"As an executive, you hold a great deal of influence within your organization. Your team depends on your leadership and looks to you as an expert in your field.
Extending this influence to your social media network amplifies your thought leadership and expertise. Not only is it good for your career, but it’s great for your company as well, both from a revenue and a recruiting standpoint.
The 2022 Connected Leadership study found that 82% of employees believe it’s important for business leaders to communicate company vision and values through social media. Not only do more employees prefer to work for CEOs who use social media (by a ratio of 4-to-1), but it’s also become increasingly important for companies to have more executives participating in thought leadership on social media to tell a more robust, collaborative brand story.
When it comes to social media thought leadership, LinkedIn is the place to be for business leaders. Being active on the platform has multiple benefits, from networking, talent branding and reputation management, to business development and maintaining a competitive edge in your industry."
The three things you need are
1. A buyer centric profile
Your social media profiles are your shop window to the world, you need to move away from "boring" to "that's interesting". As a leader, this is not about selling, this is about being who you are, the authentic your, share your expertise.
2. A wide and varied network
Your network and who you are connected to, are the people you are trying to influence. Prospects, buyers, employees, future employees, investors, future investors, other influencers. If you are not connected to them, then you are pretty much invisible.
"If you believe that LinkedIn is just a platform where everyone is trying to sell you something, you’re connected to the wrong people."
3. Insightful content
Your buyers, employees, future employees, investors, future investors etc are looking for insight. They are looking to be told something they don't know. After all you are the expert. We are not coming to social media to read brochures or brochureware your website is for that. Our extensive research shows that human content performs twice as good as other content.
Social is a way to build a community and for you to be able to share information to that community in seconds.
For example, Julie Sweet, CEO at Accenture was able to post during the pandemic on how the company was reacting to the ever changing position. When the team in India was impacted, Julie was able to raise money for oxygen for the team, in hours and people reacted. Afterall, they love Julie.
"In my experience, LinkedIn users do not want to be sold to. They come to the network to communicate, network, grow their businesses, educate themselves and bring about change in their industries. They want to learn from their peers (that’s you). You can help them achieve this goal by sharing relevant, timely" insight.
"If you want your connections to engage with your social posts, you’ve got to engage with theirs. Don’t worry about how many followers they have, or what their title is. Connect, comment, share and be social."
"Activate your social media superpowers on LinkedIn, and watch your professional reputation—and your career—soar."
Want to know more about social selling, check out my new book
"social selling techniques to influence buyers and changemakers - 2nd edition".
In this brand new edition, I have updated all the text, I have also got 15 practitioners, so people who are doing this already to explain how they are get (practical) business benefit. From the CEO that has been running a digital business for over 18 months to sales leaders who use social selling every day.
Articles on how these business have and are implementing digital, from Mercer, Telstra Purple, Ring Central, Cyberhawk, Namos, Ericsson, DLA Ignite and more.
What does Mark Schaefer, Marketing guru think of the book "social selling - techniques to influence buyers and changemakers - 2nd edition"? watch the video here
It's available on Amazon worldwide. Link to Amazon.com here and Amazon.co.uk here.
"The 2022 Connected Leadership study found that 82% of employees believe it’s important for business leaders to communicate company vision and values through social media. Not only do more employees prefer to work for CEOs who use social media (by a ratio of 4-to-1), but it’s also become increasingly important for companies to have more executives participating in thought leadership on social media to tell a more robust, collaborative brand story.
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