Sharing and Engaging with Your LinkedIn Audience has Never Been Easier

You guys have probably already figured out that I’m a big proponent of using LinkedIn to build a digital presence and engage with potential buyers by publishing relevant content and advice. It’s how I went from 8K to 30K followers in less than 12 months. It’s also how I learned that it’s not just about your follower count, but more so how engaged your audience is because of the quality of your content.

I frequently challenge others to do the same, but getting other people in your organization to persistently publish and engage is an uphill battle. Using LinkedIn to grow your business isn’t just for the CEO or a couple other high-level execs in your organization. Well-rounded employee participation and advocacy is even more powerful, and LinkedIn just made it even easier to help companies drive this initiative. 

I want to share some quick thoughts on this Q3 release for those who may have missed it; and how the addition of Elevator to Sales Navigator can morph this uphill battle into a downright avalanche.

Let’s start with talking about LinkedIn Elevate and how it’s already upped the standard for companies taking advantage of it.

“LinkedIn analysis has shown that sales professionals who regularly share content are 45% more likely to exceed quota.”

• Introducing Elevate in Sales Navigator

The whole purpose of LinkedIn Elevate is to make it extremely easy for employees to grab and share content your marketing team posts into Elevate (so yes, you do have to get your marketing team involved). 

There are two things I have identified make it more difficult to turn your employees into digital advocates for your company: 

• A lack of content for them to share; or
• The time it takes to find and post quality content

Enter Elevate.

Now my friends, the geniuses behind the curtain have taken Elevate one step further by integrating it into Sales Navigator, bringing these two ecosystems together. ??????

How Elevate Works in Sales Navigator

It’s simple. Every day when you log into Sales Navigator, you’ll receive a custom alert prompting you to share a piece of content from Elevate. Boom. It shows up front and center in the Sales Navigator homepage feed as a powerful reminder and you no longer have to log in to a second platform - saving yourself and your advocates even more time.

Has it been successful, Jake? Has this small change really made an impact for companies?

You bet. LinkedIn first ran a pilot of the integration and saw an average 53 percent increase in monthly shares among Sales Nav users. In fact, more than ? of Elevate’s content sharers are sales professionals using Sales Navigator -- so it only makes sense. 

You can check out the release page for more info.

Why am I so gung-ho about this? Because as I mentioned, the hardest thing about getting employees and sales professionals to share more content and be active on LinkedIn is limited access to resources and the time it takes to source them and come up with fresh ideas. But a second thing LinkedIn noticed when piloting Elevate in Sales Nav is that the Elevate Alerts also activated many first-time sharers - getting more people off the bench and ready to start swinging. 

You don’t have to be a content creator to share quality content. I’m going to talk about this more at an event Skaled is hosting next week, but I’ll tell you a little secret now:

Your audience doesn't care who wrote it, the credit goes to the person who shared it.

That’s why teams should be taking advantage of Elevate. It aggregates content into one place that now even sends out a notification to Sales Navigator - an application your salespeople should be opening every day anyway.

How To Tie it Into Your Sales Follow-Up

Active status in LinkedIn Messaging has been around for a long while, but when you add it to the Sales Navigator update, I now see another opportunity. In case you haven’t already noticed, LinkedIn messages have green circles next to active users names. 

• A solid green circle means someone is currently active. 
• A hollowed out green circle means they aren’t currently active but get push notifications on their phone. 

Meaning you know when potential buyers and prospects you’re working are active and reachable in real-time. 

How I see this tying into the Elevate/Sales Navigator update, is instead of just adding into your prospecting or follow-up sequence a step to share a piece of content at this specific date and time… you can now share content at the exact moment a prospect is online. Or send them a message along the vein of, “Hey, I just posted this article this morning, “ by way of the Elevate Alert in Sales Navigator of course, “and if you have a couple of minutes, I think you should check out the section on [insert here]...” 

This is just another one of those simple changes we can make to our everyday routine in order to reach more buyers. It would require you to keep a better eye on active users, and we can’t sit around and watch for the little green circle all day. But we can check it during the times of high user engagement. Basically M-F in the morning, lunchtime, and early afternoon.