Every time you post a piece of content that no one engages with (e.g. product content usually gets very low engagement), the social media platform’s algorithm learns that users don’t like your content.

As a result, the algorithm will show your next post to less people, so your opportunities for engagement have now decreased.
Thus, your 2nd post will most likely get less engagement than your 1st post.

The algorithm will now show your 3rd post to even LESS people, which will further decrease your opportunities for engagement.
And this keeps going and going in vicious downward spiral, so that posts that used to get 1,000s of views, now get 100s of views (or less)!

Unfortunately, I’ve seen many companies go down this path by consistently posting product-based content. You can see their engagement dramatically decrease quickly and then you just don’t see their posts at all anymore because the algorithm has learned not to show it to you.


So, how do you avoid this? Post content that will add value to your target audience!


Solve their pain points, give free tips and content and information they can’t get elsewhere. When you do talk about your company, talk about DEI initiatives or things you are doing to help local communities.

The focus your content should be about THEM, your target audience, and what will add value to their lives.

If you do that, you will get more views and engagement, and generate more awareness and more business opportunities as a result.

You’re always to lose a big deal or two. That’s sales.

I ask sales leaders to keep the big picture in mind. Even if you lose one big deal, your team will probably close more deals overall because of the time saved not in the car or on a plane. It equals a huge boost in overall productivity.

Also, look at the bottom-line instead of top-line numbers. With the decrease in travel expenditures, the bottom-line numbers will look vastly different than before.

My company, for example, has seen expenses cut by over 50% in the past two months because I’m not travelling – huge difference!

Not saying face-to-face interaction should go away – it’s still the fastest way to develop a rapport.

However, if companies invest in coaching their teams to effectively sell virtually, the boost in productivity and bottom-line impact could be immense.

This is social media, not ANTI-SOCIAL media. To be successful with social media, you have to engage with others. If you only post content, it’s like you’re on the sidewalk shouting things through a megaphone. Eventually people will tune you out, and stop engaging with your content.

Social media is about reciprocity. Engage with the content of others 5-10x as much as you post content. This will ensure you stay top-of-mind, and your biggest advocates continue to engage with your content.

After all, why did someone post content on LinkedIn? They want engagement. They want to be validated! Give it to them – especially if that content would add value to your target audience as well.

This isn’t Instagram. You don’t get 30 likes and 5 comments every time you post a selfie.

Most content on LinkedIn gets 5 likes or less and 1 comment or less. If you consistently engage with someone’s content, they will remember you! In turn, they will engage with your content, and they will be more likely to accept your invitation to connect (and a meeting request) as well.

So don’t turn LinkedIn into anti-social media, engage with others – learn, network and grow. It’s the whole reason the platform exists!

Words matter. For example, “financial advisor” is searched for 10x more than “financial professional.”) When your team writes LinkedIn profiles, websites and sales materials, use words your prospects typically use. This will allow you to get found and be more easily understood.

Other surprising results:

• “Sales” 70x more than “business development” – no one wants to say they do sales, but you are much more likely to be found if you do
• “Innovation” 2x more than “innovative” – craft your content to use that tense instead
• “Strategy” 50% more than “strategies”
• “Online” 10x more searches than “digital” – an oldie, but a goodie
• “Digital marketing” 10x more searches than “online marketing” – but not when it comes to marketing
• “SEM” 20x more than “search engine marketing” – abbreviate this one
• “SEO” 15% more than “search engine optimization” – this one doesn’t matter at much
• “Social media” 80x more than “social networks” – it may not be grammatically correct at times, but using “social media” will get you found more
• “Facebook” 80x more than “social media” – if you are talking about Facebook, say “Facebook”

Want to run some searches on your own? Check our Google Trends (https://trends.google.com) to do comparisons between 2 or more words or phrases.

Tips to make your training sessions sing

My team has conducted a slew of training sessions this year. Based on those sessions, here are 4 key takeaways you can use to make your training more effective:

1) Make training interactive.

There’s nothing worse than talking at a group for 55 minutes, and then having 5 minutes of questions. Invite questions throughout the session, and cater your training to your audience’s answers. If no one is asking questions, ask them instead.

2) Show how to do things LIVE.

Yes, this adds an element of danger if the wi-fi isn’t strong at the venue, but live demos based on the needs and situations of your audiences are a lot more beneficial to them, and will keep them engaged.

3) Train small groups or conduct individual sessions.

Depending on the size of the group, this isn’t a possible, but try to get those groups down to small numbers. That way, participants won’t be afraid to ask questions, you will get a good dialogue going, and your message will stick.

4) Give homework. 

It’s easy for participants to attend a training session, think it’s great, but then go back to their desks and keep doing what they’ve always done. Have an “ask” for them (with a deadline), and follow-up to ensure they did it.

Follow these tips, and your training sessions will improve in 2018!

Every year, LinkedIn brings together sales leaders from around the globe at their annual Sales Connect conference. This year, it is clear that Sales Navigator is a big priority for LinkedIn. They are continuously investing and expanding the capabilities of Sales Navigator, and today they announced a slew of new features focused on 5 key areas to create what they are calling a “System of Engagement.”

1) Tags and Notes – you can now write tags and notes and organize information on leads or accounts and categorize any way you want – such as where you met, how to follow-up, or the contents of your last conversation. Tags and Notes launched a couple of weeks ago. Personally, I’ve been hoping for this one for quite a while, and I have been loving it so far. Here’s what it looks like in action:

2) CRM – LinkedIn announced an integration with Salesforce a while back, and now through their CRM Partner Program, they will be allowing other CRM companies to create apps that plug Sales Navigator into other CRM platforms. The first batch of partners are Oracle, SAP, SugarCRM, HubSpot and NetSuite.

You will be able to see LinkedIn information at the contact level. You can set up leads, and act upon that activity more easily – you don’t have to move back and forth between platforms anymore. This lowers the barrier to social selling. No longer will you have to cut and paste information from LinkedIn into your CRM. This is huge.

You can also write directly into your CRM – more things you will no longer have to copy and paste into your CRM system and vice versa.

3) InMail 2.0 – a group of new enhancements to InMail were announced including:

• The current iteration of InMail blocks the entire window when you are sending a message. Now, the window be on the side of the screen on the desktop, similar to Gmail’s interface.
• LinkedIn will also give you icebreakers – common connections and items to include in your messages to improve likelihood of a response – while you are creating your InMail.
• You can include attachments now. Let me repeat that: You. Can. Include. Attachments. Now. Hallelujah! It’s also through a great, interactive, data-rich service method called PointDrive,

4) Search – You will now be able to search by:

• Spotlights – a group of key sets of information that will give you ways to drill deeper into your search results such as how many of your results have changed jobs in the last 90 days, have been mentioned in the news the past 30 days and have posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days
• Department size and revenue (to determine if a company should be in your target audience)
• Senior leadership changes at companies (new people tend to make changes to personnel and technology)
• Zip code of a company’s headquarters (until now any office would appear in search results, but most decision makers are in a company’s headquarters)
• Growth of both company and department (to see the trajectory of a company and department)
• Content (keywords for content they are posting to see what is important to them)

Some of these enhancement are live (Spotlights, department size and senior leadership), and the rest are coming soon.

5) Sales Navigator for Gmail – this integration of Sales Navigator and Gmail brings Sales Navigator directly into your Inbox. You’ll have all the information you would have in Sales Navigator (connections in common, interests, shared companies, more) that you can use to start a conversation now in Gmail.

This one is already live as well. You can this find plug-in in the app store on mobile (search Sales Navigator) or here:

When I spoke with Derek Pando, Senior Marketing Manager at LinkedIn, he related “the new Sales Navigator features are to enhance the overall customer experience of Sales Navigator, and to integrate it into daily workflows to get people the information they need as easily as possible.”

With these new launches, LinkedIn has showed that they realize the way forward for them is through Sales Navigator, and the best way to do that is to help set sales teams up for success by making it as easy as possible to do social selling.

So, Sales Navigator users, what do you think of the new features?

About the Author

Robert Knop is Founder and CEO of Assist You Today, a company dedicated to helping companies transform their social media programs from driving engagement to driving revenue. He’s a proud member of the Wave3 network of consultants, and always happy to talk strategy, digital and social selling.

If you’d like to learn how to set-up a sales-driving social selling program at your organization, contact Robert at 323-972-3566, or simply complete the short form below.

When I did work out, I loved the competition of it – even if it’s competition with myself. I loved constantly trying to beat my best time or reps (and becoming frustrated when I didn’t!)

When I ran, I used to mostly run on treadmills. I preferred treadmills to outside running because 1) I have bad knees from years of high school football and wrestling, and 2) I loved the ability to be able to see exactly how you are doing before your race is over.

On a treadmill, I can see that I’m running an 8 minute mile (too slow, pick it up!), and I know when I am on pace to beat my best time way before I actually do. I liked the instant feedback, and ability to control my own destiny before the final results were in.

Gauging success  

With many companies, especially in the B2B space, the sales process is long and arduous; it may take months or even years to see the fruits of your labor.

So, how do you know you’re on track during that race?

The traditional way is to track the number of phone calls and emails you send on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. The challenge with this method is that I’ve been in this role before. If you need to make 10 phone calls a day, and you only have 9 names, that 10^th one is going to either be made up, the pizza guy or a family member.

The new way is track success along the way is through a great tool LinkedIn created called the Social Selling Index (SSI). This Index is a combination of 4 factors that typically lead to success within social selling, which focuses more on quality than quantity.

LinkedIn originally had the SSI as a component of their premium services only, but last year, they released to everyone. My current score is above. You can see your score here. Go ahead check it, I’ll wait…

Is a high SSI a guarantee of success? Of course not, but it’s worked for a whole lot of other people to date, so there are precedents in place. LinkedIn research has shown that SSI leaders:

• Are 51% more likely to hit their quota
• Create 45% more opportunities per quarter
• Get promoted 17 months sooner

How it works

The Social Selling Index measures 4 key steps to success on a 1 to 25 scale.

• Establish your professional brand
• Find the right people
• Engage with insights
• Build relationships

For detailed descriptions on each of these, you can go here – it does a great job of explaining it.

Now, I know that some of you can’t do all these things because you work in highly regulated industries. That’s okay – as a result, maybe your target number isn’t 100, maybe it’s 60. At almost all companies, you can do parts of the SSI, but definitely check with your compliance department to see what your company’s guidelines are. All-in-all, though, it’s a great way to keep track of your progress, especially before you start generating the back-end sales numbers to show to the C-suite.

But that’s not my favorite part about the SSI…

The best part

My favorite part about the SSI is the number itself. The fact that LinkedIn realized how much people love games (Candy Crush, anyone?), and how competitive sales people are. So, they made a game out of LinkedIn!! Now, you can compare yourself to others in your team, your company, and your industry. This is genius, and a big motivator for people who like to win (like myself, and about 99% of salespeople out there)!

So check it out, see where you compare to those in your network. Get frustrated that you are not higher. Do better, and oh by the way, this will all help you be a more valuable partner for your clients, and improve your bottom line. So have fun, and start tracking your Social Selling Index today!

Key takeaways

• The LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) is a valuable tool to help gauge success
• Top SSI leaders are typically more successful
• The gamification of the SSI is a strong motivator

About the author

Robert Knop is a passionate helper of people, and Founder of Assist You Today, a company dedicated to helping companies get closer to their customers, build trust and drive sales by harnessing the power of social media. He’s always happy to talk about strategy, digital and social.

If you’d like to learn how to get closer to your customers, build trust and drive sales using social media and social selling, feel free to contact Robert at 323-972-3566, or simply complete the short form below.

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