Using LinkedIn effectively to grow your agency

Agency Leadership Podcast

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the pros and cons of using LinkedIn for agency growth and professional engagement. They touch upon the challenges of spam and overautomation, and emphasize the importance of personalized, thoughtful interactions.

They also share strategies for repurposing content, such as tailoring blog posts to different audiences when posting on LinkedIn. They address the increased use of LinkedIn direct messages for networking and provide insights on effective commenting. Additionally, they briefly discuss the appropriateness of political posts on LinkedIn and recommend focusing on values rather than partisan views.

Key takeaways

• Gini Dietrich: “Writing LinkedIn comments that are thoughtful and interesting are going to be so much more effective than having AI summarize the content for you and write the comment. Please don’t do that.”
• Chip Griffin: “LinkedIn works best like most social platforms when you’re being genuine and and authentic.”
• Gini Dietrich: “If you’re going to produce new content on LinkedIn, I love the idea of testing out a topic or an idea. Or repurpose other content, and you really only have to do something once a week.”
• Chip Griffin: “LinkedIn direct messages should be from one human to another human. Period. Stop.”

Related

• How agencies can get the most out of LinkedIn (featuring Chuck Hester)
• How agencies can use LinkedIn ads to grow their businesses (featuring Anthony Blatner)
• The future of events and other agency biz dev tactics

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, you know, I think maybe I’ll just start sending you direct messages on LinkedIn from now on. That’s the only way I’ll communicate with you.

Gini Dietrich: Awesome. Well, that’s one way.

Chip Griffin: It’s one way.

Gini Dietrich: I might not get back to you immediately.

Chip Griffin: The problem is, I was going to say, if you respond to me, I probably will not see, cause I get so much spam in my LinkedIn direct messages that I very rarely actually look at them. And usually as soon as I do, I will tell whoever legitimate is reaching out to me that I do want to talk to. Here’s my email address.

Send me an email. We can, we can pick it up over there. Cause you’ll get a much more timely response.

Gini Dietrich: Do you accept all LinkedIn connection requests?

Chip Griffin: I do not.

Gini Dietrich: Okay.

Chip Griffin: I used years ago I used to do that, but then I got flooded with just a bunch of junk and, and nowadays so many spammers are, I mean, just obvious spammers are many are trying to connect many.

So at this point, I, I’m looser than I used to be in that I don’t only connect with people who I actually know. I will also connect with agency owners, for example, if they’re, they appear to be, you know, operating a legitimate agency and not one who’s trying to spam me. Sometimes I guess wrong. And then all of a sudden I’ve opened up my inbox to nonsensical pitches, but most of the time I’m pretty good at guessing.

So yeah, it’s tough. LinkedIn is a great platform, and these days it’s one of the few where you can actually communicate professionally because X/Twitter has sort of, well, not sort of, it has deteriorated. It’s become sort of a little bit of business and lots of cesspool.

Gini Dietrich: Definitely a dumpster fire.

Chip Griffin: So, you know, as useful as it used to be, it is not useful today.

So I thought it’d be helpful if we talked about LinkedIn and, and thought about how are agencies using it? How can agencies use it? Not so much on behalf of their clients, but on behalf of themselves, growing their business, learning, all that kind of thing. And, and I think there are some do’s and don’ts. I think we can share some things from our experience that we’ve seen work and that we have seen not work so much and things that frankly irritate us.

We’ll, we’ll certainly mix those things in.

Gini Dietrich: Of course, because we’re not us without it.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, if we didn’t complain about something, people, people would think that they were listening to a different podcast. So plenty of plenty of whine with this episode.

Gini Dietrich: Plenty of whine. We love to whine. You know, there was actually a Spin Sucks community discussion about this.

And somebody had posted, are you using LinkedIn in a way that’s different from your content on the blog or is it the same? And I think it started a really nice conversation because I think, you know, to our tagline, it depends, right? You know, for me, I do use the same content, but what I do is I, I write first for PR firm or PR professionals, communicators, because that’s our target audience on the Spin Sucks side.

And so that’s, that’s who I write for first. But then when I repost usually about two months later to LinkedIn. I rejigger the content to be focused on the business leader. So while I might talk about with a PR professional, I might talk about the things that you should do to prepare your CEO to speak out on politics or to take a stance on their values.

I’ll rejigger that content so that it’s to the business leader to talk about here are the things that you should be thinking about. So it’s, I don’t have to do a complete rewrite, but I do have to switch it up a little bit to be more focused on the audience there. I have seen some like Martin Waxman and Andy Crestodina.

They both create content for their blogs and then just do a complete repurpose on LinkedIn. Same day that it’s published to the blog, it’s publishes to LinkedIn and it’s the same content. Different audiences, maybe not the same subscribers. There might be some overlap, but I think that they’re just doing a complete, complete, like just copy and paste essentially.

So I think there are pros and cons and it depends on your audiences, right? If your audience for the blog is the same as the audience in LinkedIn, then that probably makes sense. But if it’s not, then you should think about who your audience is for both places.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I think sometimes it can make sense to split them even if it is a similar audience because then you can have an opportunity to have another bite at the apple, right?

So if you post to your blog and someone is busy that week or on vacation or something like that, And then you post in on LinkedIn, you know, three, four weeks later or a month or two later. Well, now, now they’ve, they’ve got another opportunity to see it. So I, I think personally that there is some value in splitting out content.

The place where I don’t do that is with my newsletter. So with, with my email newsletter, I do match that with LinkedIn. Usually LinkedIn is a little bit delayed by half a day or so, from the, the email. Honestly, that’s more because I post manually to LinkedIn and we’ve, scheduled with email so so that timing really depends on what my day looks like on Fridays when I when I post it and occasionally I don’t get to it doesn’t go up till Saturday because it’s a manual post. But you know, I do think that repurposing content in some fashion is beneficial.

The other thing that I do is I will test things on LinkedIn. So I will, I will write a shorter version or something that I’m thinking about writing a longer piece on and just kind of throw it out there, see if it gets any reaction. If it doesn’t get any, that doesn’t, doesn’t mean necessarily I won’t pursue it, but if it gets a strong reaction lots of feedback, then it makes it much more likely I, I bubble it up higher in my queue to do a full article on.

Gini Dietrich: That’s a really good idea. That’s, that’s a good best practice. I think for agencies. There are some people who are doing a really nice job there. I think, you know, there it, There are some that I started out thinking they were doing a nice job, but then it got to be overwhelming because it was multiple times a day or at least daily, which I think is too much because the algorithm isn’t like the other places where it’s showing you people you don’t know.

The algorithm on LinkedIn is still showing you people, you know, which is great. Or people that you follow, which is great. That’s, that’s what it should do. But it also gives you content from those same people. Quite a lot. And you’re just the, every time you, every time I open LinkedIn, there’s one person there all the time.

Like you’re smart, but I don’t need to see you 25 times a day.

Chip Griffin: I think I know who that is, but I will, I will let that, I’ve, I’ve actually got a couple of those who are multiple times a day posters. And so my feed tends to be fairly inundated with them all, not necessarily always in a timely fashion. I think, you know, right now, the, as we record this, the, the LinkedIn algorithm seems to prefer not more than one post a day, as far as actually getting, broad distribution.

And I can tell you from looking at my own numbers, that it seems to be anecdotally backed up that that on days where I do more than one, they both suffer or all of them. Interesting. If I do more than than two. You know, that said, LinkedIn will keep posts around for a fairly long period of time.

Gini Dietrich: It does. Yep.

Chip Griffin: So, you know, I don’t necessarily think you even need to be certainly I don’t think you need to post multiple times a day. I think if you’ve got the urge to be creating that much content on LinkedIn, that’s fine. But but do the other things as comments, because those will also bubble up in feeds.

Gini Dietrich: They do bubble up.

Chip Griffin: Which which you have the added benefit that you’re engaging with someone else who’s got a different audience than you do.

So your folks will still see it because it will say Chip Griffin commented on. And so they’re still seeing your thoughts. They’re still seeing you being active. And so to me, my advice would be if you want to be that active on LinkedIn, that’s great. Just use it in the comment field as opposed to creating fresh posts, you know, every two hours.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. I will say, though, on the comments that I have noticed this on my own content that there are a certain number of agencies, a handful of agencies who have maybe said to their team, somebody on their team, you’re in charge of LinkedIn and I got advice to be commenting on content. So I’d like you to read these people and then comment on their content as the agency.

Nothing wrong with that. However, there are some that are having AI analyze the content, provide a synopsis, and then write the comment. And as the person who is receiving the comment, I can tell that that’s what’s happening. I know every single time if that’s what’s happened. And quite honestly, it makes your agency look dumb.

Like it doesn’t, it doesn’t provide any value. It doesn’t provide any thought leadership. It doesn’t provide any value. And there’s no ability for us, for us to engage because it’s literally a robot who is, who has created it. So I will say that if you take the extra time to write a thoughtful comment that allows for engagement, especially on content where, you know, it’s, it’s an influencer that’s going to do business with you.

It’s a journalist. It’s, a prospect, somebody who you’d love to do work with. Writing comments that are thoughtful and interesting are going to be so much more effective than having the AI summarize the content for you and write the comment. Please don’t do that.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. Yeah. No, I mean, look, LinkedIn works best like most of most social platforms when you’re being genuine and and authentic to overuse that that term that’s been around for as long as social media has been. And so you need to be directly engaging with people in a way that you’re able to demonstrate what you actually think and who you actually are.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: I mean, it’s okay to, to show a bit of your personality. So if you see my comments on LinkedIn, there’s probably going to be a little bit of snark, sarcasm, and humor in there because that’s generally what I do. And so if I don’t have that, you know, then I’m probably too tired that day to put that effort in who knows.

But, but it, it shouldn’t read like AI. It shouldn’t be something you have an intern do. It should be something that you ae doing personally. Even if that means you do a lot less of it, because it really is about the quality of it not the quantity of it. And speaking of quantity, these, these folks who like to spam tag people in their posts, right?

Where they, they put together a post and they, and there are two ways. There’s the really awful way, which is at the end, they, they post like three paragraphs and at the end, they just have a long list of people that they’re tagging.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: That I find to be utterly obnoxious. Yes. And, and it, and 100% agree, and, and I, 99.9% of the time will not take the bait.

If I get tagged, I will not comment. I will, I will ignore you. Just stop it. Other people will do it where they, they tag a bunch of people, but it’s in the, they do it in the text like, well, you know, Chip said this and Gini said that, and Yep, yep. Okay. If it, if it actually fits. Okay. But, but don’t, I don’t see the need to just chalk it full of it.

I mean, sometimes I will, I will share as I did actually over the weekend. I, I shared an article that Sharon Torek wrote on classification of independent contractors and I tagged her in that because that’s the right thing to do. She had a great resource. I was pointing the resource out and directing people to it.

That makes sense. Now, if I had done that and then tagged every other lawyer in the agency field or every other HR person in the agency field, I mean, to me, that would be silly and not productive. So be thoughtful about it. Absolutely tag people when it’s relevant, but don’t just tag people so that you, you know, hope to trick the algorithm or bait people into commenting or whatever.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree with you. I’m, I’m the same way where I’m just like, Oh, come on, really? And then you read the comment or the content and you’re like, I don’t know why you tagged me in this. Right. Ah! Yes. Right. Yeah, it’s playing on their audience, which I think is shady.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, and occasionally if you’re trying to be provocative, you know, you know that, I don’t know, you know that I’m opposed to RFPs, you post something, you know, pro RFP, and then you tag me, you know, so what do you think?

I don’t love that either, but at least it makes, it kind of makes sense in that context. And, and sometimes I will take the bait on that because I, you know, I can’t help that.

Gini Dietrich: Can’t help yourself?

Chip Griffin: No, I can’t help myself.

Gini Dietrich: Now everyone knows the secret. Just post that RFPs are great.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, there you go. Anyway, please don’t do that.

Gini Dietrich: I’ll give you a list of things you could post about and tag him.

Chip Griffin: It’s probably better to give them a list of things that won’t get me riled up because I am, I am easily provoked. In any case, so, so speaking of being provoked and, and, you know, not necessarily being thoughtful in what you post, let’s talk about politics.

And I don’t mean, let’s actually talk about politics, but should people be talking about politics on LinkedIn? Cause I, I mean, I have seen a lot more political posts in my LinkedIn feed in the past few months than probably my entire history of being on LinkedIn. I mean, political stuff used to be relegated to primarily to Twitter, maybe a little bit on Facebook, but LinkedIn was pretty much a, a politics and religion free zone.

And it, it seems like it is perhaps because Twitter has its issues, people have decided that, well, might as well share it here. Or maybe it’s the people are buying into this whole concept that people want to know what companies think, which I think is rubbish, by the way. I don’t think people want to know what companies think on issues.

Gini Dietrich: I think, I think that this is probably a topic for a different day. I think that people want to understand i if I am pro choice. I want to understand if you are donating money to anti abortion organizations. I think that people do want to know that. And I see this with the kids a lot where they’re like, I’m not gonna, they won’t go to Chick-fil-A.

They will not go to Chick-fil-A because they understand that it does not support their values. Doesn’t matter how good their french fries are. These kids will not go to Chick-fil-A. That’s neither here nor there. What I think the challenge is, is you can talk about things that are happening in the world without making it political.

So instead of like, Sticker Mule, who a couple of weeks ago sent an email saying, Oh, everybody’s mad because Trump’s a bad guy and I don’t think he’s a bad guy. I think that we should be able to support him and go Trump and here, buy a t shirt. That’s not the right way to do it. If you want to talk about the fact that there was an assassination attempt on him and that we should call for unity, and this is the way that our country is divided as ridiculous, that’s a different message, but saying that I support Trump and I’m scared to say that because I think people are going to come after me is not the right message. So when you think about, and this is, this goes for your clients too. Like when you think about how you’re going to position it, think about it less from a political standpoint and more from a, it’s a value or it’s a stance or it’s like the, the issue. Like I’m against climate change.

And I think we should do X, Y and Z. I’m against guns and I think that we should have gun control because of X, Y and Z. So it’s less about the politics and more about the issues. I think that some people do it well, and some people don’t. Sticker Mule’s a great example of not doing it well at all.

Chip Griffin: So, so I, I, I think we should add this to our list of topics for a future conversation, talking more about politics generally and, and what agencies should do, how they should advise clients, that kind of stuff.

Because I, even though our own politics here are somewhat meshed, I, I think that, my views of how you can talk about politics and whether you should talk about politics may be a bit different than most people. So I, I think that’s probably a worthwhile conversation and out of the corner of my eye I can see you already typing it into our, our shared Google Doc where we have topics.

So, but, but I think when it comes to LinkedIn, I, I think you do need to be careful about talking about politics, period, because it’s, it is not the conventional thing to discuss on politics or, to discuss on LinkedIn. So if you are going to do it, you need to be really thoughtful about it, because it is, it, it jumps out at you a lot more when you see it there.

Sure. And, and so the reactions are likely to be stronger as a result. If you see someone commenting on politics on Twitter, you’re like, of course, that’s that’s what they do. And maybe you kind of move on. You see it on LinkedIn. And if you disagree with it, in particular, you are likely to have an even stronger reaction, I think, than if you saw the exact same thing posted by the exact same person on another platform.

So just be mindful of that, if you’re going to talk about politics on LinkedIn. So in general, I would encourage you not to. I don’t, I don’t think unless it is core to your business, like if you’re running an advocacy firm or something, advocacy agency, of course, sure. Talk about politics, right? I mean, that’s, that’s your key audience, but really think about whether your audience wants to be hearing you chatting about politics on, on LinkedIn.

So that would be my general advice there, but…

Gini Dietrich: I think generally I would agree with that.

Chip Griffin: But we can look at the topic more broadly as well in a future episode, because I think, particularly as we get deeper into political season here in the U. S., how we’re acting as agencies and leaders and how we’re advising our clients, you know, we need to be thoughtful about that, too, because there are a lot of things to take into consideration.

But back to LinkedIn. So, you know, the other area that we haven’t, we started the conversation here was on direct messaging on LinkedIn. And so, you know, how do you, how do you go about using direct messages properly on LinkedIn?

Gini Dietrich: So I’ve actually noticed a big increase in DMing with journalists on LinkedIn, which has never happened.

And probably in the last 30 or 45 days, I’ve gotten more requests there via DM from journalists than anywhere else. So I would say number one, pay attention to that, especially for PR firms, because that seems to be where people are going. I also read a Columbia Journal, Journalism Institute article that said they’re going to Reddit as well.

So that’s another thing, but that’s not the topic of today. But I’ve seen a big increase in that. I’ve seen, seen a big increase in, inviting like guests for podcasting and things like that., And I’ve seen a gigantic increase in, we can, and we’ve talked about this before, we can get you 10 to 12 new clients a month.

Can we set that up for you? Like, no, I don’t want 10 to 12 new clients a month. No, stop it. I mean, I probably get 10 of those a day. A day, which is crap.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. Well, and my favorite is I haven’t heard back from you on this. And you get that more in email because LinkedIn, at least if it’s in mail, you can’t hit someone repeatedly. Email, I get it all the time where people will follow up a few days later. I haven’t heard back from you on this yet. You’re not gonna, cause it’s a

dumb ass request and I’m not paying any attention to it. You know, the same thing people want to be guests on this podcast on something that’s not even related to agencies.

A, we have never had a guest we’ve been doing this for six years now. We have never had a single guest. So don’t pitch me on get, and by the way, if you’re going to make it relevant to agencies, at least.

Gini Dietrich: I got one yes this morning that was, I, I stopped by your facility over the weekend and noticed you could use a cleaning crew.

Oh, did you now?

Chip Griffin: Cleaning services are all, it’s unbelievable. Who is out there that’s running these janitorial service campaigns that spam people? Because I get it on every email account for all of my businesses right now. I mean, do you need janitors? No, I don’t have an office For any of the businesses I don’t care what and the funny thing is I will get like three of them in a row because I have multiple websites for the different businesses and they all get spammed at the same time Come on guys, this is just stupid Please stop it, knock it off.

But if you’re going to do direct messaging, then make sure that you are also making it clear that it is actually a personalized message. So by the way, make sure it’s personalized message. Please, dear God, do not hire these agencies that do it for you. And I’m sorry to any of you agencies out there who may be listening.

Please do not run direct messaging campaigns on LinkedIn. LinkedIn direct messages should be from one human to another human. Period. Stop. Just knock it off. It is, LinkedIn is a very inconvenient platform for doing direct messaging on. In fact, if someone messaged me on LinkedIn, I always just say, email me.

Here you go. Here’s my email address. I’m happy. I’m like, publish my email address online. It’s not hard to find me. Let’s move it over there because I will be able to respond to you in a more timely fashion. I will not miss messages. If you send it on LinkedIn, I miss them because there’s so much spam in there.

I don’t look at them very often. Yeah. It’s hard to mark something for follow up. You know, if it comes into my inbox, I just flag it and say, okay, I can’t respond right now, but I’ll respond at the end of the day or tomorrow morning. Whenever I’m doing my next batch of responses. You can’t do that on LinkedIn. The same reason I don’t accept text messages from anybody.

I don’t even give anybody a real text number. Okay, you have the real text number. Fine. I, I, as soon as I started saying it, I could see the gears churning in your head. You were going to, you were going to brag about the fact that you were one of like five people who has my actual real text number.

Gini Dietrich: In fairness though, it did take six years to get it.

Chip Griffin: Would you like to share with listeners why you got it?

We’ll tell that story another day.

Gini Dietrich: I would like, I would, I will definitely tell that story another day. Yes.

Chip Griffin: In any case, so do we have other advice on LinkedIn while we’re at it or should we just?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s don’t be, don’t be gross. Don’t use AI to write your comments. If you’re going to produce new content there, I love the idea of testing out, you know, a topic or an idea.

Just as a short post that you discussed in doing that. Repurpose other content, and you really only have to do something once a week. It doesn’t have to be every day.

Chip Griffin: Right. For fresh content. I mean, I think youshould be on there every day, commenting, liking, doing things like that. And from a networking perspective, a business development perspective, it’s fantastic because when you hit like on a post, what happens?

That person gets a notification. When you comment, what happens? That person gets a notification. When you tag them, they get a notification. You can write recommendations. They get a notification. They get a warm, fuzzy feeling. There are so many things that you can do with LinkedIn to just stay on someone’s radar.

And it doesn’t require a lot of, I mean, literally just hitting like. If you’ve got people who you would like to work with, just periodically hit like on one of their posts. I mean, it’s so simple and yet it will keep your name out there. So that they’re like, Oh, right.

Gini Dietrich: It’s a great idea.

Chip Griffin: Keep it simple. Keep it simple.

You don’t, it doesn’t need to be really complicated.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. I like it.

Chip Griffin: All right. Well, we’ll keep it really simple and draw this episode to a close. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.