Getting Serious About “Social” Selling: Part 3 – LinkedIn Advanced Jonathan Bentley, Managing Director, Head of Content Over the last few weeks we have been exploring how to use social media as an effective business development tool. Last week, we focused on LinkedIn, the primary social media platform for business relationships, discussing how giving professionals a very simple and credible means for objectifying their business relationships to aid in their resume building had created something far more valuable that is now serving millions of businesses in their core marketing initiatives. Building from that article, this week we are providing more advanced ways LinkedIn can be used to help you build your money-management or advisory practice. The Blogging Connection Point Earlier this year, LinkedIn took a massive leap forward by allowing you to build your firm’s brand through its primary internal publishing platform. Now, anyone with an account can use LinkedIn as a primary blogging platform. Similar to other blogging platforms, there is no cost for the service. By using LinkedIn, it provides simple way for all of your connections to organically promote your blog to others. This is an expansion of their Influencer program that began in 2012, where invited business celebrities such as the likes of Jack Welch of GE fame and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock. Content from these selected influencers appeared in users' news feeds, based on the interests they had expressed. If they liked what they saw, they could opt to follow them. This facility is now opened to all members. When you publish on the new platform, your article or blog post becomes part of your profile but will initially be seen only by your individual network. If anyone in your network hits the Like or Share buttons, a link to the article will appear in their own news feeds, exposing it to everyone in that network. At InvestCloud we have been seeing more firms appreciate the importance of publishing and maintaining a blog. Whether long-form opinion pieces, or the increasingly popular short-form referred link with comment for relevant wealth management for financial planning news, blogs are replacing the traditional quarterly newsletter as the primary means for staying connected with current and prospective clients. InMail – Coming In Through the Backdoor People with more than a few months of sales experience will have learnt that senior decision-makers are a difficult group to access. Because so many people are trying to reach them, they screen calls to protect their time, ignore most of
their mail and have gatekeepers prevent unwanted sales approaches from getting through. While it can still be important to use traditional approaches, sometimes they are just too guarded. That’s where InMail comes in. InMail is LinkedIn’s internal email system that allows you to send an email to any LinkedIn user without requiring an introduction. Basically, it ensures your email gets through to their inbox. In addition, LinkedIn claims that an InMail is 30 times more likely to get a response than a cold call. However, InMails are only available on paid accounts. The higher level the account you have, the more you get. On the entry-level business account you’ll get three InMails each month. This means you’ll want to reserve them for key prospects that you cannot reach by other means. Friction Free Referrals Over the 35 years that I’ve been in this industry, one thing that has not changed is that the best business development leads are still referrals from existing relationships. Besides that, the general reluctance of clients to offer those referred leads has not changed either. LinkedIn as discussed above has solved this problem by objectifying relationship networks and offering a low-key way for your clients to make references. It offers mapped insights into “who knows who” in a way that never existed before. Between concerns over privacy, and the limits of human memory, these things did not previously exist in the analog world. Among the top three social media platforms, LinkedIn is the best for leveraging this capability. Making good use of LinkedIn will help you reduce the cold-calls you have to make. In our next post we will focus on Facebook and Twitter. Both of which, while not specifically focused on professional or business relationships, offers real business development capabilities. If you would learn more about InvestCloud compliant content services and how we can help your firm develop its social media presence,visit us at www.investcloud.com or click here to request a demo. Jonathan Bentley leads InvestCloud’s content development and management division. From helping advisors better craft and deliver their stories to curating customized advisor RSS site feeds, Jonathan’s team is critical to InvestCloud’s bespoke design and site management services. Jonathan was previously founder and CEO of LightPort Inc. which merged with InvestCloud in 2013. Previously a practicing RIA, while at LightPort Jonathan was involved in developing web portals for more than 500 advisors and money managers.