Social Selling is What is Killing LinkedIn

For my Top 20 list of 2019, I want to call out 20 people who crush it at social engagement. This blog, however, is going to talk more about what more of us can do to build our own digital presence this next year by analyzing and following the 20 listed below. You’ll get the list at the end. 

But before handing over this golden list of top engagers to watch, I want to break down what makes these people “social engagers” vs “social sellers” and then my criteria for being excellent at social engagement.

Social Selling 2.0

Version 1.0 of social selling was very much focused on how to get more meetings via LinkedIn. Salespeople were taught that the best way to engage on LinkedIn was to first connect with a person and then send them a customized LinkedIn InMail and, boom, you’d set meetings. And it worked. But then everyone jumped on that bandwagon. 

The Linked inbox started to become a lot like a buyer’s normal inbox, and buyers started to tune out most of the noise. Then salespeople started making the same mistakes they would with email. We got lazy in terms of the amount of customization and relevancy we were putting into our messages, and we got lazy in terms of the amount of follow-up we’d do.

I also still get a lot of messages and follow-ups that go like this:

I get message No. 1 and don’t reply. Then I get message No. 2 saying, “Well, you may not be interested...” When really I’m thinking, all you did was send me one random message on LinkedIn. I don’t know if I’m interested, or I never even saw the first message! 

Basically, social selling 1.0 was like taking email and call techniques and applying them to LinkedIn. Social Engagement (Social Selling 2.0) on the other hand is more about how you engage with people on social media. Putting out content that people want to engage with and engaging with their content in a way that helps to develop some type of relationship in a much more authentic way than a random InMail. That’s the big difference. 

It’s almost like going to a networking event. At an in-person event, you walk up to someone and typically say “Hey, how are you?” You don’t go up to them and dive into your pitch. Think of LinkedIn as a networking event that is happening 24/7 and the same rules apply. So don’t dive into the DMs with your pitch without first saying hello or engaging in someway elsewhere. 

After you’ve introduced yourself, you’re talking, and it’s relevant (they’ve posted something that’s relevant to what you do or you see something on their company’s feed), and you’ve built a small amount of relationship capital with them, that’s the time to message them. And guess what, that could take two months, but sometimes that’s how relationships work. They take time.

The second difference between social selling and social engagement is you have to keep building your audience. Adding new people to your network so more of the right people hear what you’re talking about. Your audience right now might just be your current and ex-coworkers. That’s not going to help you engage or sell. You have to go out to where your buyers are and bring them into your network. Social engagers are very strategic. They have a strategy for connecting with new people as well as a strategy for the content they post and engage with. 

My Three Criteria for Making the Top 20 List

I looked for three things when finalizing my top 20 social engagers list:

1. Engagement to Follower Ratio
2. Consistency
3. Personality

Engagement to Follower Ratio

If you have 300,000 followers, you should be getting hundreds to thousands of likes and comments on every single post. There are plenty of people who are crushing it in engagement with just 10-15,000 followers, and they are consistently getting a 100 or 150 likes and comments per post. Why? They are putting out content that makes people want to interact.

Consistency

The second thing I looked for was consistency. That’s what goes into building an audience. People don’t follow people on social media who only communicate to them once a week or twice a week. They follow people who are putting out multiple pieces of stories or content every single day. Buyers and people who check their LinkedIn multiple times a day, don’t want to see the same content.

Personality

What I mean by “personality” is if a person or brand has a differentiating tone of voice. Meaning they are not just stating facts, but I can hear a person talking back to me. Or maybe I hear a brand voice that is different from what I would find on their two top competitors’ pages. The ability to have some type of voice or lean on an opinion is very important in order to attract an audience. Otherwise, you’re just like Joe next door, and people don’t want to follow and listen to two Joes. 

Final Thoughts

There are way more amazing salespeople, marketers, and non-sales/marketers kicking butt on LinkedIn using social engagement. But I did have to cut the list off somewhere and 20 people to watch in 2020 sounded like a good round number. If you’re looking for more of the best to follow and learn from, check out this Top 50 list the team put out in late-July.

Finally, Here’s the Top 20 Social Engagers to Watch in 2020

(In no particular order.)

1. Collin Cadmus, VP Sales, AirCall
2. John Barrows - CEO, JBarrows Sales Training
3. Shay Rowbottom - CEO, Shay Rowbottom Marketing
4. Jackie Hermes, Founder & CEO, Accelity
5. Gary Vaynerchuk - CEO, VaynerMedia
6. Because if I didn’t include him, someone would call it out.
7. Kevin Dorsey - VP of Inside Sales, PatientPop
8. Oleg Vishnespolsy, Global CTO, DailyMail - Mail Online
9. Amy Volas, Founder & CEO - Avenue Talent Partners
10.  Jason Barrett, Owner, Elevated
11.  Dave Gerhardt, VP Marketing, Drift 
12.  Paul Salamanca, VP of Enterprise Sales, vArmour
13.  Scott Barker, Head of Partnerships, Sales Hacker
14.  Josh Braun, Founder, Sales DNA
15.  Scott Leese, Founder, Scott Leese Consulting
16. Justin Welsh, Founder, The Official Justin
17.  Ryan O’Hara, VP of Growth and Marketing, LeadiQ
18.  James Mackey, CEO, SecureVision 
19.  Belal Batrawy, Enterprise Account Executive, Clearbit
20.  Sahil Mansuri, CEO, Bravado
21.  Sam Jacobs, Founder, Revenue Collective