I have a weakness for walls of text. I really do.
See, I love to teach and think and expound and explain, and I do it best in writing. This is, as I have been frequently reminded by my wonderful business partner, rather merciless on the end reader, on websites, in newsletters and emails, and sometimes even on social media.
And it’s a problem because while the content may be good and fondly like to believe that it is, it’s hard to read. This is important everywhere, but it’s especially important on social media.
And I’ve never been a huge fan or a super user of it, which means I’ve never been great at configuring things in the right way to perform the best. But there are so many experts who are so, so good at it, for which I am profoundly grateful because so many of them are so generous with their knowledge.
We are talking with one of those experts today, and she’s got some strong opinions about the length of content that belongs in LinkedIn, as well as the topics, the relationship building, the role of LinkedIn to business, and how podcasters can take advantage of it.
Sophie Lechner is the creator of The Magnet Model, and she helps mission driven entrepreneurs find their audience on LinkedIn and build relationships with them so that they can spread their message and grow their own businesses.
If you want strategies that you can use today to improve your LinkedIn game, listen to the episode below or continue reading the blog post!
Tune in to the full episode to learn about:
- The strengths of LinkedIn as a platform
- How to make LinkedIn work for podcasters
- LinkedIn mistakes and best practices
- The ideal LinkedIn post from Sophie Lechner
- Relationship building with podcast hosts and guests
Don’t forget to join us for our free monthly strategy calls on the third Thursday of every month!
The LinkedIn Landscape
Now, if you’ve been on LinkedIn for more than 45 seconds, you know that a lot of people are using it for aggressive and pushy sales, flagrant self-promotion, and very smug:
I have amazing insights but they’re actually just trying to say Don’t be a jerk—but they’re phrasing it like it’s a revelation content.
Sophie and her community of clients and friends are not that type, and she has dedicated a huge amount of time to understanding how the platform can work to create real connections with real people, and that’s the foundation of everything.
So, grab a pen and pencil if you can or bookmark this one for later because it is full of the good stuff.
Sophie Lechner and Being Mission-Driven
Sophie: “My name is Sophie Lechner, and I’m a coach for mission driven entrepreneurs. I help them to find their audience on LinkedIn so they can build relationships with them, which, as we know, is the basis of creating business for yourself.
It helps them grow their business and also share their message, which is an important thing for them since they’re mission driven.”
Are you a mission-driven entrepreneur?
Sophie: “My definition of mission driven is someone who is really passionate about what they do. They do it for their clients and for their audience more than they do it for the money.
And there’s another dimension, which is really that they have a bigger message to share. They want to, let’s say, raise awareness about a cause or about something that is important in their work.
So they have this message to spread beyond just their audience and their clients. Those are the two components. I zeroed in on that just by looking at all my clients a couple of years ago and saying, Okay, who are the ones that I really enjoyed with? And let me put two columns, the ones not so much. And I found this common thread.
I’ve really centered myself on that work, and I put it out there broadly so that people who are not resonating can just walk away.”
It’s not just about the niche
I remember back when I was doing more business coaching and consulting earlier in my career, and people would say, I need to have a niche, I need to niche down, I need to pick my niche. And it’s just like, No, work with a bunch of people and then do exactly as Sophie is describing; look at the patterns.
What did you actually enjoy? Where did you see the most success and how did you help them the most effectively?
Sophie says that this helps you to stay away from things like the demographics which can be so artificially driven—because a lot of times, as Sophie said, what really ends up being your niche is something that is not so easy to describe, but after having worked with people, you can describe it.
Sophie talks about people who are really driven by passion, who have really strong messages to share. And I’ve got to be honest, when I think of those things, of really passionately communicating, connecting with others, sharing important messages—LinkedIn is not the first platform that kind of intuitively springs into my mind, but she’s really making it work.
Here’s how Sophie does it:
LinkedIn: The Conversation Platform
Sophie: “I think LinkedIn is the perfect platform for that, much better than any other ones. It’s a platform where you can really engage in conversations, real conversations with people, in a way that I find, and I’m probably biased, but I find that I can’t really do as well on other platforms.
You can put your message out there, you can share articles, you can share other people’s stuff, even if it’s related, and do it in a way that is going to open conversations.
There’s all the comments section where people can comment, and you can create your posts in a way that’s going to engage and have people respond and put comments, and then you respond in the comments, and you get this thread of conversation going.
Then of course, the goal is to get them off of LinkedIn so you can have a real conversation, like we are having now, or even if it wasn’t recorded—so just a Zoom call, or even in real life.
Building those relationships is how people would think of you six months down the road when they meet someone who you could help. And I find that, yes, there are still a lot of people using LinkedIn the wrong way. What I call the wrong way, send in 100 connection requests a day and bothering you in your DMs. I mean, a lot of people just walk away from LinkedIn just because of these stupid messages that they receive, which is so annoying. By the way, there’s ways to minimize that.
It’s a shame to walk away because of that because beyond that, if you can, number one, reduce that and number two, just get over the fact that it’s going to happen wherever you go. There’s so much goodness to be had and there’s a lot of great conversations happening. I’ve had so much stuff happen from LinkedIn.”
Managing LinkedIn DMs for a More Productive Experience
Those LinkedIn messages—oh, man, those hard selling DMs.
I’ve started a new little game, so when I get one, I start hard selling right back. And it’s really fun because it always makes them be quiet and go away.
Sophie Lechner’s thoughts on LinkedIn DMs:
“I prefer to just ignore them because I feel like it’s not even worth my energy and I just ignore them. But if you go into your notifications and wherever it says in mail, you can turn all of that off and you’ll get a lot less, and you’ll only be able to get emails, which is messages basically from people you’re connected with.
The next step is to be careful when you’re invited to connect, to really be selective, just take a look at who is it that’s requesting a connection and you can guess most of the time who’s going to DM you right back. And it’s immediate because they’re not just sitting there, it’s a robot.”
LinkedIn’s Unique Appeal for Business-Oriented Networking
Sophie: “Well, a couple of things, I think one is the audience, the audience and the intent.
People are there for business, and business is a very broad term. You could have people in corporate who are there to spread their message or talk with colleagues or entrepreneurs, salespeople.
It’s really not about last night’s dinner or your pet, there’s already a boundary, even if it’s fairly loose, where you know there’s not going to be all this other stuff on there.
Then you have the audience who’s there, and it’s a similar thing. They’re there for business, so you don’t have the grandmas looking at pictures of their kids. At least there’s a little bit of filtering that way.
The next thing I find is the way that the platform is structured—not to say that this can’t happen on Facebook, a lot of people have their business on Facebook, there’s a lot of great conversations.
I have to say, groups are better organized on Facebook than on LinkedIn, but you can still have a great group on LinkedIn. Anyhow, the way it’s structured, where you create a post, it’s always the same format, and then there’s comments underneath, the way you get notified in your messages or in your notifications if it’s a comment.
Once you know how to work it, it’s just easy to navigate. Of course, my newer clients wouldn’t say that, but by the time they’re done with me, they agree. There’s an ease of navigation where you really can get into the conversations and the meat of it.
It just lends itself. Then beyond the post, there’s articles, there’s a featured section on your profile, so you can highlight certain things. I think it just lends itself beautifully to that work.”
How to Make LinkedIn Work for Podcasters
Of course, this is The Company Show, and we’re talking about podcasting for a business. So if I’m a company podcast, this is for our company, One Stone Creative: How should people like me or other people running podcasts for their business be using LinkedIn?
You don’t want to just be a spam bot and posting your own content, that doesn’t work anywhere.
Here are some of the ways that people can really work with their podcasts on LinkedIn:
1. Guest research
Sophie: “There are a million ways that you can use LinkedIn for a podcaster and a podcast guest as well. And that’s one of the very unknown things, if you will, about LinkedIn.
From a podcaster standpoint, the first thing is finding guests. Obviously there’s people who are referred and all of that but you can do some research on LinkedIn. You can put in topics in the research bar. That research function on LinkedIn is so underutilized and underknown.
You can put, for example, in the search bar, your topic or any topic that you want, and then you can click on posts and you’ll find all kinds of people having conversations with that word in there.
You can use the filters that come up on the right-hand side. If you click all filters, you can filter by all kinds of things, like where do they work now? Or where did they work in the past, what industry they’re in, who they’re connected to, the hashtags they use—all kinds of stuff to really zero in on the perfect audience.”
2. Connecting with other podcasters
Sophie: “Then you can also, of course, look at other podcasters. You can find other podcasters that talk about similar things or overlapping topics and look through their guests and invite the people that they’ve invited.
That’s all just about identifying the right guests. Then, of course, you can connect with them on LinkedIn and say, Hey, I heard you talk at this and such and such. I’d love to… you could do that by email, but you may not have their email. So on LinkedIn, you can just go ahead and connect with them.”
3. Episode promotion
Sophie: “Then there’s the whole part about sharing the podcast episodes. Obviously, you can post when there’s an episode coming out. You can post when you’ve just booked someone and you say, Hey, I was just talking to so and so, and I’m so excited, I’m going to have them on my podcast.
Then you can link to certain things that the person has, and you’re starting to already serve that person before you even have them on the podcast. So there’s the mirror activities, we’re going to talk later about what you can do as a podcast guest if you’re looking for podcasts to get onto. And a lot of these are mirrors of each other.
When you’re a podcaster, so as I said, post when you’ve just booked someone great, you can post when it’s going to be next week, you can post the day before saying, Well, this is coming up. Then of course, when the episode is aired, then you can post there and put little audiograms.
From a one-hour interview or half hour interview, you can get all these different snippets that you could [use]. You’ll have more material than you have time to post. You don’t want to be posting ten times a day, so you’ll have too much stuff.
So you can do these little snippets and of course, you put a link to the full interview, not in the post, in the comments. That’s just a little tip to increase your visibility.”
Where should you put your post links?
Sophie: “If you are someone who’s got 20,000 followers and you regularly get 5000 views and 50 comments, then don’t worry about it. Put the link in your [posts]. It’s not going to ding your visibility by any percentage that’s relevant.
Most of my clients are either early on LinkedIn or they’re in their first two, three years. They don’t have that kind of exposure. And for them to lose 15% visibility is significant enough that I tell them to put the link in their comments, not in the post.
That’s why there’s this debate, because it depends, like most answers. For my audience, I always say, put in the comments.”
TL;DR: If you’re one of the big boys, then you can put it in your post. But if you’re smaller podcast, just put it in the comments.
The Biggest Mistake You Can Do on LinkedIn
Sophie: “People who know me will know this is when I get on my soapbox. Long posts, wall of words. Please don’t do it.
The technical maximum length of a LinkedIn post is 3000 characters. It used to be 1300 characters. One of the worst decisions LinkedIn made is to move it to 3000. I was like, Oh, no. Everybody was excited, but I was like, No, not me.
If you try to type 3000 characters, we’re not talking words, we’re talking characters, and put it in a LinkedIn post, you will see how damn long it is. Sorry, it’s just nobody wants to read that.
If you have that much to say, by all means, but put it in an article. And the reason is the expectation from the reader is different. If I’m looking at my feed, I am expecting short stuff. I need to move through it, I need to have just enough for me to decide whether I want to read it or not.
You’re doing yourself a disservice by writing long posts because people just won’t read them. They won’t. It’s like noise. If you decide you want to write an article, then you can make a short post, link to the article in the comments, and then in the article.
If someone is looking through their feed and they say, Oh, this is an article I want to read, your expectation then as the reader is like, Okay, this is a longer piece but I’ve signed up for this. This is what I want now. I want the depth.
I think respecting readers in that way is important. So that’s the biggest one.”
Megan:
I feel a little personally called out by this because I’m a wall of text kind of person, but it’s an excellent point about the context of the different parts of LinkedIn, because LinkedIn makes these different features available.
There are articles for longer form, there are newsletters for longer form. You’re possibly meant to be conversational, so write a conversation, not a monologue.
Techniques for Readability
Sophie: “Even in a short post, you want to put some visual space, you want to put some white space. There’s no field for a headline but create a headline.
Go to one of those websites where you can get bold in different characters. There are a few websites. But even without that, just put a short title and then skip a line and that’s it. You’ve got a headline.
Then make very, very short paragraphs, use a couple of emojis—don’t go crazy with that, so that it’s easy to read. In this day and age, if we want a book, we’ll go get a book.
You’re serving yourself. You want people to read it, so make it so the text just will jump into their brain without having to make any effort. It’s a sad state of society, but it is what it is, so we got to work with it.”
LinkedIn Best Practices
1. Carousels for the algorithm
Sophie: “Carousels are those images that you can slide, it goes through, it’s like a slide deck. I love them, I do them all the time. For most people, they work really well. It’s not interesting, but because there’s dwell time. So you spend more time on it, so you get rewarded from the algorithm.
I don’t like talking about the algorithm, but there is truth to that. Now, that being said, it’s important to know that anything that anybody says about best practices, even the big gurus, you need to test for yourself because your own audience is going to be different.
Just as an example, I have one or two clients who did carousels because I told them to do carousels and then they’re like, this is flopping in a major way. So, okay, well, don’t do carousels anymore then—you’ve got to test.”
2. Best time to post?
Sophie: “Some people ask me like, Oh, what’s the best day of the week or the best time? So I say, okay, between Monday and Friday, between 09:00 a.m. And 05:00 p.m. It also depends if you have a global audience than you.
But for some people, the weekend works great. You can’t really have these hard and fast rules, generally speaking. Just try.”
3. Videos are in
Sophie: “I think short videos are good. They get a lot of viewership. Keep it short. Same question as with the post length, just keep it like 30 seconds or a minute. Do put captions.
Now, the number one reason is for any abilities, so everybody can see it but also a lot of people will not want to turn on the audio on a video. If you have captions, then people can consume your content, kind of plays in front of them and they’re kind of digesting it whether they want to or not, almost.
It really is important. You’ve seen all kinds of formats for that, there’s different platforms that create that.”
4. No bunch of images
Sophie: “One thing I’ve seen a lot of, and I’m guessing it’s a mistake from people who don’t know any better—are these conglomerations of images, there’s like nine images and you have to click to see them.
I think this is people mostly who are trying to do a carousel, just don’t know how to do it. That’s my guess. Because why would you want to put a whole glob of pictures like that?
LinkedIn Formats Versus Other Platforms
Multimedia dimensions
Sophie: “The format of an image or a video is going to be different. This is why you see a lot of square because Instagram is very vertical. LinkedIn is more horizontal, Facebook is more horizontal. So a lot of people just default to square because this way they can throw it everywhere.
So when I see a vertical video on LinkedIn, that’s where I turn up my nose, because I’m like, Hmm, okay. And you can tell by the style. It’s like, Oh, I’m on the street. I’m walking. Sorry, I just shouldn’t be such a snob. But those are the different formats.
The tone
I think more relevant is kind of the tone. I was talking about the Instagram tone is much more, I’m walking around the street, I’m just sharing what I’m doing today, I’m giving you the behind the scenes. I think that’s not so much the vibe on LinkedIn.
Maybe the behind the scenes, if it’s giving you some insights about the kind of work that I do, about how I work with my clients, that kind of thing, but not just gratuitous.
The Ideal LinkedIn Post from Sophie Lechner
Sophie: “I have a little template that I use with my clients.
1. Title
“You want to have a title, like I said before, a few words that you can bold, if possible, on the first line, then you skip a line, and then you want to have a hook—that’s a common writing feature.”
2. Hook
“The hook needs to take the topic, look at it from the perspective of your reader. So you really want to be in the reader’s shoes. So what is the reader feeling and thinking about this particular topic? So that when you write the hook, they will see it and be pulled in.”
3. Elaborate
“After that you want to elaborate a little bit. again, you don’t have that many words available to you, but you want to elaborate a little bit and sort of describe what it is that they’re going through or thinking with regard to this topic. So just illustrate a little bit so they feel heard and understood.”
4. A different perspective
“Then you have them in your camp and then you want to provide them with a different perspective. So then you take the thing and not all posts will be that right, but an ideal sort of educational info sharing post. You take what you’ve said and you turn it on its head.
You’re like, Well, maybe the reason you’re dealing with this or viewing it this way is because you’re not noticing this other thing or you’re thinking it. Maybe not the wrong way, but there’s another way to think about it.
This is where you bring in your own expertise. You’re not saying, but it’s underlying. You have all this experience that makes you understand better the actual root cause, the actual problem. And so you say, Well, how about thinking of it this way? And then you give a little bit of illustration, explanation, you talk about the problem of not seeing it this way, the benefits of looking at it this way.”
5. Call to action
“Then you want to close with a call to action and the call to action. A lot of people misunderstand this as sign up for my program or download my lead magnet. But the call to action, I prefer to actually call it call to engagement.
It’s a question, something that you’re going to ask them about that will encourage them to actually take action and engage with your post. So asking a question is the most common thing. And you need to be careful that this question is not a yes or no question. And it’s also not something that’s going to take a lot of time and thought to answer.
It should be just enough that people are called to put a little answer in there. So you have to kind of gauge that.
That’s the structure of an ideal post in my mind.”
Sophie Lechner’s Podcast Guesting Strategy
Right after I had invited Sophie to the show, she asked me for something that I am not frequently asked for, and it was a copy of our cover art for this podcast.
Here’s why she did that:
Sophie: “Well, I was implementing one of the first steps that I recommend to my clients when they get invited on a podcast.
When you’re a guest, it’s a great honor to be invited on a podcast. It’s something that’s exciting. It means somebody seen something in you that they appreciated. It’s going to be great for you, for your audience. It’s going to give you stuff that you can promote.
There’s a lot of gratitude that goes into it. And so I want to recognize the person who’s invited me and I want to showcase their podcast. So when you invited me, I said, Okay, I’m going to declare that I’ve been invited on a podcast, that I’m very excited about it, and I’m not going to just leave it at that. I’m going to say who it is that invited me, what the podcast is, and I’m going to talk about one of the key things that you want to talk about to your audience.
I’m giving an opportunity to you to spread the word to my audience, so, giving you visibility, basically. And so I put an image of your podcast and I said in my PS at the end of my post, I said, because we had talked and you had told me this new dimension that you wanted to a product that you’re interested in giving visibility to, which is the analytics behind having a podcast and how to measure the ROI.
So I put a PS and I said, Well, if you are a podcaster and you want to measure, this is the girl for you. And so I put in the comments, a link to a podcast episode that you had talking about this particular topic.
I’m happy to report that post got a lot of views and a lot of comments and people are like, Oh, that sounds great. Let me go check out this podcast. I’ve added it to my Spotify list. It was nice, it was fun.”
Quick tip!
As a host, Sophie’s strategy made me feel great. It was so cool to see that happening.
So take note, why you should have prep calls before full interviews so you can have kind of discussion, so everyone’s got that kind of information.
It was just a really lovely kind of relationship-nurturing part of this experience. It worked and I invited Sophie to the podcast.
Applying The Same Strategy for Your Guests
Sophie: “You can say, Hey, I spoke to so and so, and I’ve invited them on my podcast. You could do the exact same and say, I wanted to invite them because they do this and that kind of work, and I liked it because this and that. And then put, here’s a link to their whatever, maybe their podcast, maybe it’s a podcaster. Or their website or the same thing.
LinkedIn is all about building relationships. And when you really look at the other person, when I say the other person, it could be in this case a podcast host or guest, but also the other person, the reader, as a human being that you can give value to.
That’s my whole philosophy is treating your audience like they’re already your clients. They’re already people you want to share stuff with and educate and help and hear from and all this other stuff.
When you start thinking that way, then these things come to you naturally.”
Final Thoughts
So here are my favorite parts about what Sophie says.
LinkedIn is very much a social media platform.
It’s not just job hunting and humble bragging, although, of course, there’s still job hunting and humble bragging. But when people are using it to be social and to connect with people, it’s usually about work in some capacity.
That is really, really important as a business owner who is promoting their own work through their podcast or building the relationships they need to grow their business through their show.
Similarly, you very much get out of LinkedIn what you put in.
If you’re intentional about what you post, who you connect with and how you communicate with them, great things can happen.
Finally, you can apply frameworks and strategies…
to your posting, connecting and converting, and this takes a lot of the pressure and overwhelm out of the whole equation.
Of course, that means it can work really beautifully with the Business Podcast Blueprint that you’re using for your show. I particularly love Sophie’s strategy for using LinkedIn as a platform to engage with your guests and be promoting them before and after your call with them. That covers the invitation, the prep, the recording, and the promotion.
It’s an amazing way to leverage the time that you’re spending with your podcast for multiple purposes, building your content on LinkedIn, improving your relationship with the guest, and creating great content for your own audience.
Make sure to check out Sophie on LinkedIn, the link is in the show notes and visit her at themagnetmodel.com.
Next Week on The Company Show
Next week we’re talking to a fabulous entrepreneur who’s developed a simple, intuitive framework for understanding how you can make the best content as a business owner and with a great deal of joy.
Shanna Hernandez is the creator of the content personalities and is one of the owners of the joyful business revolution. She and I sat down for what ended up being a luxuriously long and rich conversation about how approaching content like podcasting, live streams and email can look very different depending on your own strengths as a content creator.
We also talked about how it’s possible to get a lot of data out of the work that you’ve done that can inform your future decisions. And, you know, that’s what we’re all about over here.
Here’s a quick preview where Shannon is explaining why to correlate income to content, she looks at a 90-day window of time:
Need A Podcast?
As always, this is Megan Dougherty, and The Company Show was made possible by the team at One Stone Creative.
If you know a business owner that you think should have a podcast, do us a favor and send them to podcastingforbusiness.com!
Key Quotes
“In this day and age, if we want a book, we’ll go get a book. You’re serving yourself, right? You want people to read it, so make it so the text will just jump into their brain without having to make any effort.” – Sophie Lechner
Resources
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