LinkedIn & ROI: Interview With Viveka Von Rosen
Being in the social media game, you cross paths with a lot of self-proclaimed gurus and social media experts that are, quite frankly, competition. Despite this competition, the social media industry tends to have an unspoken brotherhood because one of the common practices preached is to share other’s content. In this process, you inevitably stumble upon some great people who you start to perceive more as peers than anything else.
I’m happy to say that the person I interviewed for this feature is someone who has a lot of great advice to give on the subject of LinkedIn and social media. Being that LinkedIn is my field of expertise, I am exceptionally picky about those whom I get info from and Viveka von Rosen is someone that has been around long enough to have earned her stripes.
When it came to choosing who would become the author of the upcoming book, LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour A Day, Viveka von Rosen was a stand out choice with her conversational writing style and authentic approach to marketing.
The meat of our conversation was our focus on ROI and LinkedIn. We spoke for well over 40 minutes but this article has been condensed with the most concentrated and impactful information that your business can translate into actionable steps. Be sure to check out the audio player below for the full interview!
Interview With Viveka von Rosen: LinkedIn & ROI
Melonie Dodaro: What strategies do you find to be most important for generating long-term sales and growth through social media for the clients you work with and even for your self?
Viveka von Rosen: Well, it always comes back to connection and engagement. So any strategy I can use to connect and engage the individual that I want to have a relationship with is ideal. I really like the strategy Bob Berg has, which is “How can I help you?” A lot of times, it’s simply about reaching out and saying “You know I noticed that you’re an accountant in Anchorage, I’m going to be speaking in Anchorage and is there any way I can help you? Are there any referrals you need at this time?” To the point where you’re helping them and you’re not even trying to sell your stuff.
Becoming top of mind as well and other techniques can be a little bit more time consuming but less invasive and more effective.
Simple attraction marketing type techniques where you’re sharing useful tips and useful information so even if they don’t need to use you or your services, when someone they know says, “Oh I need someone who can help me with my social media strategy” or “I need an accountant” or “I need a realtor” that your name springs to mind.
The people who use LinkedIn to do more traditional push marketing and blast your inbox with “buy my crap”… do they really think anyone’s going to click and buy that product? We still need to make ourselves a valued resource so that others want to engage with us.
Also, if you are going to reach out to someone on LinkedIn, then make sure you use the tools LinkedIn gives you. Read their profile, research them, go to their websites, visit their blog, read their blog, or, at the very least, follow their blog. If they have written white papers read them so when you reach out to the individual, you can actually reference that and say “Hey I have an interest in you. I’ve invested time in you already and here’s what I think on how we can do XYZ together.”
Melonie Dodaro: Connecting and engaging is absolutely key and I see so many that send out all these spammy messages and it’s very frustrating because I just hit delete, delete, delete and I don’t even open them. It’s usually so obvious based on what the subject line says a lot of time that there is no sense in wasting any time. I think people really owe it to themselves to become more educated because the amount of time that’s being wasted doing the wrong things could easily be spent doing the right things and you would see much better results in your business.
So Viveka, how have you connected the dots between ROI and social media for yourself and for your clients?
Viveka von Rosen: Oh, I love that question! The first thing, what metrics are you measuring? First of all, is the investment a monetary or time investment? On social media it’s probably going to be one or both. The other ROI I like to focus on is return on influence and I really think that’s what you’re talking about when you’re talking social media. How are you using social media to build the influence that will turn into more clients and customers?
Most people I talk to have no idea how many followers they have on their company page? How many new invitations they get per week on average? How many people are looking at their profile on average? And some of that’s easy to find, it’s on the home page or in your network statistics, some of it takes a little bit more digging, but you got to have those baselines so you know if you’re growing or not.
Related: LinkedIn webinar to teach you exactly how to optimize your profile and attract your ideal clients! Click here to register now.
Viveka summed up 12 great questions to ask when determining ROI with LinkedIn:
- Are you getting business from LinkedIn?
- What metrics are you using?
- What baselines do you have to substantiate your ROI?
- Are you getting business directly or indirectly?
- Are you keeping notes regularly about where you leads are coming from?
- Do you keep track of how many connections you have?
- How visible are you?
- Do you check weekly or monthly to see if you still show up on the first page on LinkedIn under your keywords?
- Are you getting any business through groups?
- Do you regularly check up and post in your groups?
- When discussing return on financial investment, are you doing LinkedIn ads?
- Are people even looking at your key words?
These are all great questions to ask and things to start measuring if you really want to use LinkedIn as the powerful tool it is to grow your business. The key is taking the time to really educate yourself on how to use LinkedIn as a business building tool.
Big thanks goes out to Viveka von Rosen for taking the time to chat with me! If you have any questions for Viveka or myself, leave a message in the comments below.
To ensure that you get the most out of your LinkedIn profile and take actionable steps to complete it properly, I have a special LinkedIn training webinar that you can attend to learn more.
