive into that first one then just because we can break into what they asked. Yeah, what you said there, I completely get because everyone goes in and they list all their high schools and how many dogs and cats they’ve had or whatever else. But if we’re talking about the business, we want to talk about the products we’re offering, the services we offer. Is that the type of thing you’re referring to?

Louise Brogan (14:26):

Yes, basically how you can help someone.

Greg Wilkes (14:28):

Yeah. Okay, perfect.

Louise Brogan (14:29):

In the “about” section, write the about section for your reader, not how fabulous I am and how many medals I won when I was in my teens. That’s not really interested in us, they’re interested in themselves and how we can help them.

Greg Wilkes (14:43):

Yes, exactly. Okay, brilliant. Alright, so we’ve got that one nailed.

Louise Brogan (14:48):

Yes, good solid profile. So, second one is content. What are you actually going to write about on LinkedIn? And if you think to yourself, right, do you ever see people put stuff up, Greg where they’re like, oh, it’s been a hard week and here I am by the pool with my glass of beer. That’s very nice and everything, but it’s not really helping anybody in your network to understand what it is that you do. So, I like to work with people to write down what are the things that we get asked about our business or our industry all the time. And those are the core things that you should talk about on LinkedIn. The thing to watch out for here is don’t write about stuff in a way that goes over the head of the person that you want to work with. So you might say you are an architect and you’re like this amazing highly educated architect.

(15:40)
If you write stuff in a way that the average person doesn’t really understand what you’re saying, you’re not going to get any engagement. So you need to write or do video even better, to the room. So who is in your audience, who’s in your network, how can you create content that actually lands with people that they start to reply to you? And because if you post something on LinkedIn and everyone’s like, oh, that sounds really smart, and they just click the little like button, you’re not getting as much impact than if you were actually starting a conversation with your network, which is what we’re really aiming for. So create content that starts conversations with your audience. And by that I mean they start to respond underneath your posts.

Greg Wilkes (16:26):

Yes. Now that’s really interesting because if someone’s posting on Facebook, Instagram and whatever else, they may have a different target audience. They may be going for an actual client, if they’re a builder, they might be going for a homeowner. So rather than potentially just cross-posting and posting the same stuff on LinkedIn, really what we’re saying is you need to think about if their audience is an architect or structural engineer or main contractor, they actually need to think about what’s going to be relevant to them. So we’re talking about completely different content, aren’t we for this platform?

Louise Brogan (16:56):

Completely different. So give an example. One of my clients works in the financial sector and he wants to be elevated amongst his peers. So, therefore his content is actually probably you and I would probably read it and go, okay, I kind of get that, but I don’t necessarily, it’s not something I feel qualified to respond to, but his peers do start conversations underneath that. I prefer to write something at a level where most people can engage and comment with you because what happens then is people in their network are also more likely to see your posts as well. And it’s really interesting because one of the things I find of 10 years working with companies on LinkedIn is that it’s quite often the person who is in the second level of your network who reaches out to ask if you can help them or support them or work with them.

(17:55)
And that’s because somebody who’s in your direct network sees you sharing this interesting content on a regular basis and they might be at a barbecue or they might be at a business networking event or a conference and they’ll say, we’ve got this new project, we’re looking for this particular kind of style of architecture. And they’ll say, oh what’s sure, Greg talks about that on LinkedIn all the time, do you not know him? That’s what he talks about. And that’s where that leader connection comes in. Now someone listening to this might go, that’s going to take forever. On LinkedIn, you’re not going to get business overnight on LinkedIn? Be clear about that. You need to be consistent in sharing and that’s why you need to think about, well what am I actually going to talk about on this platform and can I be consistent in it? It doesn’t mean you can’t share personal stuff every now and again. Absolutely. I mean I think marketeers would say maybe every fourth post can be completely unrelated. Maybe you’re a big football fan or whatever, but if you only ever post about whenever you go to see Arsenal play, then people won’t actually know what it is that you do. So that’s the second pillar is content.

Greg Wilkes (19:00):

Yes, that’s fantastic. Exactly as you said there. I think we buy into people and we buy into personalities. So it is important to share a little bit of personality in it. And I guess for a lot of builders, what would be nice about this is sometimes you might want to post some technical stuff. Let’s imagine you’re trying to attract architects, engineers, whatever it’s going to be and you’re using a certain product and you want to start a conversation around that product that you’re using. That’s probably not going to be interesting to an actual homeowner, but for the architect that’s potentially going to specify that product, that could be, so these are the sort of things that they want to be posting about, I guess, and that sort of content.

Louise Brogan (19:34):

Yes. So an example there actually of somebody I’ve worked with is somebody who is a PowerPoint expert. And another interesting way, to look at your content is, can you create a platform for discussion with people who also do what you do? So this client of mine, she helps companies to create presentations if they’re going for pitches or whatever they’re speaking at a conference or whatever. We find that when we created content about how to use technical pieces of PowerPoint, if you’ve never used Microsoft PowerPoints for making presentations here, is there something technical about that? There actually is. So she goes into how do you use a particular tool within Microsoft PowerPoint, other PowerPoint presentation experts start commenting underneath and having this whole conversation about it. But actually, she is seen as the expert in this field because she’s leading the conversation. And if you have three or four people who start to comment under your post, you could be getting a couple of thousand or more other people seeing that content. Because remember, go back to those percentages, only 5% of people are actually posting anything. So I talk about, it’s like almost you’re creating a platform or stage for other people to showcase their knowledge about the subject, but you are seen as the leader in that field and that’s really, it’s quite not a secret tip, but it’s something that people don’t really think about in that way.

Greg Wilkes (21:01):

Yes. Very powerful. Okay, great. So content is the second pillar. What’s next?

Louise Brogan (21:06):

So the third pillar is your connections, and we kind of touched on this a little bit, but if you can build what I call a network of value on LinkedIn, you are going to enjoy it more and you’re much more likely to get business as a result. So really think about who you want to connect with and think people you’ve worked with, people you’ve met at business events, people who you hear on podcasts, on YouTube, reach out and connect with them and always connect with a message. Let someone know why you are connecting with them. So I don’t know about you Greg, but most people just send you a connection request and don’t actually say why. And when you send a message to say, “Hey Louise, I heard you on Greg’s podcast, I’d like to connect with you.” Then I would know, oh, this must be somebody in the construction industry. And then I would reply and suddenly we’re having a conversation in the direct messages. And actually that’s where you deepen that relationship with somebody and you don’t know where it’s going to lead to, but it also makes you stand out from all the other people who just send connection requests without a message.

Greg Wilkes (22:11):

Yes and I think one thing that bugs me on LinkedIn and we don’t encourage anyone to do is sometimes the connection request is a little bit of a sales pitch and there’s no warmup strategy there.

Louise Brogan (22:23):

No, there’s no warmup. Yeah. Honestly, people do that so often. I’m like, are you sending a thousand of these and you’re hoping 10 land? Possibly, however you probably get your account frozen. Are we word on that? Actually, Greg, there are certainly software tools out there. They say, we will help you generate a thousand leads a month or 30 leads a week on your LinkedIn account. Just be very wary of that because you might end up with a network full of people that you’re not interested in. Your LinkedIn, it’s full of really irrelevant stuff in your newsfeed and you don’t actually enjoy it. So I very much prefer people to connect with someone authentically. There’s that word. I still like to use the word authentic in 2023, I don’t know. But build a network of value and one that you actually enjoy speaking to. My favorite analogy for using LinkedIn is to treat it like your favorite industry conference.

(23:22)
So if you imagine Greg, you and I are going to a conference full of people who work in the construction industry and there’s going to be five key speakers on stage. We go to LinkedIn, first of all, we prepare for the conference so we look and see who’s going to be speaking. We probably dress how we would dress if we were meeting somebody in a professional, say you go to somebody’s office to have a conversation about something, you dress appropriately. So that’s you getting your profile all set up appropriately. When you get to the conference, you would not walk around just handing out your business card, not speaking to anybody. You would go to people, you have conversations maybe in the coffee queue, maybe in the line as you’re walking in and you would talk to each other and if you thought there was something in common, you might exchange cards then.

(24:11)
And then you might set up a call with that person a week later. So LinkedIn is exactly the same. If you think about LinkedIn, the speakers are those people who are creating the content, you and I as the attendees and possibly could be the people in the comments commenting on each other’s content and seeing people to connect with there. The company page, which we haven’t actually touched on yet, I see that as the sponsor booth at the conference. So you and I walking around the conference meeting people, talking to people, connecting with people are the personal profiles. The sponsor booths at the sides or in the next room are the company pages. So you meet somebody and you’re interested in what they have to say and then you see their sponsor booth and you go over and you get more information about their products and services. To me, that’s what the company page would be in this analogy. So I think if people can, I’m a very visual person, I’ve literally got an image of you and I walk into a conference now if that helps to understand how to use LinkedIn, then you just wouldn’t just connect like messages,

(25:17)
You wouldn’t not speak to anybody when you’re at an event hopefully, anyway.

Greg Wilkes (25:22):

Yes, that’s a really good analogy. That makes complete sense. And while you were saying that, it just made me think about sometimes people will listen to this and think, oh, I don’t know what conversation I should get started and things like that, but there is an opportunity just to jump on other conversations, isn’t there and contribute. So I presume that’s quite a good tactic if you want to connect with people because you’re always going to notice ones that jump on your conversation if you want to connect with that person.

Louise Brogan (25:45):

Well, that’s the fourth pillar, it’s community.

Greg Wilkes (00:00):

Oh, here we go.

Louise Brogan (25:49):

So how do you build community on LinkedIn? You go to LinkedIn and you start to comment on other people’s content that raises your profile with that person. But also everybody else in their network, they see your name, your photograph, your headline and your comment. And if we go right back to the foundation of the first pillar being your really excellent stellar profile, one of the key pieces on that is your headline. So your headline tells people what it is that you do. If you don’t write your headline on LinkedIn, it takes it as your current job. So that’s why you see a lot of people that’ll say, Louise Brogan, CEO, or Louise Brogan, architect, doesn’t tell me where you are, what you focus on. Do you specialize in anything? Who do you work with? So building community involves you actually going in and engaging with your community on LinkedIn and for people who are, and a lot of people are completely overwhelmed with the thought of, well this all sounds wonderful, but what do I write on LinkedIn? You start with commenting on other people’s content, which actually is almost as powerful as posting your own stuff because people will see your name, your headline, if your headline’s interesting enough, they’re going to click on that, which takes them to your LinkedIn profile, which in the about section is where you tell them what your products and services are and how you can help them and that’s when they then start to connect with you and it all kind of builds on that.

Greg Wilkes (27:24):

Fantastic. Yes, so they’re the four pillars really useful, Louise. Thanks for running through all of that. As you were talking about that, you mentioned something we haven’t touched on yet and that was company pages. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about company pages, what they are and why someone should be using those?

Louise Brogan (27:39):

Yes. So when you create a LinkedIn account, you create a personal profile, watch out for creating a company profile as a personal profile that is just not allowed. So a company page cannot connect with individuals. You build a company page and people follow your page. Okay? For me, I am on LinkedIn as Louise Brogan. My company is called Louise Brogan Ltd. I know it’s not very imaginative, but that’s what it’s called on the company page. Then I have my team as well and we talk more on there about products and services, but company pages are harder to get engagement on. However, there are lots of little tactics that can help. So the average engagement on company page posts is 3%. We’ve got our clients up to about 10 to 13%, and you can invite people to follow your company page, you can engage your team, showcase your team as well as your products and services.

(28:50)
Think of it as slightly more traditional. So where you are over a personal profile, maybe starting in conversations like you and I have a conversation on the company page, you might want to introduce a topic or introduce a service that you offer. And yes, it’s harder for people to engage with that, but actually a lot of the engagement on company pages starts with employees. So get your team on board, even if some of them might not want to be on LinkedIn, but those that are on LinkedIn, then encourage them to connect to the company page so your company logo shows up on their personal profile and then just educate them a little bit. But hi, if you’re creating this excellent content on your company page, they can share that to their network. The key here is not to simply share without saying why you’re sharing something.

(29:42)
You see this happen all the time, especially with large corporates. But if you say to somebody, look, the CEO is going to do this post about something or other, there’s a tool called notify employees. So little employees know the post has gone out. If they’ve had a little bit of training on how to use LinkedIn, then they’ll share that and they’ll write why they’re sharing that. And that has much more of an impact than just simply reposting or resharing without saying anything. It’s also in this day and age, it’s actually an excellent tool for helping you to recruit as well because if you have a job right there at the moment and you’re trying to recruit somebody, people will go straight to your LinkedIn company page and see what is this company actually like? Do people like working there? So use your team. We do for our clients, we do a regular meet the team posts who is actually working here and if you have everything really depends on personalities, but we try and encourage our clients to record short video clips.

(30:45)
So you could your star employee or employee of the month or whatever, just say, do you mind maybe doing a 32nd clip as to why you like working here? And people just really resonate with people, with human people and that can have a huge impact. So there’s lots and lots to company pages and they’re changing them all the time. Now you can actually send a private message to a company page, not ruled out to everybody. So if you haven’t got that on your own company page yet, it’s coming, it’s coming slowly. LinkedIn likes to introduce features. People have no idea how regularly, extremely regularly new features are brought out all the time, usually under the radar and usually ruled out at quite a slow pace. So there’ll be some people, I guess small cohort at 10% will get it and they’ll test it out because they are a software company and then they slowly roll it out. So one of the questions I get asked on YouTube all the time is, Louise, you’re talking about this, we don’t have this yet. Why don’t we have this? I’m like, well, it just hasn’t been rolled out to you yet. So things are rolled out slowly.

Greg Wilkes (31:51):

Only those who’ve met the king get this first.

(31:56)
Brilliant, really useful stuff you’ve just mentioned there, just to go back and talk about some of that. So using a company page and leveraging the power of your employees. So that’s really valuable. I guess if your employees have got a load of connections and contacts and you’ve got really important message, you want to get out there and you say to your 10 employees, look, would you all mind sharing this and saying something about it? I guess the promotion that post is going to get and the leverage that gets is going to be so much greater than just posting it yourself. So that’s the first thing there, isn’t it?

Louise Brogan (32:24):

Yes. And also then the other tool that they give you is that your employees can invite their connections to follow your company page. So every month on the first of the month, people who are page admins can invite, depending on your settings, either hundred or 250 of their network to follow the company page. Highly recommend that you just set a drumbeat for doing that on the first of every month. But then your employees can also invite their network to follow the company page as well. And it’s a little button says invite connections. And that could be at the end of every team meeting just say, “Hey guys, if you don’t mind, could you go and invite 10 of your network to follow the company page?” And you see that start to build up and grow and company pages for us. I think there’s a tipping point of when you get to about 500 or a thousand followers, the engagement starts to like a ball rolling down a hill.

(33:17)
So you do need to work at it, but it is so worthwhile I think, and there’s so much more to all of this, Greg. One of the biggest things we find the most successful tools we find on LinkedIn in the last year are LinkedIn newsletters. So you can publish up to five newsletters from your company page and what happens is everybody who follows the page is invited to subscribe to the first issue of that. The reason they’re so powerful is because yes, they publish on LinkedIn like the old style article, but people who are subscribed to it get it into their email inbox. So they’re sitting at work and if you are strategic and time this right and have the right headline at the top of it, it arrives in somebody’s inbox and they click on it and suddenly they’re reading about whatever it is that you’re currently doing or the project success you just had or whatever. And that’s a really powerful tool, that newsletter tool.

Greg Wilkes (34:13):

Yes, really useful. Some might already be doing newsletters internally or to their email list. So if you’re not leveraging newsletters in LinkedIn, then that’s a great tip there, Louise. And just coming back to something you touched on that we skimmed over, but I think this is so powerful, is about using the company pages of recruitment strategy because we hear all the time that it’s so difficult to find people out there. I’m trying to find a project manager or I’m trying to find this or that. It can be a challenge, but yeah, I guess if we’ve got a nice company page and profile up and all our employees are speaking about us, that is a really powerful tool, isn’t it?

Louise Brogan (34:47):

It’s massively powerful. And that again, you could create the job posting on the company page, get all the employees to share it to their network as well, to get the message out to more people. But people do check out your LinkedIn, they checked out your LinkedIn profile and they check out your company page before they come anywhere near you. Way more than probably, I think most people realize. So one of the interesting things, and another reason why I love LinkedIn is it is one of the biggest resources of content on the internet. If you think about all the companies and people who are sharing posts on LinkedIn every single day, all that fresh content every single day, Google loves it, which is why if you go to Google and type in someone’s name, usually their LinkedIn profile is the very first search result, not because their LinkedIn profile is amazing. It’s because LinkedIn, the platform is seen as such a trusted resource by Google and other search engines that it comes up at the very top. So also those newsletters and articles that you publish, I get found by people through Google on articles that I might have published on LinkedIn two, three years ago. So they have a really long lifespan as well. So take this stuff seriously.

Greg Wilkes (36:06):

Yes, that’s really good. And I guess you could use it, some people are updating blogs all the time on their website, once a month a blog goes out, that’s great for SEO. But yeah, you could maybe use that as part of your newsletter if you’ve got some good content.

Louise Brogan (36:20):

No, no maybe about it. Absolutely repurpose that stuff into your newsletter. I mean social media, at the end of the day, the purpose of it is to send people to our businesses to knock on our doors to visit our websites. Do not build your whole business on LinkedIn. Get a really good website, have everything on there, your team, your products, your services, how to contact you, use LinkedIn to spark interest enough in you that people then go to your website to find out more about you. A hundred percent. With our content marketing service for LinkedIn, what we do is we write the newsletter once a month and then we say to the clients, put that on your website as a blog now as well, because that’s going to really help your website with the fresh content as well. When a client comes to me and they say, “Well, Louise, we need help with our LinkedIn, can you manage our page for us?” We’ve been blogging for years on our website. I’m like, happy days. So much content for us to use to be able to create the LinkedIn content from. It’s like perfect client. Love it.

Greg Wilkes (37:22):

Yes, that’s awesome. So there’s been a load of tips here that you’ve gone through, Louise, and I guess people listening to this, you’re probably going to have to go back and start it again and listen to it fully and take some notes because there’s some real gold that you’ve been sharing today. If you were just going to give us a few practical tips to take away, if someone was just listening and thought, I just want to do just a couple of things to get myself started, where are they going to get the biggest bang for their buck? What should they be focusing on? If we were just going to hone it down to maybe one to three things they should be doing?

Louise Brogan (37:50):

Number one, absolutely get your profile up to date. Absolutely. I have a load and loads of videos on YouTube on how to optimize your LinkedIn profile. It’s also a one-to-one service I do myself. But absolutely get your profile up to date, check that what you currently offer is actually what your profile says. The number of people who go to their profile, oh gosh, I haven’t not changed that in three years. We don’t do that anymore and this other thing we do is not actually on there. So get your profile up to date, just block out an hour on your calendar and just go through it and update it. So that’s the first thing. Number two is please, start to post on LinkedIn. Be in that top 5%. So get a pen and paper. If you’re like me, I love to write things down and think what are the key things I want to be known for?

(38:41)
What are the key topics that I want to be known for? What can I actually write about? And if that completely stumps you get somebody in to help you with that strategy piece or your favorite industry articles. If there’s a journal that you like to read, follow them on LinkedIn. When they post an article that you like, number one, comment on it, because so few people comment on these things that you will get noticed by the company publishing that article or the person you will get noticed and they will be checking out your profile and then share it to your network and say what you liked about it. And there you’ve just done your first post and you haven’t really had to come up with anything too unique or too difficult to work with. So profile and start posting. Third thing, start commenting on other people’s content. I’m not going to give you more, but honestly Greg, I give you a hundred things. I don’t want to overlap.

Greg Wilkes (39:34):

That’s brilliant, Louise. And I know there’s so much there isn’t there, but it’s nice just to bring it down to just a few things that someone can take away on the podcast. So really useful. So we’re going to get some people listening to this that think this is fantastic. I want to start using LinkedIn. I can see the power of it. What’s the next steps if they want some help to do this, how do you help Louise?

Louise Brogan (39:55):

I do training, two things really. I do training myself with people and companies and we do the LinkedIn profile and then we do how to use LinkedIn, which sounds really simple, but I love doing this training so much. And then the second thing is we actually just take it all off your plate. We create all the content, we build up, we help your team to understand what part they play in that, and we post everything on the behalf of our clients and we do the strategic piece and everything. We have a team of writers. We’ve started to create video content with clients, which is actually really fun. I do that piece myself. So we do the training and we do the content management for clients as well.

Greg Wilkes (40:36):

Fantastic. So complete done for you if people need a little bit of assistance on that, so that’s brilliant. If people want to hear a little bit more and learn more about what you’re offering. Louise, you said you’ve got a YouTube channel earlier. What’s that?

Louise Brogan (40:47):

Yes. So you can find me on YouTube and my podcast, they’re both called LinkedIn with Louise. So nice and simple. I just type Louise Brogan LinkedIn into Google and it should all come up. And then I also have a little free guide to help people just to look at what you should be doing on a daily and weekly basis on LinkedIn. If they want to grab a copy of that, it’s on louisebrogan.com/download. Same with a Belfast accent people. Nobody can understand what that does.

Greg Wilkes (41:17):

That’s absolutely perfect. Understood that clearly. And what I’ll do is I’ll put all the links on the show notes so everyone’s got them. Louise, thank you so much for your time today and the value that you’ve offered. There’s so much in there that people will be able to unpack. So much appreciated. All the best.

Louise Brogan (41:32):

Thank you so much, Greg. Loved it. Thank you.

Greg Wilkes (41:44):

If you’d like to work with me to fast-track your construction business growth, then reach out on www.developcoaching.co.uk.