Transcription
****Please forgive any and all transcription errors as this was transcribed by Otter.ai.****

[intro music]
Kenneth Kinney 0:16
Welcome back and thank you for joining A Shark's Perspective.

Kenneth Kinney 0:19
I am Kenneth "Shark" Kinney, keynote speaker strategist, and your Chief Shark Officer/

Kenneth Kinney 0:24
How are you using LinkedIn today to grow your business or your brand? A lot of people look at the LinkedIn platform in the same manner as other social platforms. But as the algorithm has well proven, it doesn't reward you in the same manner by any stretch of the imagination. What is the right way then for how to grow your visibility? Is it better content? Or is it better content that creates and furthers conversations that move them forward in a social media world? I saw today's guests present at a National Speakers Association Winter Workshop, so this is definitely an episode you won't want to miss.

Kenneth Kinney 0:58
Richard bliss is the CEO of bliss point consulting, a top social selling trainer, a LinkedIn top voice and author and a public speaker.

Kenneth Kinney 1:06
And on this episode, we'll discuss building up to 120,000 followers being named one of the top LinkedIn voice in the world, being in the enterprise sales business without being in sales, algorithms, data analysis versus opinions, three to five hashtags, creating better conversations, marketing crap that doesn't resonate, videos versus text, employee engagement, habits that sabotage your posts, getting replaced in your job by your own ex-wife, puppies, unicorns, cats riding rhoombas, and a lot, lot more.

Kenneth Kinney 1:34
So let's tune in to a blissful LinkedIn expert with a shark who finds bliss and happiness in the water, on a stage, or on this episode of A Shark's Perspective.

Kenneth Kinney 1:48
All right, Richard, welcome to A Shark's Perspective. Please give us a brief overview of your background and career to date.

Richard Bliss 1:55
Sure, I am happy to be here. Thanks, Shark for letting me be on the show. You know, my background is marketing. I've been a software executive for a variety of software companies over the years. I'm located here in Silicon Valley. And I've worked for some of the largest tech companies here in the valley on a variety of roles. And about three years ago, I stepped out on my own working with the same clients, both their executives and their sales teams to help them understand how to master this, what I refer to as this digital first world, as a leader, as a salesperson. We are now engaging online first long before we meet anybody in person. And so that's a little bit of my background, having done this for as long as my team says since the late 1900s, which doesn't sound flattering. But I've been doing this for a long time. So that's a little bit of my background.

Kenneth Kinney 2:44
So you hit the 100. What you're roughly 120,000 followers on LinkedIn. Yeah. At what point? Did you know that this was the channel that you were gonna go all in on? And at what point? Did you know that I'm in a pretty good place my following where I've got that street credibility to be able to give company some people advice.

Richard Bliss 3:05
You know, it started just a little over 10 years ago, because I was the vice president marketing for a software company, they fired me and gave my job to my wife. Okay. So it was an interesting story. And they knew she was my wife at the time. Now we're now set divorced. So I think that probably led to it a little bit. But I had to figure out at the time, I had to figure out how to reinvent myself, because the nature of the role that I played, I was a global presence in my industry, traveled the world. And I couldn't go I couldn't go to a competitor. I couldn't go to another vendor, I was just kind of stuck. And I had to reinvent myself. And so I went out and started teaching myself how to use social media. Because back in 2010 2011, it was still kind of a new thing as far as business went. And so LinkedIn taught myself LinkedIn taught myself, Twitter, you know, I picked up 25,000 followers on Twitter with different accounts, a little bit of YouTube a little bit, I started a podcast that ran for 350 episodes. And so I end up wrote a book. I mean, there was all kinds of things I said, let me just throw spaghetti against the wall and see what happens. And really, it was LinkedIn that continued to bring back I'm in I'm in the enterprise sales business. I'm not a salesperson. But that is where my customers and my prospects and my network live. And it became very obvious that LinkedIn was where I needed to be to be in business, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, I got a tick tock account, but my kids give me a hard time about that. So that's where I kind of decided and made that move when I did. LinkedIn acknowledged and named me one of their top 10 voices number eight in the world on the LinkedIn platform in the category of sales, and shark what's interesting is I just said I didn't see myself in sales. But I was helping salespeople understand how to use the platform. And once that happened, I got named, all of a sudden, people started following me. My newsletter picked up, you know, suddenly there were 65,000 people subscribed to my LinkedIn newsletter, it suddenly became a very powerful story. And I think my timing was perfect to start teaching people how this platform works differently than all those other social media platforms, which I have a presence on. But this is the one that drives revenue.

Kenneth Kinney 5:28
Well, we've got a lot to cover. But I also wanted to ask for the most part, your company now is working with people at brands or with the brands themselves? And how to establish those brands and their business pages, if you will.

Richard Bliss 5:40
Good question. So no, I do not deal with company brands and their business pages on LinkedIn. And the reason is, is because there's zero

Kenneth Kinney 5:48
engagement on those pages, no one has zero

Richard Bliss 5:51
engagement, but two, it has a different purpose. There are three entities inside of an organization that I kind of work with, and each one have a different outcome that they're looking for, for social media, the marketing team, which usually owns the corporate brand, the social media team, they're looking for brand awareness, they're looking to get a message out, it's, it's almost a PR function for them. On the executive side, they're looking to establish thought leadership, they're looking to have something to say in the industry have influence. And the salespeople all they care about, honestly, is is this going to help me open a door to close business, they don't care about brand new, I mean, they kind of care about brand awareness, only if it opens the door to close business. And what's interesting is those three activities on social media and particularly LinkedIn look very different. And so your marketing team struggles to help the executives be relevant, because they're creating marketing material, which isn't thought leadership. And that's difficult for the sales team. Because the sales team says, Look, this thought this marketing material isn't opening doors. And so there's conflict. And so I step into the middle of that helped the marketing people understand how to get content to the salespeople, help the salespeople understand how to use that. And then I worked directly with CEOs to help them understand how to have their voice online to leverage all of those together. So there you go, that kind of encapsulates it.

Kenneth Kinney 7:12
So to start, I know a lot of what we're going to talk about today that I heard you speak at a National Speakers Association conference as well, is about the research you do with Richard vendor Blum, and what you've done at this point with consulting, we're going to talk a lot about algorithms. But to preface this, I wish she would explain a little bit about the research and what it is. Because I don't want as we run through this, for people to think that these are Richard bliss opinions, this is backed up by real data, because everything that we're going to talk about somebody out there is going to say, Oh no, if you use this chocolate ice cream cone emoji, then this will work better. And that's what they believe, not what the data says. So help me at least preface this with what data went into this research that you do.

Richard Bliss 7:57
Yeah, Shark you bring up a very valid point. Oftentimes, when I, I will see engagement online where they're like, well, that's, you know, that's your opinion, here's my opinion. I'm just like, No, no, that's, that's not my opinion. And what it is, is Richard Vander Blum, three years ago, began a process of data analysis with using hundreds and then 1000s of LinkedIn profiles, and posts over a certain amount of period to track monitor, measure, and then analyze how LinkedIn data is received, how LinkedIn is algorithm responding to variable inputs, multiple posts, going out, adding a link, over oversharing, video, all of these things went into it. And he started producing that research three years ago, and it was only a couple of pages at the time. It's now up to 40 pages of content. Richard and I have worked closely now for the last couple of years, and I the primary sponsor of that, because we recognized that that data when applied and taught to enterprise sales, account managers, helps them understand one, why the marketing material isn't resonating with their audience and to how to transform the way they interact with the LinkedIn algorithm to open those doors. And so that's where the research has come from. You can go to my website bliss point consult.com And just download the research if you want. You can reach out to Richard Vander Blom. It's Richard V A NDRBLOM. He's Dutch lives in Spain. The just don't make it available for free. And we've been very proud to be part of this research. And then we test it all the time. Just to give you an idea, you know, video is the worst performing content on LinkedIn. By far most people are shocked to hear that. So just to make sure last week I posted a video why in the world would I post a video if I think it's the worst performing I just because I want to test the algorithm. My video generated I think 760 views. I put out a post a couple of days earlier. It generated 29,760 views, it was text only, no links text only. Again, we are constantly testing the algorithm as well. LinkedIn themselves gives us hints, they, their developers will actually post content on a regular basis, hey, we've made changes to the algorithm, here's some of those changes. But the in depth analysis of how that impacts individual users that's coming from the Richard vanderbloemen research,

Kenneth Kinney 10:26
I'm gonna kind of go back against what I just said. And I'm gonna ask you sort of your opinion, overall, take a high level look, in general, before we break it down further, in general, what are people doing right? And conversely, what are people generally doing wrong? We'll go into the details later. But is there something overarching that you saw out of all of it again, video versus other,

Richard Bliss 10:48
you're talking about on on LinkedIn activity on LinkedIn? Yes, sir. Yeah, I'm gonna flip that I'm going to start with what they're doing wrong, because that's the shocker that you heard as sitting in the audience. When I spoke to NSA, that was the shocker. What people are believing is is that all social media is the same. And that is, if it worked on Instagram, it should work on LinkedIn, if it worked on Facebook, it should work on LinkedIn. Because if it worked on Facebook, it's probably going to work on Instagram. And if it worked on Instagram, there's a good chance it's going to work over on Twitter, or Tik Tok, or maybe even YouTube. So they see this commonality. And then they come to LinkedIn, and it's a ghost town. And they're like, oh, LinkedIn sucks. There's nothing here, when in reality, LinkedIn is looking for a completely different outcome. And so the thing that most people are doing wrong as rep, I call it, the three habits, sabotaging your LinkedIn activities that you're pulling from Instagram, for example, posting more than once every three to four hours, LinkedIn will not allow you to spam their platform, they'll let you think you're spamming their platform, but they will simply hide your second, third, fourth, fifth post in a four hour window. That's why so many people are like, Well, I'm not getting any trash traction. No, because LinkedIn is not actually showing it to anyone, you get one post about every four hours, they're testing that post. And as they test that post, they're gonna not let you pollute the feed with other content. That's number one. Number two, adding links to your posts to drive people to somebody else's advertising platform is not good business. So LinkedIn will penalize you from putting a link in. The other thing is thinking that you're sharing content, when you click the share button, I refer to the share button as a copy and paste button. Oh, I'm just gonna copy and paste. Well, you didn't add any value. And LinkedIn is looking that every post that you make, excuse me, is it starting a conversation? And if that conversation is started, it's gonna measure it by comments thing, great if you copy and paste somebody else's conversation into your own feed. Link is like, what are you doing that for? Why aren't you participating in the conversation, and it will penalize you and hide that from 95 to 99% of your connections will not see a post that you share. And I use the word share carefully here, because there's a post that you place on LinkedIn, which we refer to as sharing, but then there's clicking the Share button. And when you click that share button, you're simply copy and pasting. So those are the three of the main things that people are doing wrong. Also, multi tagging people in the post. LinkedIn sees that as spam. And if you if they don't respond, LinkedIn will demote your post, hashtag happy more than five hashtags. LinkedIn is going to demote your post hide it because you're spamming those are all the things being done wrong. Video worst performing content on LinkedIn, everybody's dumping video on LinkedIn. So what are people doing right? The number one thing that's going to drive your visibility, new business, people looking at your profile coming to your feed is not because they typed in a search looking for a roofer. And you happen to be a roofer on LinkedIn, it's because they saw you participating in a conversation somewhere else on the platform through your comments. And this is what people forget about LinkedIn when you place a comment on something. So for example, Shark if you had a post, and I wouldn't made a comment on it. Yeah, you're gonna see my comment, but so is my network. And I have to remember that my comment is going to be read by my network and your network. So the comment needs to be a public facing mini post. This is the one thing that people are doing right when they're finding success is spending most of their time commenting on other people's conversations rather than focuses so much on creating their own content. And that's really the big thing that people are looking for. What do you got? What

Kenneth Kinney 14:38
I was also going to add is another thing that you pointed out in the research is that short comments, don't work well, that you're penalized if you make might like five words are less, it's five words or less. Yes. And I think a lot of people just spray and pray on a lot of people's different comments and posts. It's like great job, Richard. That's not a that's not a comment. That's not gonna help.

Richard Bliss 14:59
No, that And we don't consider that a comment. That's a mention that's a Instagram response or a Facebook, we call those Facebook, you got, you got Insta likes. Those are the people who just click like and move on. And you've got Facebook comments, which aren't Hey, awesome, good job. I agree Happy Birthday, whatever it might be. Instead, what a comment is. It's as if you and I having a conversation, you say something, I say something, you say something. That's a conversation, and that's what LinkedIn is measuring. And so no, those come those, those comments that are just throwaway comments, they don't add any value or context. I mean, think about the shark. If I made a post, and you were like, great post is your comment, your network connections are going to see, you say, great post. Now, some people would think, Oh, obviously, my audience is going to be interested in that and they're going to be pulled in to pay attention. No, they're not all they're gonna see his great posts, they're gonna move on, because they're not going to take the time to go figure out what you thought was a great post.

Kenneth Kinney 16:01
Well, and it made me think because the week or two after that presentation in assays winter workshop when I was on clubhouse, and this was probably 20 minutes before you had joined that clubhouse room that popped up. We were talking about comments. And I had grown my own following substantially on LinkedIn over a several month period. But it was because of a I will call it a sort of a conversational strategy on other people's posts. Yeah, more than anything. Now that I think back on it after I make that comment several weeks ago, that it wasn't just great job, Richard gone, it was something something, something something, you know, a dozen words, and then became part of the conversation. I thought that was a really interesting point. And another thing that you spoke about was the best days to post. And this is something that comes up all the time. But it's Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, between eight and 10. local time. And when I read that, I was curious, because now that we are more disconnected locally, for example, you're in San Jose, I'm in Central Time Zone two hours away. That could be an obvious difference. And I probably have as many connections in New York, as I do in San Francisco, San Jose. And I think about that from a local where's it going to reach that audience? Morning or noon ish, or where I am or in between?

Richard Bliss 17:21
So I need to clarify something on that. Because people are asking I get asked that question. Every training. I've done seven trainings this week. Last to me last week, and every single training, I got asked that question, when's the best time to post that, that? I know why they're asking, what's the best time to post that I get the most views? Right that the most people will see my post? That is not the way LinkedIn works. The question should be, what's the best time to post that I will get the most comments. Because it's comments that drive views, it is not views that drive comments. So now you ask yourself, when will my audience most likely be willing to engage with my content, and eight to 10am local time, is when we used to commute. And now instead, we're laying in bed with our phone above our heads twiddling with our thumbs going oh, hey, I think I'll leave a comment on that one. And that's why the research indicated that Tuesdays and Thursdays between 730 and 930 is something we've found that works. But the but we have to come back to this this foundational belief that comments come from our content being popular and being seen by a lot of people, which is what happens with Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, and Twitter. It's the exact opposite on LinkedIn. We don't get any views. If we don't get any comments. If we get 10 comments, we'll get 1000 views, guaranteed doesn't matter guaranteed. It doesn't even matter the quality of the comments, the LinkedIn algorithms, like you got 10 comments in the first hour, we're going to show this to 1000 people. Well, if it's really, really good content, and I don't get any comments, they're not going to show it to anyone. The quality of the content in the beginning is irrelevant. It is the quality of the comments that drive the views and engagement on LinkedIn. And that's something people I gotta tell you, I just pounded and pounded and pounded. I had a post go out just about an hour ago about commenting the secret of commenting how do you comment on LinkedIn? Because that is how you build business on LinkedIn and you just establish it right with your own growth

Kenneth Kinney 19:29
will so how do you define through the research because you mentioned that several times high quality content?

Richard Bliss 19:34
Yeah high quality content is Did it start a conversation? That's that's all LinkedIn is looking for? Did you start a conversation so if you put up a video of two Talking Heads, that with no subtitles with so many people do I cannot believe that the chances that people are going to sit and watch your three minute video or 10 ICS 10 minutes and there's no way on sim spending 10 minutes I only spend 10 minutes on that Affleck's watching the single show, I'm not gonna spend it on LinkedIn watching your video. So, am I going to stick around for three minutes and watch your video with no subtitles? And then leave a comment to start a conversation about that video? No, no, it has nothing to do with the algorithm. It has everything to do with human nature. If you leave a picture, will I stop and leave a comment? Well, it depends if you will have the picture of you swimming with sharks. Yeah, I'm probably gonna leave a comment about that. Because it's you, sharks, something that connects us. But if it's just a stock photo, hey, Shark weeks next week, be sure to watch it and it's a stock photo of Shark Week. No, that's not gonna cause me to leave a conversation comment. LinkedIn will not reward that post. So your content is really not whether LinkedIn will reward it. But can you start a conversation with the content you're putting up there and good quality content starts a conversation.

Kenneth Kinney 20:59
It's fascinating to hear somebody I think blows the brains blows the minds of a lot of people with what they think is high quality content. And a lot of them especially in your part of the world, from Silicon Valley. They think everything they touch is high quality. Yeah. Yeah, that's, and that isn't meant nasty. Just because you got some sort of little technology that does something you think that automate some stuff is not what gets people engagement. I know people that will post a picture of a puppy dog or a unicorn, and they get 500,000 views. And it's because it draws people into a like, share or conversation. Yeah,

Richard Bliss 21:36
so you want me to address that issue puppy dogs and unicorns? And why you don't see them on LinkedIn? Yeah, please, because you don't see those on LinkedIn, very, very seldom compared to the other social media media platforms. Do you see cats writing Roombas, or puppy dogs? I mean, think about it. If we open up our Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter right now, it's going to be flooded with those things, right. But you're not going to see them on LinkedIn. And it's not because we're all more sophisticated on LinkedIn. Now there are people trying to post their content. And they're their influencers coming from another platform, they've got this video it crushed it on Instagram, and it's this dog doing whatever, they put it on LinkedIn, nothing. There's a reason. And it has nothing to do with the algorithm. It has to do with the fact that that video, probably one meme, probably got a bunch of likes and comments right away. And then what happens is it gets triggered by the algorithm. And it gets handed to human editor. A human editor looks at every piece of viral content on the LinkedIn platform. And viral means it's starting to take off. But before it can get beyond the test group, because remember, I might have mentioned when you're making a post, it only goes to a small test group. And so that test group shows a lot of interest, it triggers the algorithm to hand it to a human editor. The human editor now determines if this content is appropriate for the LinkedIn platform. If it is, it pushes it back to the algorithm, which now amplifies it. If it isn't, it kills it right there. So I'm posting live my cat videos all day long. On LinkedIn, I'm getting nothing. Well, LinkedIn is letting me post it, but the algorithms not letting anybody see it. Because that content is not appropriate for their platform. Now, some of your listeners are gonna bite for that censorship. What are they doing? Now? Here's the other difference about LinkedIn. 80% of LinkedIn revenue comes from paying customers. There's no other social media platform like that. Right. Sales Navigator, recruiter tool, and premium, all drive 80% of their revenue. That means only 20% is advertising. They don't need to keep you entertained, like Facebook does if they want to make money, or enraged. Right, what they need to do is make sure that the experience is so valuable to you, that you keep paying the money, and I will not pay it. I mean, I'm not gonna pay Twitter to entertain me. I'm not gonna pay Instagram money to entertain me Facebook to entertain me. No. YouTube's trying it with their Hey, would you like them to have no more ads, you can pay us. LinkedIn is like, No, we're not gonna have ads or anything because people are already paying us. Let's keep this experience so positive. That's why they have editors preventing that content from polluting our streams and detracting from the business experience of being on LinkedIn.

Kenneth Kinney 24:30
And if they want to complain about censorship, then let them go do it on Facebook and Twitter and right. They do a very good job right. I thought one of the things that was really interesting and I went back and looked prior from when we scheduled this to several different posts myself, and I thought this was really interesting. Employees commenting and fellow employees engaging with your content resulted in negative 20 to 25%. Reach, then people external to your company. I went to somebody's posts and almost every person in that company doesn't really good job of galvanizing, getting some likes and shares for a post, but it was in a smaller pond.

Richard Bliss 25:06
Yeah, so we need to be careful with that, because it's portrayed in the research as a negative. But in reality, it's a positive. So when you're, when your employees post comment on your content you're gonna get, there's a scoring system, right, and so you're gonna get, let's just call it eight points of value for every comment coming from one of your employees eight points of current value, and you get enough points of value, the algorithm says this is valuable enough, and it triggers it. So you get eight points, that's pretty good, because the lake is only worth two points. And so you're getting four times the amount of exposure if an employee comments, if an outside person comments, now you're getting a 12 to 14% point value per comment. So it's all positive. Just getting second and third degree connections is going to give you a lot more boost of value. But it's still valuable to have your employees commenting, there's no negative there. There's no negative like some things or you can get some negatives, like I said, tagging too many people, too many hashtags. Those can be demote the post itself, but, but getting comments from your employees are all positive, just not as positive as getting a second or third degree connection.

Kenneth Kinney 26:20
Well, I don't really want companies thinking about this or dialogue with it, because they're having enough trouble getting engagement as he is. But if they start putting algorithms in their brain, it may blow up their minds too much as well.

Richard Bliss 26:32
So I spend a lot of time with these clients, and I teach their employees how the algorithm works. And then I help them understand why they should be engaging, not just what they should be engaging with. And it has dramatically changed some of my clients, one of my clients is called sneak s and YK. security company based out of London, Tel Aviv, Ottawa, and Boston, they were just named after working with me, the number one most active company in the UK, for employees, more of their employees are active on LinkedIn than any other company in the UK. And that's because I have spent time working with this company for two years, training nearly all 1000 of their employees on how to use LinkedIn and engage and now they it starts at the CEO level, the CEO brought me in, he and I work together and all the way down to every new I had a training this morning with the Tel Aviv and Switzerland offices, every new employee gets trained on how to start engaging with social media on LinkedIn. And they just, they love it because I teach him. Look, this is what the algorithm is going to do. And then they just get so excited, they use Slack channels to notify each other when they make a post. They plan together, all of these things are things that companies can do to be so much more powerful on LinkedIn, which is why I think we talked earlier, I don't ever tell anybody spend any advertising on LinkedIn, because LinkedIn is gonna give it to you for free. If you mobilize your employees to do it

Kenneth Kinney 27:59
100% For the 900 plus of that company, or with any company, what is generally what you see as to why they don't engage with the content. I know there's some bigger employee engagement issues, but in particular, with LinkedIn content, is there something is there anything overarching? Is there a complete lack of understanding in the algorithms? Do you see that maybe they aren't engaged with whatever their company is, in general? What do you think is the general drawback if you will, that I'm trying to get to?

Richard Bliss 28:29
Sure. So when you sat in that room, and I got up on stage to talk about LinkedIn, I gotta believe that you felt pretty comfortable with your knowledge and understanding how to LinkedIn, your use of LinkedIn, fairly, right? Yeah. Yet when I got done,

Kenneth Kinney 28:42
right, little downtrodden, depressed?

Richard Bliss 28:45
Yeah. And you weren't alone, almost everybody in that room. And so what happens is, is that the reason you and so many of your colleagues and other these, because we think we have a pretty good solid understanding of how social media works, we got a pretty good understanding. So when I joined a company, and they asked me to share the company content on LinkedIn or whatever, I'm just like, Yeah, okay, whatever. It's my personal one. It's my personal account you're asking me to do and to what do I get out of it? Okay, what do I get out of it? When they get done with me? They're like, Oh, what they get out of it are several things. One, the number of people looking at their LinkedIn profile skyrockets. This is going to be prospects, customers, potential employers, I mean, it goes down the gambit. They also now understand the why. It also helps that I teach the marketing people to stop sending crap to the meat salespeople that is not going to resonate on LinkedIn. And the salespeople know it. They keep getting all this, you know, these, these infographics or, or hero images stock, I stock photos. And they're like dutifully hitting the Share button. All right, I'll post it I'll share it. Getting no traction. So I think it's a matter of no, there is no feedback loop that shows a salesperson or an employee, that if I take this action, I will get this result. Instead, they're just being mandated by marketing here, you got to share some stuff and stuff. And they're like, Okay, and they hit the share button, and then posting ghost and move on. That I think is the biggest, either a bit of apathy, a bit of pushback, that it's my personal account and a complete lack of a feedback loop that shows them the results of their efforts.

Kenneth Kinney 30:31
No, such a great point of getting the entire company involved instead of just the Mark architeam. Yes. So what are the last questions before we get to the end? Sure. You talk about focusing on getting the engagement in the first two hours after posting? Yeah, and in your mind, you get high quality content, maybe isn't a puppy or a unicorn, but it's not marketing crap. What do you do to start building that engagement? And I know you're not talking about a single post, but you got to start somewhere. So I'm just going to use this in order to apply as an experiment your what do you do other than text or email to other people in the first two hours?

Richard Bliss 31:04
Yeah, one don't do that. What you should do.

Kenneth Kinney 31:07
And that's what I know, somebody we mutually know, did because it was part of an experiment and test it was, but it's not sustainable.

Richard Bliss 31:13
Yeah. It's not sustainable. We call it comment fatigue is keep getting hit up by everybody comment, comment, comment. So instead, what you do, there's a couple of things you can do. One is that, I'm going to come back to this, you should have already been commenting on other people's content first. Also, that because now anything you post is going to show up in their feed. So the chances of your content being seen by the very people you're engaging with will go up. Number two, anybody you've connected with in the last seven days, is going to see your content. So remember that that contents now going to show up in front of new people. What you'll want to do then is there's something that's against the terms of service for LinkedIn, and that's called pods, that is organized groups. And I see people paying to participate in organized groups who they do nothing but artificially amplify each other's by leaving comments, bad idea, what you want to do, instead, there's a couple of things you can do. Number one is form a small group of like minded people on this topic. And then you work together, I'm going to make a post this week, here's my post, I'm going to send it to all of you, you know, there's six or seven of us, here's what I'm going to talk about, could you add your insights, okay, the post goes live, I'm going to let everybody know, before the post goes live not after, then you're going to already have your comments prepared to go and you're gonna put comments out there we preach. We teach companies how to do this internally, with their small Tiger Teams of departments to plan the posts beforehand and let the employees see it. But if you're a solopreneur, you don't have employees. Something else you can do is if you're going to do a topic, you can then in the comments themselves, start calling out people who you know, would add incredible insight and value to that conversation. So if I posted something about the LinkedIn algorithm, I will then in my comment, call out Richard Vander blonde Richard, in all the times that you do the research, how have you seen this impacting companies? I might call out you shark, I know that one of the things you've done is worked in marketing in the past, how do you see this having an impact with your clients? And I do that four or five times? Well, now you're gonna get notified that Richard mentioned you in a comment, not an email, not a text message, but and you're gonna come see me serving it up to you the topics already there. I've already asked you the question. And I shared this on this on stage, Devin Thorpe, who's a member of NSA, you know, he did this after being coached by me, he generated 102,000 views in the first week, simply because he started calling out people who had something to contribute. That's one of the best ways to do it in the beginning is add value to them. And they get something out of it. They get to come and share their expertise in front of your network in front of their network.

Kenneth Kinney 34:05
Well, our mutual friend saw remarkable lift just out of engaging with a lot of people. But again, it's not sustainable. But when you go back to the comments, you're not talking about adding 50 comments and calling out 50 people inside those comments. Boombah Boombah, boom, or, you know, or how do you do that to where you're adding more and more people to grow that conversation further?

Richard Bliss 34:26
Let's suppose I was, let's suppose I made a post about let's suppose I made a post about diving. Okay. I know very little about diving. But let's suppose it was relevant. You know, my daughter's live in San Diego, I'm gonna go down to La Jolla, I thought about doing it. And I'm gonna make a post about the importance of preparation, especially when your life's on the line and putting yourself in harm's way. Like diving, for example, and I'm going to write up a little bit about the concept of preparation, whether on stage or going into the ocean. In the comments, I'm going to say, you know, one of the I'm sure shark, you're one of the people who knows the most about this. As I go through this, and I do the preparation, what three things? Would you identify that somebody should really be thinking of that applies? And then maybe I'm going to do somebody like Tom singer, who, right who's very active, I'm gonna say, Tom, I know that you spend a lot of time getting in front of an audience, what would be three things you'd identify for preparation, right. And so I'm going to pick three or four, maybe five individuals who I know, one will appreciate the opportunity of sharing their expertise in front of my audience, they're going to get something out of it, I'm going to get something out of it. And it's going to grow exponentially, because LinkedIn is going to see that true value is being added to this conversation with the comments, the original post, but then the comments themselves become even a deeper conversation around that.

Kenneth Kinney 35:47
So let's come back to video real quick, before we get towards the close, where do you think video will go with LinkedIn? Obviously, this was a real switch for them of just a few years ago. With ad again, we've got a lot of people who doing LinkedIn lives and posting video, a lot of people posting video incorrectly. But what do you think of where video starts to live within the platform and settles in?

Richard Bliss 36:08
The tough thing is that we're all convinced that video is the future, the videos, the most effective way of communicating information, video is how you get people's attention. And the problem is that we're all wrong. So what I mean by that is, and I got a lot of people who can argue with that one. But the number one way that we consume information that we want to retain, is through reading. That's the I mean, when we study in school, we don't go watch a video, we sit down with a textbook, we go through, we make notes, we write it down, and we read. And it's the best way of communicating back and forth. If I watched a cool video, and there were three points, I wanted to capture out of that and send it to you, how would I do that? I'd probably write it down and say, Hey, you should watch this video. Because there's really three points here, those three points. Video is a terrible way of communicating information in such a way that it needs to be retained. It's a great way of communicating emotion. It's a great way of communicating entertainment. And it's a great way of communicating how to in real time, I need to change the heating coil on my dryer. I'm not going to read it in a manual, show me how to do it in real time. And when I say real time, I'm watching doing it as I'm watching doing it. The problem then is is that we think that that's what all the social media is about. But now, why am I watching? What am I caught myself 30 minutes yesterday watching stupid YouTube Facebook videos, it wasn't to be educated. And so that's the challenge. LinkedIn live video, it's following the other trends. It's gonna settle in, but I'm telling you, LinkedIn will continue to be the biggest value is text only. The second most popular powerful way of us receiving communication is actually audio. Right talk radio, your podcast, this is why podcasts are doing so well. Here's one of the challenges. There's a great book out there called the loop by Jacob Ward, about hacking, how all these companies are hacking our primal brains and addiction. But one of the things that comes out of that is we we are able to absorb unintended or subconscious signals from people and in video, we can pick up on unintended messaging, if you're not making eye contact with the camera. If you're fidgeting, if you're spinning in your chair, if you aren't appearing right your hairs out of place, whatever it might be, diminishes your position of authority in the eyes of the audience. Audio is much more powerful. They hear your voice they hear the enthusiasm and they imagine what you look like text, then audio video so to answer your question, it's going to be there. But I continue to urge people to be cautious and judicious with their use of video.

Kenneth Kinney 38:50
Quick two seconds on hashtags and how we should look at them. Andy foot

Richard Bliss 38:54
puts out the best hashtag research I helped sponsor that one as well. You can go out to Andy footsore LinkedIn profile and find it that's Andy a and dy foot fo te, and he'll show you all the hashtag research he's done. LinkedIn is experimenting with hashtags. It's the best way to do a virtual group. I do his hashtag called Digital first leadership, click on that hashtag. And you can see all the content that my team puts out around that topic. Click on the hashtag LinkedIn by Richard vanderbloemen, you'll see all the content. And so use hashtags, three different hashtags, you need to have minimum three, a micro hashtag that is just yours. A, a medium hashtag that fits into a 2000 to 20,000 subscriber follower list. And then your macro hashtags if 20,000 or more people think well, I need a hashtag that's got 2 million followers. Well, you're gonna get drowned in a sea of irrelevant content for most of your audience. Instead, find a hashtag that you can dominate that's got about 10,000 followers, you can dominate ransomware is a great What, in MySpace, you could dominate that by using ransomware and getting your employees to use ransomware. And it'll bubble up. So hashtags can be very strategic and how you use them. But don't get enamored with, you know, 3 million followers on a hashtag, you're just gonna be lost in a sea of noise.

Kenneth Kinney 40:18
Well, not counting content general, how do you recommend? Because you're also working with a lot of salespeople, as we discussed? How do you recommend people leveraging the tool to connect with others?

Richard Bliss 40:28
It's, it's kind of a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, routine Monday, wake up, spend 10 minutes, go through all your connection requests. That's one thing, but then go out and find three people to comment on Tuesday, work with your team, what posts are you putting out that week as a team, this whole collaborative effort, okay, either you write it or somebody writes it, you prepare your comment. Again, you're just kind of monitoring Wednesday, three comments on three different posts again, and maybe this is when you get ready to write that comment, or the post for your team goes out that you're going to comment or you're going to post it yourself. Thursday, you're going to be some commenting again, come Friday, oftentimes Thursday or Friday is when I put out my most important content, because I'm gonna let it run through the weekend. Because I don't want to step on it, the algorithms gonna step on it, and prevent it from running its full length if I post something too soon after that. And so you don't have to spend hours. I spend hours because that's my life. But you can spend 10 minutes a day, commenting, commenting, commenting, and then finding somebody who's other content, you want to either build around, or work together as a team and put out a single post. And everybody then engages in that first hour of commenting. That's kind of the strategy I use, and it's it has such a huge impact for so many of my clients.

Kenneth Kinney 41:46
Perfect. Well, Richard is this of all the guests who've been on a shark's perspective. You're in San Jose, different kinds of sharks. But what is your favorite kind of shark and why?

Richard Bliss 41:56
My favorite kind of shark and why it's probably going to be the hammerhead. Right. Right. We saw the Hammerhead in Star Wars. We saw the hammer head. It's just got a unique evolution like why in the world did that happen? Right that God's got a sense of humor? Oh, well, I got a hammer every hammer everything looks like a nail to him hit everything looks like a hammer. I'm gonna make that one a hammer. So it's just kind of a unique creature that has really no purpose to have its head shaped like a hammer. It's like swallowed a hammer. And then all the babies had had and still had that head shape. So

Kenneth Kinney 42:32
they're beautiful. I just swam with some in Florida just, they're just so cool. Very different. Well, Richard, it's a special time in the show. Are you ready for the five most interesting and important questions that you're going to be asked today? Absolutely. Let's go for it. All right. This question will make sense when you consider how everyone wants to buy me a cup of coffee for a 15 minute sales pitch slash LinkedIn Connect. Yep. If you're grabbing a cup of coffee just outside your headquarters,

Richard Bliss 42:58
that is a Starbucks for door exam. Style Starbucks or Peete's off piste is across the street, you have to stand and wait for the light.

Kenneth Kinney 43:06 Okay, there you go. Alright, number two. Which do you prefer as an actor or actress Salma Hayek or Owen Wilson?

Richard Bliss 43:16
That my only two choices

Kenneth Kinney 43:18
that will make sense later.

Richard Bliss 43:19
All right, I'm gonna pick Salma. And that's because I really don't enjoy Owen.

Kenneth Kinney 43:23
Well I've been in love with Salma for 20 years, but you get both of them in the 2021 movie Bliss. The story about an unfulfilled man and a mysterious woman who believe that they're living in a simulated reality.

Richard Bliss 43:38
Okay, now if you're using that movie as a reference, I'm not going to pick either one of them because I just did not enjoy her in that movie. And actually he okay, I would pick him then because in that movie, he played his same doofus self. But he kinda was. I didn't like her manipulation in that movie. So there we go. I did watch that movie.

Kenneth Kinney 43:57
She gets a pass with me. Alright, number three. better way to grow your following commenting on someone else's posts, or posting your own content?

Richard Bliss 44:07
Commenting is by far by far,

Kenneth Kinney 44:10
agreed. Alright, number four, and this is a hashtag prisoner's dilemma. Yeah. Would you rather make a post with three hashtags, which is the bare minimum of what you recommend? Yep. Or seven, which would be the, which would be two more than the maximum recommend three. Why so?

Richard Bliss 44:29
Well, one, LinkedIn is going to demote your posts. If you go past five, and two, this is not Instagram, you need to keep the message tight and too many hashtags, starts to dilute the message and it confuses your audience and doesn't allow them to start commenting. So don't put 30 on there. Know what you see people doing? And I gotta tell you, it is so hard to restrain myself from leaving a comment stopped doing that

Kenneth Kinney 44:53
on Instagram if I'm lucky if I post one because if it gets muddy, Alright, number five, and the most important question that you're going to be asked today is biscuits or cornbread?

Richard Bliss 45:01
Neither because they're both made with milk butter or some type of dairy. And so maybe cornbread because usually you can do it without dairy but I am so dairy. I love biscuits, but you can't make them successfully unless you use a ghee which is clarified butter. So I'm gonna go with for this one cornbread.

Kenneth Kinney 45:22
That's interesting. I didn't expect that out of you out of seeing you drink a Coke (Coca-Cola). Why is that I would not have expected a very vegan, lactose intolerant person. I appreciate people drinking sugar.

Richard Bliss 45:33
There it is. I got I've got cases of my garage. It is my one voice. I don't drink alcohol. I don't smoke. I don't do drugs. But I do ingest large quantities of Mexican coke in the bottles

Kenneth Kinney 45:44
There you go. You just didn't say Do you ingest Mexican Coke (Coca-Cola)?

Richard Bliss 45:48
Yes, there we go. Sounds terrible. Yes.

Kenneth Kinney 45:52
Richard, where can people find out more about you keep up with the research you're doing here you speaking and more?

Richard Bliss 45:57
Most of it is just on LinkedIn. Just find me on LinkedIn. It's linkedin.com/in/bliss.

Kenneth Kinney 46:02
If you'd said Twitter would have been a horrible answer, right? LinkedIn, but

Richard Bliss 46:05
Twitter. I'm Richard bliss on Twitter. I'm Richard bliss on Facebook. I think I'm even Richard bliss on Instagram, although I just posted about my garden there. And you know, I just and my website is bliss point consult.com. And so those are the ways you can usually find me that way.

Kenneth Kinney 46:23
Awesome. Richard, thank you so very much for being with us today on A Shark's Perspective.

Richard Bliss 46:28
Shark has been great. Thank you very much.

Kenneth Kinney 46:34
So there was my conversation with Richard bliss, the CEO of BlissPoint Consulting, a top social selling trainer, a LinkedIn top voice, an author, and a public speaker. Let's take a look at three key takeaways from my conversation with him.

Kenneth Kinney 46:46
First, lots of people probably including me, even who in the past treated this platform to similarly to Instagram in some other channels. So many great tips on the sub sub. Let's cover a few three habits that he said were sabotaging your posts. So don't do these don't post more than once every four hours, starts looking at it like it's spam, adding links to drive people out of the platform. Obvious because those advertising dollars live and breathe on LinkedIn. They want to keep you on their platform, whatever it is, three sharing content that doesn't add value that should be starting a conversation. Don't borrow other conversations, or they'll just hide it.

Kenneth Kinney 47:21
Second, he reminds us that what will drive your visibility is not a search for you or for plumbers, for example. But and I quote that they saw you participating in a conversation somewhere else on the platform through your comments. And for LinkedIn, the best kind of content is the kind of content that drives conversations. That was a key point of the whole episode. It's about the conversation. Don't add comments also that are just throwaway comments, but about engaging in a conversation and moving the conversation forward. He said to look at how comments drive views and not how views drive comments. And when is the best time to post when it gets comments. Interesting, though that content as he said, and I'll quote, the quality of the content in the beginning is irrelevant. It's the quality of the comments that drive the views and engagement on LinkedIn. crazy to believe that your comments may be great for the reader for whatever problem it solves, but not great for comment engagement. But such as the algorithm, I hope that you'll still write great content, and not just the kind of content that gets likes, shares and comments only and that only be your focus. Never forget that.

Kenneth Kinney 48:24
Third, interesting conversation on hashtags. Find a micro hashtag that's just yours than a medium hashtag to 1000s 20,000 followers than a macro hashtag of 20,000 or more, use at least three hashtags, and no more than five. He likes to posts on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays between eight and 10. Local and then let it run through the weekends. If you're posting towards the weekend, then also find time to engage with three comments or three posts. So you better feel free to engage with one of mine.

Kenneth Kinney 48:51
Got a question? Send me an email to Kenneth at a shark's perspective.com.

Kenneth Kinney 48:55
Thank you again for the privilege of your time and I'm so thankful to everyone who listens.

Kenneth Kinney 48:59
I wish you please consider writing a review and letting me know your thoughts on the show.

Kenneth Kinney 49:03
Look, I don't find bliss on social. It's always the beach and the water for me. But still, I hope that you'll join us on the next episode of A Shark's Perspective.
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