30 Minute Social Sessions: LinkedIn - Inner Social Media-ness

What is a 30 Minute Social Session?

30 Minute Social Sessions are my tested recommendations to help solopreneurs take away that confused feeling of where to go and what to do for their social media marketing.

Each session will show you steps you can do for 30 minutes (or less!) to help you grow your social media presence and to get your message heard by the people who want to buy from you.

If you missed the previous 30 Minute Social Sessions, here are the links to review them:

Click here to read how I scheduled these Facebook 30 Minute Social Sessions once a week into my calendar.

How I learned about how to track my site’s traffic with the Google Analytics 30 Minute Social Session that I do once a month.

What I learned about how a little Twitter 30 Minute Social Session goes a long a way.

Why I’m moving my eggs to the Pinterest basket with the Pinterest 30 Minute Social Session.

What’s your favorite timer?

We’ve been doing this a few months so I’m sure you found a timer that you like to use to track your 30 Minute Social Sessions. This link will take you to my favorite timer. I like to use this one because I can see the time left in the browser’s tab and I don’t need to keep checking the browser page to check my remaining time: http://www.online-stopwatch.com/countdown-timer/

You can use this one or an app on your phone or even a timer that you use for cooking. Whatever you use, make sure it’s something you can keep near your desk so you can stay on track with your time.

This Month’s 30 Minute Social Session: LinkedIn

This month, we’re adding a fourth social program to our marketing mix. Now I’m planning my week out to use Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest AND adding in LinkedIn.

This is that tipping point for most people. They get overwhelmed, freak themselves out and most likely, just stop doing any posting. “It’s just too much,” they’re thinking. “I’ve got work to do that brings in money, I need to work on that new product launch and there’s just so many hours in the day when I can get anything done. I’m not seeing any results from this social stuff … so why even bother?”

I know that feeling. I’ve had a few months where I felt like that and just pulled back from everything.

But that was before I discovered my 30 Minute Social Sessions. I learned how to stay organized while still posting and growing my social presence.

How to get LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a totally different animal than the rest of the other social media sites. It’s like a great big networking meeting where you can run a search for any type of business, pull up their name, walk across the room and stick out your virtual LinkedIn request hand and make a new business contact.

This is the one site where it’s completely appropriate to talk about your business. While you want to show your personality with your posts, this is not the place to take this too personal and post what you had for dinner or where you’re going on vacation.

Update your profile

Before you get started on your sessions, I highly recommend that you update your LinkedIn profile. This is your first impression with most of your connections. If your profile is incomplete or only lists your old job from 2001, than you’re not presenting your whole story to potential partners, vendors or possible clients.

Below are several links for you to review to help you update your profile:

How to Create a LinkedIn Profile in 21 Steps

How to Complete your LinkedIn Profile: Summary, Experience and Education

Killer Tricks & Tips I Learned While Updating My LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn Sessions: Increase your engagement with these secret tips

Profile updated and ready to go? Check!

Now I want to share with you these two simple LinkedIn secrets that I do to maintain a constant presence on LinkedIn without logging into the site every day.

Secret #1: Posting valuable content to your connections.

Your posts could be content you created like blog posts or promoting something in your business like a webinar or new service you’re offering. Or you could post links to interesting articles that your contacts would find helpful, educational or maybe it’s a quote that gives them a chuckle for the day.

Here’s my secret tip to get my posting done quickly and easily:

When I log into Hootsuite to schedule my tweets for the week, I click on the image for my LinkedIn profile and post the same messages to my LinkedIn status update.

As I said before, I like Hootsuite but you could also use Sprout Social or Buffer. All of these programs will allow you to schedule your posts so you don’t need to log into LinkedIn (and Twitter) every day.

I use the free version of Hootsuite which allows me to add in five (5) different social programs like my Facebook fan page, Twitter account and LinkedIn profile.

To schedule your posts, do the following steps:

Click “Compose Message”
Type your message, include links if you have any and upload any images you’d like to include
Click to select a profile(s) from the profile picker – click on Twitter and LinkedIn
Click the calendar icon
From the calendar, select the date for the message to be sent
Select the time for the message to be sent
Click “Schedule”

Once all your posts are scheduled, you can review and revise either the text, links, dates or scheduled time in the HootSuite Dashboard. You’ll see them listed in the scheduled posts stream in each of the social program’s tabs.

If you don’t see the scheduled posts sections, look at the top of your Dashboard and you’ll see the button to Add Stream for each social media program. You’ll just click on that button and add in the scheduled posts stream into your LinkedIn section.

Secret #2: Grow your connections in LinkedIn groups.

You’ve seen them listed in the site and chances are, you may have joined a few.

Here’s the second secret tip I’m going to share with you – LinkedIn groups is the place to take your connections to the next level. Being active in groups not only introduces you to new people, it also helps you share your content and products/services to a specific niche of targeted people.

Before you start clicking on this group or joining that one, take a few minutes to listen to my friend Gennia Holder’s tips about LinkedIn groups:

8 LinkedIn Groups you need to join to generate leads

Vetting LinkedIn Groups: 6 Simple Things to Check Before You Join – this one has an incredible amount of information that I didn’t know about! Great stuff to learn before you join a group.

For this part of the session, I set the timer for 30 minutes and did the following steps:

Clicked into my group. I’m pretty active on just one of the groups that I’ve joined (Pinterest Networking Group) so for this Social Session, I just concentrated on the one main group.
I looked through the group’s discussions, read a couple of articles, hit the like button and made a comment if I had something valuable to add to the conversation.
Only two times (2x) during my month long Social Session tracking did I post up a link in the group to a blog post that I wrote. While I have a lot of blog posts I can share with the groups members, I want to keep my posts on topic with this Pinterest group’s interests. I don’t always blog about Pinterest or Visual Content but when I do, I share it with the group.

What did I learn?

I spent the first week updating my profile and then I did the LinkedIn 30 Minute Social Sessions once a week for a full month. Since LinkedIn isn’t like the other sites, I didn’t see an immediate increase in my connections or traffic to my website. LinkedIn isn’t a numbers game to see how many people you can connect with – always go for quality over quantity.

1. The timer still keeps me on track. When I clicked into my LinkedIn group, the timer helped me stay focused on the conversation and gave me some time to check the profiles of other members in the group to see if I should connect with them.

2. The more I did the sessions, the quicker I got. My last LinkedIn session took me 20 minutes. I used the extra time to check my Hootsuite account to make sure I had at least 4 posts scheduled for the week. Remember, I already scheduled these updates when I did my Twitter posts so if I only had 2 posts scheduled, I added in a couple more articles to share.

3. My engagement with my group increased. I connected to people who work in the same field as I do. A couple of those connections moved off LinkedIn and shifted over to Facebook and Pinterest.

Like I said earlier, LinkedIn is the place to meet and virtually shake hands. Spending a little time every week to increase your engagement can take those introductions into working with potential partners, vendors or clients.

My Social Sessions Schedule

Now, we’re into our fifth 30 Minute Social Session. I admit, it’s been quite a challenge to add one more social program to my already busy schedule this month.

And just like last month – I’m still working though the steps in each session but I’ve added in what I call free moments of social time into my day (sitting in the school car line, waiting for my lunch appointment to arrive or for a meeting to start). I’ve still continued to pull back from Facebook and spend my time with the social programs that are sending me more site traffic.

Here is the breakdown of my time using the checklists from the 30 Minute Social Sessions.

Facebook:

Once a week, 30 Minute Social Session + 30 minutes to schedule my posts for the week = 1.0 hour per week

Google Analytics:

Once a month, 30 Minute Social Session to check where my traffic is coming from. I’m getting really good at working through this. I pulled up my March report in 20 minutes = 20 minutes once a month

Twitter:

Once a week, 30 Minute Social Session + 30 minutes to schedule my posts in Hootsuite for the week = 1.0 hour per week

Plus I use my free moments to add in new posts about what’s happening in my day, retweet people I’m following or thank someone for sharing a blog post = I’d say this is approximately an additional 2 hours for the whole week.

Total of Twitter time – 3.0 hours for the week

Pinterest:

Twice a week, 30 Minute Social Session, once to create new content and the other session to find new people = 1.0 hour per week

I scaled back to a couple of days a week to do a quick 10 minute session to repin what was in the home feed = This was approximately an additional 1 hour for the whole week.

Total of Pinterest time – 2.0 hours for the week

LinkedIn:

Once a week, 30 Minute Social Session to go into my groups and make sure I added in at least 4 posts a week = 30 minutes per week

Remember, I did double duty when I logged into Hootsuite to do my Twitter updates. With just a quick click on the profile picker, some of the posts I scheduled for Twitter were also scheduled on LinkedIn.

Total of LinkedIn time – 3o minutes for the week

At this point, I’m doing almost 7 hours a week to keep my social media presence growing. I reduced the time on Pinterest to add in LinkedIn as well as shifted my focus from Facebook to Twitter.

And it’s not really 7 hours at one sitting, but scattered throughout the week and when I have those free moments that life throws my way.