How do you stay engaged with contacts on LinkedIn?

Grant Leboff: People have a lot of connections on LinkedIn, and I think one of the challenges they have is how do they stay engaged with those people, because you have to engage them, you can’t just have a one off contact. So what are the things that people can be doing, or thinking about, to stay engaged with some of those contacts to network, the network, as it were?

Danny Bermant : One way that you can stay visible is to put out regular status updates. You don’t need to necessarily have a content strategy to do that. It can be a simple case of using tools like Google alerts, to keep you notified about what’s the latest news.

If you’re an accountant who specialises in the latest tax updates, Google alerts can let you know about anything that the Treasury, or government is thinking of announcing or has announced. So you can be the first to tell your contacts about that, and if you put simple, informative updates out on a daily basis, you’re keeping your audience top of mind. It doesn’t even matter if it’s third-party, people love third-party content, they give you credit for showing that because they think wow – you know all about the latest developments in your industry and that says something about you.

Grant Leboff: So you’re putting up these status updates and things like that. What about creating original content, can you get away with not doing that if you’re busy?

Danny Bermant : I think original content is crucial as well. I often speak about three types of ways of speaking to people on social media. There’s informing, there’s educating, there’s engaging. Engaging is where you’re having a two-way conversation. Informing is where you’re putting out news updates and third-party content. Then there’s educating; educating is when you’re going a bit more in depth, telling people about how your business works or telling people a bit more about your expertise.

If I’m a tax planning lawyer, it’s not enough to share status updates, they want to know; do you know your subject? Well in order for you to [demonstrate you] know your subject you need to, maybe, publish a short essay explaining about some of the laws, how they work and how you should be working within those laws. So yes, I would say even if you are putting out third-party content a lot, I think it’s important that you intersperse that periodically – one in four or one in five updates – you’re sharing something original.

You don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel, there is a lot of content that you can be re-sharing. People, very often forget that if you put a status update out once, only some of your audience will see it. You need to be putting an update out on the same topic a lot for enough people to actually see it and to remember it.

Grant Leboff: That’s an interesting point because you’re right, if you just put one thing out and never put it out again, very few people see it. On the other hand if you keep repeating, people get a bit tired of it. So how many times can you do that before people who’ve seen it, have seen it and let’s move on?

Danny Bermant : For example, on Twitter, if you’ve written a blog article you should be showing that a minimum of five times and then you should be, over subsequent weeks and months, going back and re-sharing that.

What you would be doing is, you wouldn’t necessarily be saying things the same way. So, for example, let’s just say that you have just published a blog about the budget and you want to share your tips about the budget. Your first update on LinkedIn or Twitter would be; ‘The government’s 2014 budget – 5 things you need to know’. The next update, for example, would be; ‘The budget why you should be using your car less’. The third update would be; ‘The 2014 budget – why you should be considering employing another member of staff’. So each time, what you’re doing is, your creating a little bit of intrigue but you also revealing another angle of what you have to say in your blog article. Giving people another reason why they should read it.

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