How LinkedIn Can Get Bigger and Better: Charlie Whyman

Transcript lightly edited for spelling and punctuation. The conversation is unabridged.

Mark Evans: You're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight, tools, and tips for marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in 25 minutes or less. I've done several podcast interviews about how to use LinkedIn, but today, we're gonna focus on where LinkedIn is going. And the person who's gonna help me look into the crystal ball is Charlie Whyman, a marketing coach and LinkedIn trainer. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Charlie Whyman: Thank you very much for having me.

Mark Evans: So before we look forward, let's look back at LinkedIn in 2020. How would this—this is a tough question. I understand, I realize that. How would you summarize how people used LinkedIn and conversely how LinkedIn evolved?

Charlie Whyman: Okay. So, the first question: how did people use LinkedIn? I think to start with, especially with the global pandemic, everybody dived into LinkedIn, and it was a bit of a free-for-all. The Facebook police were going a little bit crazy because I think, sort of, online professional etiquette, let's say, was thrown out of the window because nobody really knew what was happening or how to behave particularly. But the statistics show that there was a 55% increase in the amount of conversations that were being had on LinkedIn between first-degree connections and an increase in a 60% increase in content that was being published. So I think more and more people were realizing that, actually, in a world where we can't go and meet our clients, we can't go and meet our prospects and do those site visits, go to in-person networking events, that online networking and social selling was something that people needed to really, you know, sharpen their skills and take a little bit more seriously. So I think things have quietened down a lot now and especially with the introduction of Clubhouse. I think a lot of the noise has been taken away from LinkedIn, which, you know, I'm quite happy about. But, yeah, it's it's definitely been very interesting. It's definitely been very interesting to see how people are behaving, what is happening. A lot of people are getting good results from LinkedIn, those that know how to use it well. And I think some people are still really struggling to find their feet, to understand, 'Right, okay, how can I turn connections into clients, or how can I effectively use the platform to market and make sales?' Because I think that that's something that I've always focused on is that it's not just about generating leads and adding connections into your network and broadcasting; it's about effectively using LinkedIn as a social selling platform, as an online networking tool, and getting the results there.

Mark Evans: When we can meet again, when we can go to conferences and meet people for coffee, do you think LinkedIn is gonna change dramatically, or is this the new way to do networking in a very efficient way at scale? Personally, I find that coffee meetings and conferences take a lot of time, a lot of energy. Sometimes you just don't get the ROI. You go to an event for a whole day and you meet two people. Whereas in LinkedIn, I can connect with somebody for half an hour. Boom! We're done. I can connect somebody else in the day. So I can do multiple connections. I mean, I look at my own schedule and I've got five, six, seven, or 10 LinkedIn-related conversations happening. I could never do that in real life. So what do you think we're gonna do when we snap back to our former lives?

Charlie Whyman: Oh, I—you know what? I think, or rather I hope, that people are just gonna be a little bit more purpose-driven when it comes to going to in-person events and trade shows. I mean, I wrote an article on LinkedIn back in 2018 about how to use LinkedIn to get more return on investment from events and trade shows because that's my background. My background is events, trade shows, conferences, marketing using events. And LinkedIn, for me, was always the biggest difference between getting actual sales from a conference or an event or just generating a little bit of a buzz. I mean, for context, me and the team used LinkedIn as a way to launch an MVP, so minimum viable product. At an event, we had eight weeks to launch, but we couldn't tell anybody about the product because we were a small business. And if our competition caught wind of what we were doing, they could quite easily trump us and, you know, get there first. So we had to launch a product, and we had to create a buzz without actually talking about what it was. And we used LinkedIn as a tool to create lots of curiosity in the market. And off the back of that, we got a sales pipeline from one event for 12 and a half million pounds. So for me—Wow! LinkedIn has always been a tool to help you get more from events because you can be more purpose-driven. You know, especially now, there's, like, 740,000,000 people using LinkedIn today. So imagine if you could curate a very targeted, very specific group of people and invite them to your event or invite them to meet you or even invite them to your digital events. You know, for me, it's gonna be nothing new. I just think people are gonna start taking online networking and tools like LinkedIn a little bit more seriously and actually realizing that it's a tool to leverage and not a tool to replace.

Mark Evans: Those are really good points. And I think one of the most interesting things you said is that there are 740,000,000 people on LinkedIn. That is a massive global audience. And if you are doing business, looking to attract prospects, launch new products, that's an unbelievable way to get in front of so many people. You know, one of the things I think about is I used to spend a lot of time on my blog and, you know, maybe 100 people visited a day, maybe in a good day it was 500. But I was very limited, writing away in my little corner, little nook. But on LinkedIn, my content can be seen by thousands of people. And I think that's the one thing that I think is going to change how people approach LinkedIn as we move forward is that there's this realization that it's this amazing platform for connections, content. If you wanna do business these days, you have to be on LinkedIn.

Charlie Whyman: Yes. Yes. You have to be on LinkedIn. I think it's just more that you're leaving money on the table. I mean, I've been saying this for years: You are leaving money on the table if you're not using LinkedIn, you know, pandemic or no pandemic. But, you know, from a content point of view and from a marketing point of view, I say, and I tell this to a lot of people, marketers are ruining LinkedIn. Back before I started my business, yeah. And here's why. So back before I started my business, I was working as the head of marketing for a group of companies, and I was overwhelmed. I was under a lot of pressure to generate leads. I was under a lot of pressure to demonstrate ROI and all of the things that marketers have to face on a day-to-day basis. And along came the growth hackers and, you know, I'm not a professionally trained marketer. You know, I trained as an engineer. I fell into a marketing role and ended up loving it. And I was kind of like wooed by the growth hackers that came to me and said, 'Well, you know, you can just automate these things. You can schedule these things. You can do all this, and it'll save you so much time and achieve a much bigger result.' And at the time, I was thinking, 'I can see how that would work. That makes a lot of sense to me. Let's give it a go.' So I used automation on LinkedIn, which, for the record, do not use automation on LinkedIn. Avoid it like the plague; it will do you more harm than good. So I didn't lose my LinkedIn account, for one, because it's against LinkedIn's terms of use. I didn't damage my reputation because I like to think I'm quite clever with content and messaging—like starting conversations with people online is one of my things. So I didn't get a damaged reputation, but I did see quite early on that that wasn't the way to go. And also, I think a lot of marketers want automated tools; they want scheduling tools. They want to drive traffic to your website because that's what we can measure. It's really easy to measure these things. But in reality, that's what's ruining LinkedIn because I get complaints from people every single day. 'Oh, I'm just swarmed by people trying to sell me stuff. I'm swamped by people that just wanna connect for no apparent reason. All I see is group messages by people just sharing blog posts, links, and things like that.' And I think it's—we're living in a world now where we don't want to be broadcast to. We want to find things to engage with. We want to find things that are interesting, you know. And also, we don't want generic marketing anymore. We want things that are specifically aimed at us. And we have the tools and the ability to do that. But I think marketers are so under so much pressure that, you know, and I felt this before, so I know this from experience. But I also know that when you take a step back, you slow down, do less but better—that's where the magic happens. That's where you get engagement. That's where you reach the people that, you know, are gonna make the biggest difference. So, yeah, I do say that marketers ruin LinkedIn, but also the curious marketers—the marketers that are genuinely interested in helping clients and understanding things from their perspective—those are the marketers that are really gonna win.

Mark Evans: Before we move forward, I wanna touch a little bit on automation. So I did some coaching for an organization that helped entrepreneurs do better, and their primary channel was LinkedIn. And one of the tools that they were all about was Dux-Soup, which is an automation tool. And the idea is that you would send dozens, if not hundreds, of connection requests out in an automated way. And I always thought that that was a really strange way to do business. It's—you're blasting out to the world hoping that somebody will pick up on your canned message, and you can establish some kind of connection. I can understand the interest in doing things at scale. And to your point, marketers love automation tools. We love things that make our jobs easier and more efficient. But why do you think automation is this evil thing on LinkedIn? I'm not in the automation camp, for sure. I do everything organically, but I'm curious about the evils of automation. And do you think that LinkedIn will start to clamp down on these tools?

Charlie Whyman: LinkedIn is already clamping down on the tools. So I think that the main reason why automation on LinkedIn is bad is because it's against LinkedIn's terms of use. And they're specifically targeting Chrome plugins. So if you're using a Chrome plugin, that's usually the biggest warning sign. They don't endorse automation, and they are actively going and shutting down accounts that use automated tools. One of the biggest reasons that you should be aware of, just in general, rather than relying on people giving you feedback, is that if you send, say, 100 automated messages to your ideal prospects, then let's say you get, sort of, let's say you get three people replying to you saying, 'Yes, I'm interested. Please send me more information.' That's like 97 people that have either ignored you or you've annoyed. And a lot of the people that you've annoyed will do one of two things: they'll ignore you or they'll block you. Now you've got no visibility on whether you've been blocked or not, or also if people are ignoring you, but that's also you damaging your personal reputation, you know? It's not the brand's reputation; it's personal reputation, which also does, in turn, have an impact on the brand. So I think the more you can see LinkedIn as an online networking tool and a platform to build reputation, it's easy to realize that, actually, automation can really hurt that reputation because I think, you know, we're living in a world where Google search is so advanced. And we expect that from all different search engines, and the LinkedIn search engine is not as advanced as Google. So if you're sending mass connection requests, mass messages to people, there will be people that aren't suitable for what it is that you're trying to offer them. And, again, I think it's that, you know, we want a more personal approach. If you meet somebody at a trade show or an event, you don't go straight in with a pitch. You say hello, you know? Right. And you're more genuine about your approach. So I think the biggest piece of advice that I give people is: behave on LinkedIn as you would do at an event, at a trade show, at a networking meeting, or if you met somebody in the line-up of a coffee shop and you wanted to ask them what they do or there was, you know, an indication that they could be a prospective client. You know, we all have those interactions, but you wouldn't approach it in the same way. It's like marketers, as well. I work with a lot of marketing agencies, and they're like, 'Well, why are we being ignored on LinkedIn?' It's like, 'Well, if you received the message that you were sending out to people, what would you do?' And their response is almost always, 'Well, I'd ignore it because it's not using natural human language, you know?'

Mark Evans: There's a lot of talk about what LinkedIn could do, the features that it could launch, the new services that it could get into. But I wanna ask you, given all those asks on LinkedIn, how do you think LinkedIn reacted in 2020 in terms of the way that people were starting to use the platform and the demands they were making to make it more interesting, interactive, useful? From the outside looking in, it doesn't look like LinkedIn did very much at all, although there could be a lot happening behind the scenes.

Charlie Whyman: Yeah. Well, in my opinion, LinkedIn is way too slow. Way too slow, too reactive, not proactive enough. So, prime example: if we look at, like, introduction of LinkedIn Stories, which was quite a new thing last year, you know, that they're talking about what new stickers can we integrate into the platform. It's like, 'Well, first of all, give us a search function so we can search for the sticker that we want rather than have to, sort of, mindlessly scroll through.' Groups. Last year, LinkedIn made a few tweaks to make groups more interactive and managers able to, you know, alert their members as to what's going on. You can recommend one post in a group every seven days. You can now set notifications so that your members can get a notification with new group activity. You know, you can now send an unlimited amount of messages to people in the same group as you that are not necessarily connected to you. So there's lots of new features that have been released. But because LinkedIn isn't always as transparent in terms of what they are, you know, you have to stumble upon them or you have to be in a network of other people that are looking out for them. So I think LinkedIn is a little bit too reactive for my liking. They're not that easy in terms of rolling out new features, and they're quite slow. But I always think the pros massively outweigh the cons and the frustrations. And I think, again, if you just keep thinking, 'Right. Okay. Actually, just in its most basic form, it's such a powerful tool,' you know? There's so much you can do with it. Like, with the free version, the advanced search filters that you can tap into are incredible. You know, there's loads of people that think, 'Oh, I need, like, LinkedIn Sales Navigator to be able to search for people in a particular industry or with a particular job title and things like that.' You don't at all. So I think, you know, I always say, 'Avoid that painful trial and error process.' You know, if you can't get business from LinkedIn, work with—you know, it's not just me. There are thousands of other LinkedIn trainers out there. You know, work with somebody—you know, fast-track your success. But also, there is way more to using LinkedIn than just knowing how to use LinkedIn. You need to know how to market your business on LinkedIn and generate engagement and use it as a social selling tool.

Mark Evans: It's funny that you mentioned LinkedIn Stories because I love LinkedIn. I love commenting and creating content. And I tried LinkedIn Stories, and it didn't work for me. I just didn't see the value. I tried to make a few videos. They got minor, very minor pickup. It struck me that LinkedIn was trying to jump on something that Instagram had done and Snapchat, and it didn't work for them. That may have not been native. It may have not been introduced properly, but that was something, I think, that was a fail. Let's look forward in terms of what LinkedIn could do in 2021. And I created a list. I have a long wish list of the things that I would like LinkedIn to do. And one of them—let's go through the list here. One of them is analytics for personal accounts. Even while analytics for corporate accounts aren't that good and not that user-friendly, what are your thoughts about analytics? Because there's a company called Shield, which seems to have dominated the LinkedIn analytics market. LinkedIn has basically allowed them to have this established, really solid foothold. Do you think that LinkedIn will introduce analytics in 2021?

Charlie Whyman: I wish they would. I don't think that they will. I think they need to differentiate between their paid versions of LinkedIn a little bit more. Like LinkedIn Premium and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, the lines are very blurred at the moment. There used to be a clear distinction as to what you would get for each, whereas now it's not as clear. Stories, I actually think that there's a big opportunity with stories. I think the fact that most people still use LinkedIn with their desktop. I know that my market—I target a very, like, technical company, like tech companies, engineering companies, manufacturing companies. They use LinkedIn on desktop mainly, not mobile, and you can only access stories on mobile. And also, there's still too many features that are missing to make it interactive and user-friendly, which is stopping people investing time on them. And also, the fact that we're living in a global pandemic, and we can't go to events and trade shows. Whereas I think that when we can do those events and those meetups, that's where, like, LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Stories are really gonna come alive. Whereas I think because we haven't had access to those, we've not really been able to leverage them to their maximum capacity. I think that last year, we saw some updates to groups. And from what I've been told and from what I've heard directly from LinkedIn, they're still working on making groups a much better resource for people and companies. So I think in 2021, we're gonna see more features specifically in groups. I think we're gonna see more updates to LinkedIn Company Pages. So recently, they've launched product pages on company pages, which they sort of had years ago, and then they got rid of. And now they brought them back again in a slightly different way. Yeah. So, yeah. So we've got product pages. And I think, you know, we've got retargeting now. That was another update from last year. So if you're advertising on LinkedIn, you've got way more control and flexibility to be targeted and to be more specific, which I think is really exciting. So Clubhouse is an interesting one because I remember seeing that on your list. A lot of people are making speculation.

Mark Evans: Of course.

Charlie Whyman: A lot of people are making big speculation as to whether or not—

Mark Evans: Me included.

Charlie Whyman: Yeah. Whether, like, LinkedIn will buy Clubhouse. I mean, Microsoft owns LinkedIn. So I personally don't think they will buy Clubhouse. I'd be surprised if they do. Twitter is launching Spaces. That's underway. I actually think Twitter Spaces will be better than Clubhouse longer term. That's just my observation. Why do you say that? And I just think Twitter's more established, and I don't think that Clubhouse has figured out where its main niche or where its main purpose is. There's a lot of issues with Clubhouse in terms of data protection and privacy and all of these things, and it's a very noisy, very distracting place. I do think that there are massive opportunities for it, but I think, you know, because I love Twitter. I'm a bit old school. So I think the fact that Twitter's giving me that functionality, you know, and they already have the built-up infrastructure. They've been working on this for a while. You know, I keep my eyes and ears open, and I'm reserving judgment too much. But I think Twitter Spaces are gonna be the thing, especially for a B2B market. Other things to keep an eye on. But then, Clubhouse LinkedIn product managers are hosting regular rooms on Clubhouse where you can actually directly ask LinkedIn questions. They're a bit frustrating to be part of because the same questions keep popping up, and some of them are, like, really, really basic questions. And also, like, everybody's a LinkedIn expert on Clubhouse at the moment, you know? I mean, if you spend every day on—

Mark Evans: Clubhouse, you can—seems to be the way.

Charlie Whyman: You could be an expert in whatever you want. If you spend every day or every waking minute on Clubhouse and call yourself an expert and just keep volunteering information that you've heard from somebody else, then, obviously, you know, people are gonna think that you are that expert because there's no credibility behind it. That's what I love about LinkedIn. You can really find out if somebody tells you something and you're like, 'That sounds really interesting. I wonder what this person's background is.' You can go to LinkedIn and find out what their background is. Whereas you can't get that on Clubhouse, and it only links to Twitter and Instagram. So I think for B2B, it's great because you can host, like, Ask Me Anything. So, like, brands can have, like, Ask Me Anything with their product managers, with their CEOs, and invite their customers, but it's still very limited because it's only on iPhone. So I think it's one of those watch-this-space, but I would be surprised if Clubhouse is bought by Facebook or LinkedIn. I think they will have plans of their own.

Mark Evans: A couple of other things that I wanted to talk to you about in terms of how LinkedIn could improve. One of them is messages, which I find to be so arcane in the way that it's structured and the way that you can search. And the other one would be connection requests. The fact that I get a connection request, and I don't really get a lot of insight into whether the connection request makes sense. I'm in the camp where I'm very selective in terms of who I connect with. I did a poll recently, and there are a lot of people who accept every single connection request. So maybe talk a little bit about how LinkedIn could improve messages and how you see connection requests being taken to the next level?

Charlie Whyman: Last year, they did actually release a couple of updates to make management of your inbox a little bit easier. So you can now multi-select messages and archive them and delete them. You can also use filters for unread messages and things like that as well. You can also set—if you've got Premium on LinkedIn, you can now set an out-of-office, which is really helpful. You know, if you go on holiday and you want to let people know that, you know, you're not gonna respond for a week or two weeks or however long. And I think, as well, LinkedIn is gonna try and encourage more people to block and report messages that are not legit or people that are just trying to be too promotional or spammy. So I think they're gonna try and do more with that. In terms of other functionality with messages, last year, they enabled voice messages. Now, personally, I love the voice messages feature. I've gained loads of conversions as a result of using that. But I've also spoken to a lot of people that don't like that feature, and they're sort of saying that they find it too invasive. They would ignore a voice message. They don't like it. So I think there's a difference of opinion going on around voice. One of your questions was around whether you thought LinkedIn would have their own video conferencing tool: you can actually schedule a Zoom, Teams, or BlueJeans meeting in the messenger, which is really handy. I think they also have a calendar integration feature, which I think is a little bit clunky. I don't like it very much. So I think next—well, next year, this year, I think they'll do a little bit more with that. But what I would really, really, really love, and I think that they're gonna do this as a Premium feature, is that tagging. So you can tag messages and create specific lists. So not like you would get from Sales Navigator, but just so you can understand where those connections have come from. I always encourage people to put a reference in the message that you're sending to people. So if you met them at a particular event or a trade show, make a note in the message, say, 'Oh, you know, great to meet you at the PSA conference 2020.' So you can search for that. Right. Great. So there are little hacks that you can use. But in terms of future updates, I'm not really sure what they could do. Ideally, they should overhaul the whole thing just to make it a lot easier because, like you said, it is very archaic.

Mark Evans: The other place where I wanted to talk to you about is in terms of content discovery. So let's say, for example, you left a comment on one of my posts. I went to your profile to check you out, and I wanted to say, 'I wanna check out Charlie's content.' There's really no efficient way for me to really go through all your content because I'm gonna have to scroll down all the posts that you've written over the past how many years, and some of them are gonna be great. I would like a way to focus on posts that, for example, are all about LinkedIn tips. I can filter out all your other posts and just focus on the tips or focus on, or be able to search by tagging or hashtags? Do you see that as a low-hanging fruit for LinkedIn, something that they may wanna improve?

Charlie Whyman: Absolutely. And I think they are. So, the last product manager Ask Me Anything Clubhouse chat that I joined, I did ask LinkedIn whether they were going to add filters to hashtag searches. Because I think if you have the ability to search for particular types of content from an individual and search for hashtags that they're using in that content as a way of tagging or indexing that, that'll be really helpful. And they did say that they are improving their search, so they're working on their search filters and things like that. I don't know how long we're gonna have to wait before we see that type of thing. But I think that, yeah. And again, hashtags, so many people have no idea how to use hashtags. So it's one of those that, you know, kind of people need to use hashtags a little bit more before we get the search filters and things. But I completely agree with you. It would be lovely to be able to say, 'Right, okay, I want to search for this particular type of content from, say, UK content creators about, like, LinkedIn or about Clubhouse or about Clubhouse and LinkedIn,' you know, and be able to use the Boolean search logic that you can use when you're searching for people to be able to use that when searching for content will be really, really powerful and useful.

Mark Evans: One final question in terms of new people to LinkedIn. I think you and I live in a world in which we think everybody's on LinkedIn. Everybody's creating content. Everybody's leaving comments. We look at it and wonder, 'Well, why wouldn't you be engaged on LinkedIn?' Why wouldn't you have an active presence? But there's lots of people who are not on LinkedIn actively or using it in a really bad way. So what's your advice to newbies? People who are hearing people like you and I talk about LinkedIn and the power of LinkedIn and saying to themselves, 'I'm missing out on something really amazing.' How do they get started? How do they move in the right direction? And you've got years of experience as a LinkedIn trainer. So any insight on how you can make the right moves to take advantage of what is a very powerful platform?

Charlie Whyman: Best piece of advice I can give you is: take it one step at a time. Try not to think that you can achieve everything that you want overnight. Put your curious hat on, put your marathon mindset on, be in it for the long term, but also explore. And I really need to emphasize this: explore what is gonna work for you and the business that you're trying to promote or the business that you're trying to work for with. And the reason I say this is that everybody has an opinion as to how you can use LinkedIn. I've been very fortunate to use LinkedIn across multiple different industries, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. So, there isn't—you have to allow yourself the time to explore what's gonna work for you. You have to ask questions. When people give you advice, make sure that you're adding context to your questions and you're challenging advice or at least understanding who's giving you the advice and where their experience comes from. Because there are a huge amount of people that are, you know, spending, you know, days and days and days on Clubhouse listening to everybody, giving all of this advice away, but not understanding how to actually apply it to them in their business. Because, you know, at the end of the day, LinkedIn is just a tool. You know, I could teach you how to use a tool in half a day or in an hour depending on how tech-savvy you are, but it's applying what you, you know, it's something like 'apply the OTTER.' The O in the OTTER behind me is all about objectives. Yeah. So really focus on what do you wanna get out of it and how can you leverage LinkedIn as a way to achieve that because there are so many different ways that you can use LinkedIn. You know, I've used it across lots of different business objectives. But focus on one thing, do it really well, and then move on to the next thing or do more of it.

Mark Evans: So where can people learn more about you and what you do as a digital marketer and LinkedIn trainer?

Charlie Whyman: So, best way to learn more about me is to connect on LinkedIn. So, Charlie Whyman, Whyman spelled W-H-Y-M-A-N, or you can visit my website. It's charliewhyman.com. You can listen to my podcast, The Curiosity Key. But, yeah, just connect with me on LinkedIn. Drop me a personal note or a message and just say that you heard me on this podcast because then it's always good to have context. And, I'm one of those people. I like to talk to my connections. So, yeah, send me a message, and—Good. More than happy to have a conversation.

Mark Evans: Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Charlie Whyman, visit marketingspark.co/blog. If you'd like to learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and coach, send an email to mark@marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.