LinkedIn Marketing

hey everyone it feels a bit weird talking to um talking to myself i guess but let me share my screen and uh and we'll get going with it so my name's chris i'm the founder and director of big esports uh australian company startup functioning for around two years just over two years now um and for me my experience comes really heavily from the gaming and esports industry so i've spent over a

decade in this space as a whole and done a little bit of everything trying to find my right place i've done a combined six years in para marketing for two different technology companies who've produced computer equipment one of which was corsair whose headset i'm wearing at the moment another one was a taiwanese brand called thermaltake and for both of these companies i was either their first marketing employee or their first employee

in the country full stop which is a great opportunity i've been a semi-professional top level player in multiple different esports and gaming titles was a commentator for a period of time i helped to manage one of australia's first ever professional gamers who's now a famous commentator and and content creator um i have run a 30 000 tournament as far back as 2010 which was quite big for those times and done a

little bit of everything else in the mix too so been keeping quite busy in this space but i left to create my own company uh in 2018 called business and games and reformed as big esports and we're in partnership with australia's largest app and games development studio called playside studios they have about 70 staff based out of melbourne here which i'm based out of as well in australia and with us personally

most of our work is international so we do do some work with a few technology companies here in australia but primarily for example right now we're doing some consultancy projects with some parties in spain in the us and another one in saudi arabia and we do a lot of influencer advertising work globally as well while we're working towards helping new companies launch themselves into the gaming market so let me just share

my screen i'll open up my presentation and also i'll just try to bring up the discord as well to see if there's any questions that might want to come through while i'm talking i'll have that up on my on my second screen there too so obviously originally this talk was going to be about tiktok um and it changed to not be a back tick tock and here's here's the reason really so

you might have seen in the news india band tiktok and a whole bunch of other apps that come out of china they banned a few large games and and something like 70 plus different apps as a whole some people are saying that could be down to the tensions between india and china i'm not a political anything so don't ask me on that but also some of the other data that's come out

um is around you know the united states military asking their constituents not to use tick tock in the past there's been some discussion about that in australia but also there's been this if you spend any time on twitter you've probably seen people talking about tick tock band within twitter as well and some of the things surrounding that so you know being someone who browses reddit a little bit like i'm sure some

of the people watching here do um you know i've come across an interesting post that talks about um some of the security concerns that that um have arise when it turns uh when it when it comes to tick tock so this is just a screenshot of a post that i made which hopefully helps to run things down fairly easily for you but for me as someone who hasn't really taken my data

i guess too seriously in the past someone who tries to keep my private life and professional life a little bit separate you know linkedin being my main platform but understanding what different companies track of me and being a millennial myself usually we're just kind of hey things attract who cares but this one was was a little concerning for me so it you know as the post that you can see on the

screen here so basically it says you know are using tick tock did you know that tick tock tracks your phone number your location all of your installed apps and previously deleted ones all of your network information which includes everything about your home wireless network or school or work depending on where you are and all of your phone hardware information as well so the imei which is a hard-coded number inside your phone

your cpu speed your ram um how much how much you have installed you know et cetera et cetera and quite a lot on there too there was also one version of the app on android i believe which could actually download a zip file unzip it and then install slash run a bat file and you know to explain for those of you who might be so much tech inclined that's essentially how virus

works a lot of the time you might go to a website it'll download something it'll unpack it and it'll install it for you so it gives them the ability to do that there was also some versions of the app that would track your location every 30 seconds whether you had the app open or not that's been since removed and one of the other concerns is that 30 of their data is stored

on a server in china um and as um i believe it was alibaba servers and as part of that alibaba's end user license agreement they say they can do whatever they want with any of the data that's on them that's on their servers whenever they want sell it to whoever they want use it for whatever purposes they wish also they had some major security breaches recently where they had almost one terabyte

of data was stolen um so this report was was developed by penetram um which is a penetration testing company um there's been a few others that have that have backed up off there and funnily enough the penitent report was taken down on their website but somebody saved it all into a google document um so i've you know used that link a few different times i think it being an interesting shift because

you know people are looking for the new thing they're not just going to say hey all right that's it tick tock's dead i'm just never going to use my phone again um so a lot of people are going towards bite bite is uh one of the founders is one of the co-founders of vine which is you know the five-second uh video kind of platform five to 15 seconds bite has become the

new thing as well if you scroll through bite like i have been you know as even yesterday there's a lot of people coming over from tick tock a lot of people from what they call alt tick tock which is like alternative tick tock they seem to be um a lot of younger gen z's that don't necessarily like what the content on tick tock was in the past and they're using this as

an opportunity to disparage what tick-tock was and what it is etc but yeah it's an interesting case study but that's the that's the long-form explanation to the short question which is chris why aren't you talking about tic toc anymore so it's no longer a tick tock talk um so going on to the next slide if it let me skip so what i want to talk today about is is linkedin and i'm

just going to bring up some of my notes here as well on the side because there's obviously some q a so i want to make sure that i um cover everything that's going to be asked in the questions in the discord to make sure that it's all good so what what linkedin is is to me is my main revenue driver for my business so my business partners i met them through linkedin

my first two clients i ever signed over 5000 us for of revenue they are both um or were both from linkedin um we receive you know 70 to 80 plus of our of our new business purely through linkedin leads and inbound generation um and this is done you know through my profile primarily not through a business profile this is done through sharing of information it's done through connecting with the right people

and it's done through i guess a genuine want and and need to help people understand more about the industry keep up to date with things and do as little as possible engagement baiting um which is something that i'll get into a little bit i'll also be talking a little bit about metrics that are standard to track on your profile obviously there's not one right answer i'll be talking about what sort of

content are you aiming to share how you share it talk about my posting philosophy talk about target adding and how to connect with new people and talk about engagement baiting which i mentioned as well so the real general theme for a lot of this talk is i'll be talking about using linkedin in my opinion in the right way generating content influence connections and actual business we've all seen people complain about linkedin

uh we've all seen people complain about facebook facebook's full of boomers it's too political everybody hates or loves trump etc we've seen people complaining about twitter all twitter is about is cancer culture and people hating each other and spewing hatred back and forth and arguing in short film and you know looking at clips and videos we've seen a lot of people hating on instagram you know all instagram is there's booty pictures

and people trying to sell fake tummy teas and and products and things that don't make any sense right so one of the common platforms to hate on at the moment is linkedin um and and obviously tick tock as well um sans the security issues you know tic toc is full of just dumb kids doing stupid dances so these these are things that you see on everything so i experienced this a lot

um from watching people from the outside even in my industry criticizing linkedin because my industry is quite new there are people who try to take advantage of that they try to share fake information try to make themselves look like an expert without actually knowing anything and try to get leads through disingenuous means or just get likes for their own self-gratification and fulfillment but what i really want to talk about today is

how i've actually been able to use linkedin where i never planned to to actually be a major revenue driver for my business making a whole lot of fantastic connections and really being much of the reason as to where i am today the same way you would you know pay and spend time on google ads or facebook ads or something else like that you can spend a bit of time on linkedin to

actually generate something for you the same reason why you could uh or same example that you could spend a lot of time just scrolling through instagram liking all of chris hemsworth pictures because it's a good looking guy you could also create your own makeup blog on there and try to make some money from um you know jeffree star cosmetics or someone like that shooting you through some free products and some cash

for showing off exactly what they do um so just a quick overview here this is my profile feel free to add me my linkedin url is smithy mayo which is my last game with a y miles name with a wire plus my gamer name and you can see basically what my profile is you know linkedin tells you to set up your profile i would suggest doing that but to be honest i

barely ever click on anyone's profile unless it is to click on it and then see what where they're working where they've previously worked at before and maybe look at their posts but hey if you want to write a cool tag line you can do that as well as you can see here i've written esports gaming and influencer business just because i like to keep it easy and straightforward for me personally i

don't enjoy it too much when people say like you know helping people make the best you know opportunities every day that could possibly ever be had or something that's a terrible example but you know i try to stay away from things like that and sometimes i like to stay away from you know digital marketer at kazoo.com because you know if i'm from the outside and someone's adding me i don't know what

kazoo.com is and i don't necessarily want to have to go there to find that out just because they've added me and i'll get into a little bit of that later as well and then like a like i started to explain as well is a bit about the why so you know why you're on linkedin asking why you're there so you know linkedin isn't um enjoyment for a lot of people it isn't

a place to go and just hang out and chill out and be yourself um you know maybe there is a bit of facade because you know a lot of time there is in business you can't um be exactly the same as you would be you know with your mates on a friday night drinking some beers or some wines as you could be you know at work on a on a tuesday morning

when you're crunch time you're trying to get some projects finished so just asking yourself that why one thing that i've got here is the linkedin ssi and you can google just linkedin ssi and it'll come up for you straight away which is a social selling index and this is one thing that some people use to track how they're going on linkedin and whether they're doing the right things mainly this is around

if you're wanting to make sales and you're doing a lot of outbounds you know we don't do that ourselves too much here most of my inquiries are inbounds coming in to me but you know it might help to give you a little bit of an idea as to what you do and and you know compare yourself to some other people all right next slide and if anyone wants to ask any questions

in discord um or wherever else they may be able to ask questions i'm perfectly happy to answer them as i go because i'm quite used to i used to have a lot of feedback from people so number one engagement baiting so engagement baiting is what you could see on the left here it became a huge thing in facebook for a long time right it's you know 300 likes and the doctor will

save the kid and that was probably the first one and then you saw a lot of click baiting you know you saw facebook crackdown at articles that was like you know seven things that will shock you about miley cyrus's previous hairstyles you know number five is insane um clicking through to something like that what you see on linkedin is is and this is something i've talked about in a lot of content

before that i always tussle with inside my inside my own head people love to get likes right like if you see someone with 400 000 instagram followers and you've got 100 000 you go man i really wish i had 400 000 instagram followers it'd be so much easier my life would be awesome i'd have so many more people that could give me money or consume my content or something like that but

we all know that followers aren't equal the same way that you know if you wanted to um you know advertise your bmw to some people and you started spending money really cheap activation money on 13 year olds in the philippines yes sure you might get 50 000 views on your post but there is no chance in hell you're going to sell that bmw because they're not the right people to reach out

to so this is what we see on on linkedin there's a hilarious twitter profile called the state of linkedin who share a lot of things like this and i'm pretty sure i took this picture from their twitter and they share a lot of ones like this if people just um making up stories you know there's very common some people will post on their feel fake feel good stories about hey i came

into the office and i was about to fire this lady but then she looked really upset and then it found out that her son died this morning but she came to work anywhere and i gave her a 100 000 raise and now my business makes a billion dollars a year and just stupid things like that people posting you know their six bmws uh in the background saying you know or hey here's

a candid shot of me working late in the office but they're holding up their ferrari keys next to their head when they don't need to be i mean one look at ivanka trump's recent advertising on twitter and instagram you'll see the similar kind of themes there where she's holding up a can of beans and says this can of beans is good essentially like it doesn't it's not natural in any way whatsoever

um so you can see like this engagement baiting post so essentially what engagement baiting is a lot of the time is um you know uh making shallow posts in order to bait people into engaging without providing a proper call to action or takeaway learning so looking on the right hand side you know this is this is my post philosophy for linkedin for example this is a post that i made um six

days ago now because i made this presentation yesterday it's got some good engagements um some good comments and a wide variety of people engaging with that post so looking at the text at the bottom what i'll do is i'll create a tagline so a heading you know sony has thrown 250 million into epic games which is fortnite's creator i'll provide some easy information so usually anywhere between three to six dot points

that boil down what an article would say in 20 paragraphs or so so making it really easy for people to understand what's going on so for here it's a strategic investment deal the deal is said to be expanded uh beyond just games and sony is launching its ps5 later this year usually what i'll do and not necessarily in this post because i'm not an expert in this field is to add some

extra information as well or extra knowledge that maybe they can't get from one article who can you know who who can uh don't doesn't want to spend the time to to learn these extra things and for me i'm positioning myself as an expert in my industry so a lot of the time i will put in some extra tidbits of information for me personally the way that i conduct myself online on linkedin

is i don't give my own opinion unless specifically asked or i'm doing content in long form which is say a podcast so i won't generally make a post like this and then say hey my name's chris i think epic games is great and sony it's great that they invested in this that's that's not my place unless someone asked me in the comments directly you know chris what do you think of this

investment then i will answer um but very rarely give my opinion that's just a personal thing for me and once again that's just me really understanding this is how i position my content in the space and it's worked for me but make sure you just stay true to yourself some people do a fantastic job of you know showing who they are behind the scenes and giving their own opinions on things and

and they get lots of business off that they get lots of followers off that they get genuine engagement off that but once again it's about staying true to who you are and it's not about one day trying to be a person who's very serious and suit and tire-wearing and only talks about you know specific investments and the next day you know you're once again talking about um miley cyrus's haircut um so

then what i'll do as well is i'll put in hashtags that are relevant to my space so hashtags are quite important in linkedin in a slightly different way than some of the other social platforms they'll actually hashtags will integrate into your feed so people can follow a certain hashtag so they can actually select to follow three four five six however many i follow i believe four personally hashtags and if you're scrolling

through your linkedin feed it'll actually start to feed you trending posts from those hashtags to you in your normal feed not from people that you will follow because generally in the past uh or present a lot of what linkedin will provide to you is people you directly follow say like what twitter used to be but now they're starting to integrate you know your friend commented on this post and then they might

share a secondary connection of yours once again very similar to twitter you know most of twitter these days seems to be what my friends and people i'm following are engaging on rather than people i'm following directly so for me the relevant ones are generally gaming gaming hashtag digital marketing hashtag influencer marketing if applicable um hashtag esports if you use a um if you use an app like hashtag expert which i've used

in the past for instagram uh you can also use that for linkedin if you really want to deep dive down into that um but i found it generally works pretty well and for me it does definitely bring me extra targeted attention um i try to make my hashtags very short i feel like it's telling if people use too many hashtags that don't really know what they're doing and they're really just trying

hard to get the views without actually getting specific views from the right people who are viewing their content but for me i've been lucky enough that i'll go trending in hashtag esports sometimes up to twice a week generally at least once a week and then once every few months i go training in digital marketing but once again you know this is about being very very specifically reaching only the people that you

want to reach throughout all that period of time so i'm hyper aware to not make engagement baiting posts i'm hyper aware not to um you know blow smoke up my butt a lot of the time as well obviously i'll make some feel good posts about some good things that are happening to us but i won't you know post about you know too many personal things and i'll mainly keep it work related

on here as much as possible then what i'll do is i'll post an image generally that image won't be one from the article might be another one that i'll pull through that's relevant to the content that's happening and then also i'll put a link in the comments and any sources in the comments whatsoever as well and then obviously i will reply to people um i've been trying something at the moment which

is liking every single person that comments um on my posts and i don't know if that works i'm still testing it out but hey if that's something you want to try you can as well so i have a question here in discord um is there a way to see how many people click on hashtags to see which ones are effective yes um usually um on platforms like you know instagram and linkedin

and if you're using something like hashtag expert it'll tell you not only how hashtag experts especially will tell you not only how many posts are made and the frequency of those posts in certain hashtags it will also tell you what the importance slash the benefit of using those certain hashtags are so they've got some deep dives into there that says you know people who use a hashtag gaming on average will receive

x amount of likes per post and things like that too but once again just be very specific with your hashtags because usually you know you'll see some people that do 20 30 hashtags and they'll do hashtag lol and then they'll do a hashtag you know i'm a cool gamer and all these kind of hashtags and sure you might get a like but what does that like actually mean it doesn't it doesn't

really mean anything at all it doesn't it doesn't help and it doesn't fulfill your need if you're wanting to create a platform to make direct sales which is once again exactly what i'm doing here and then obviously at the bottom quality over quantity you know that's the extreme important thing to me and hey look as i'm hoping on about this once again i'll say as i've said so much of my content

it's really hard not to make engagement baiting posts because sometimes you see other people and you go damn this person's the same industry as me they get like six times the amount of engagements that i do it really sucks i feel like i give quality like it's me me me it's my ego like i feel like i should be getting these but it's just not worth it because who cares if i

got 700 likes on on that post you know it doesn't it doesn't help me where that's whatsoever because out of those extra 600 people they're not people that i want to reach out to they're not people that are going to pay for my services they're not people that care about me and what i'm doing in my and my mission they're not people that are engaging in the comments and they're not people

that are engaging with others they're just just trash a lot of the time to be honest so the next topic here is um explaining uh understanding your metrics and sorry i have a question here as well um from raita which is why is the link in the comments and not in the post so as with most algorithms in my social medias it's a guess i have some friends who are big youtubers

who i would probably call conspiracy theorists as far as the youtube algorithm goes they get a little bit ridiculous sometimes but it's similar with linkedin there's no there's no you know post exactly like this and it's going to work there's no use exactly these hashtags or don't use these ones but one thing that happened when i was a journalist in 2014 to 2016 somewhere around that time was facebook tried to combat

click bait by um making every single post if you posted a link in your original post the post would bomb as far as uh viewership or um guarant what's the word i'm thinking of natural engagement that would come through organic organic engagement that would come through um so you know that was hard for us at the time because the company i worked for received most of their clicks through facebook and through

their following on facebook people would see the article about technology click on it and then and then read um so it was a little bit of a weird catch all net so you know in my days when i used to spend a lot of time on facebook doing marketing there which is not at all anymore so my data is very very old for that so please don't take any of this if

i'm saying it wrong i apologize in advance but you know for a long time on facebook it was videos are the absolute best if you want engagement then it goes down to say pictures then it goes down to a text post with an image then a text post and then a link right right down you know at the bottom in the in the basement in the dungeon and i seem to have

found through anecdotal evidence very similar in linkedin as well also in my opinion um the the stuff that comes up in the preview of the link is not as eye-catching as an image it doesn't feel as much of the screen it's not as vibrant as well as it has you know it'll it'll have the box around it it'll have extra text at the bottom that you didn't write that you can't control

all of these kind of things as well on linkedin so i find that generally works much better for me when i'm when i'm posting things um hopefully answer that hopefully answer that question where i can see some people typing probably calling me an idiot about saying some some things wrong um so understanding your metrics so these are the metrics that are working for me um and the ones that i am tracking

um once again i mean there's no bl end all you know we do a lot of influence marketing not on linkedin we do a lot of influencer marketing on instagram we know that you know engagement rate is important how many views per story is very important um and you know how many clicks they might get through in previous campaign performance not just how many followers someone has because man kim kardashian has

a lot of followers but she's popular but does she have fans does she have as many people who go to her profile every single day being like i really got to know what kim k's up to maybe not because when you download instagram it tells you to follow her right so she doesn't have that core hardcore audience we work a lot with youtubers it's not about subscribers on youtube it's about average

views per video we work a lot with twitch streamers it's not about how many followers they have it's about their paying subscribers and their concurrent viewership how many fans are coming back are paying to enjoy their their services as well as are watching them constantly those are the very important things so with linkedin for me there are a few metrics that i track the first one's the most vanity i think out

of all of them which is whose visual profile so for me here you can see a tracking of who's reviewed your profile over this period of time the reason i've had a massive jump recently is is i'm working with an investment bank who wants to uh put 10 million plus into a company uh that post you know got two 300 likes on it i've got you know 40 50 messages off the

back of that out of those i reckon about eight of them are proper leads um that are that are coming through so we're making some introductions we don't hold an australian financial securities license legally we can only make introductions uh so we can connect people together and they can invest if they feel like they they want to um but this is one thing that i track over time that we see here

and my profile views 100 correlate with the engagements on my posts so when i've got posts that are starting to get on average 60 70 80 90 engagements i see my profile views go up quite a lot too and usually what that means is someone sees my post and goes okay chris has given me some value or i want to learn a little bit more about this guy i'm going to click

on his profile i'm going to read through and that's a win that's a real win in my book because that's the first part through the funnel they're getting through they're seeing you in the algorithm and they're going okay i want to learn more about this person they might add me off the back of that they might follow me they might engage with me or at least if nothing else it's a win

because now they know who i am and they didn't know who i was before so this is one metric that that i track a bit and this is a metric that we also track on a board level with my company i actually report back to my board every um every quarter when we have our major board meetings and this is a metric that we track as part of that along with my

podcast downloads along with uh you know all that other kind of stuff too just a question uh from kirsty from zuckmelon as well am i using the new stories feature on linkedin i am i'm also using linkedin live for me stories has not done anything for me thus far the first few days i was getting 80 to 90 views per story every 24 hours now i'm getting like 20.

and as far as people actually engaging with those stories i've gotten one message out of about 30 stories i think i've posted so far probably not 30 actually probably like 15 to 20.

so i really haven't seen much advantage out of the stories thus far at all i haven't heard of examples of anyone else seeing much advantage out of it very similar to linkedin live it doesn't seem to have direct advantages but you've got to kind of make that up which is another another topic for another day uh because i don't want to i don't want to run too overtime so just checking my

watch here we're almost 30 minutes in um the other thing that i track a lot too is when you make a post you can actually click on the views so at the bottom of the post titles it'll say here you know 4917 views on your post i'll click on that and it'll actually tell you the kind of people that have viewed your post now i don't have any sort of linkedin premium

at the moment i had it for a year and a half i wish i canceled it much sooner for me it wasn't worth it for me whatsoever because i'm not making outbound sales i'm not a recruiter those are the two people that will generally use a linkedin thing i could see everybody who viewed my profile but it generally wasn't that important because there were people who were adding me anyway so i've

got access to those people so i don't need that and i've never needed inmail credits but that's once again i think where i am sitting my position in the industry and and where i've positioned myself is people reach out to me rather than me reaching out to them so once again not applicable for me maybe for you um so when you click on this these views of the posts in your feed

you can see here you know see here's a poster made on july the 12th they've got 36 reactions in 10 comments 3725 views this tells me that i'm reaching the right people so playwire is a influential up and coming startup who's raised some good capital in the esports and gaming space they have seven of their staff are reading this one specific post riot games is one of the biggest games publishers in

the world six of their staff have read this post sport five i don't know i've got to look them up corsair is one of the largest computer peripheral manufacturers in the world i used to work for them wearing their headset at the moment they're also reading my posts which means that they're still following what i'm doing you can also see here you know the types of people that are reading your posts

as well so for me with what i'm doing it's extremely important because i'm helping people enter into the esports industry and doing influencer campaigns that means i'm good for sales people sales people want to make more sales executive directors which means that i've got high profile people reading my posts which is fantastic because that's who my podcast is aiming at and they're the decision makers same with business strategists they're the people

that are looking at hey what industries should we expand into i think you should expand into esports once again marketing specialist so i'm reaching exactly the right kind of people if they said ux ui developer if they said social media manager if this said i don't know some other examples plumber you know i'm not reaching the right people at all so i can see here that yes i'm doing the right stuff

my content is reaching the right people and then also just for interest is you know what regions of people are seeing the posts so for me you know a lot of our work is international uh our podcast you know at start was 99 australia now we've got more listeners in uh california than we do from australia let alone you know other other parts of the us so this as well just helps

me to track some of that but this is highly relevant as to when you post as well you know i make most of my posts in the morning our time um around 8 9 to 10 a.m melbourne time which is you know at the moment 8 a.m melbourne time to 6 p.m est which is new york city so yeah i'll make those kind of posts too and then here i use as

well the amount of engagements and comments to track in the amount of engagements and comments is not something that we'd usually use to track on any other platform by any means for most people that would say you know just how many likes you get on a post is done but once again if you go back to my philosophy which is i am hyper hyper consistent with the types of content i post

that means the amount of people engaging with them are people who are engaging and saying like yes chris i got something out of this post so it means that i i believe personally that that's something i can track but i'm happy i'm really happy to be challenged on this and i'm really happy to be challenged to anything else if you think you can do stuff better or you know some more please

tell me because i'd like to as always i'd like to grow my linkedin so i'd love to learn that i'm wrong for sure um do you think linkedin needs to keep adding more features to keep up with the joneses do we really need stories on linkedin question inspired by bell scott and kelly hody oh yes linkedin is so lacking in features it's ridiculous i don't know the demographics of any of my

followers i can't advertise a personal account linkedin live you apply for it are you gonna get it i don't know people with four times the amount of followers of me still don't have linkedin live i have linkedin live but my business page does not have linkedin live why don't i when you ask them they say just hold on you might get it there are so many things with linkedin that they need

to improve i don't think stories are that applicable because stories are about following people so an influencer these days you know you can't be um you know like think about movie stars and the way that they do things you used to just follow a movie star um hugh jackman would rock up on your screen in one movie per year you know looking like a hunker's bunk up there and he would be

cool and he'd do a fantastic job and then he'd scatter off into his hollywood hills mansion wherever he lives and you wouldn't hear from him again unless it was some tmz beef now influencers are the opposite you know i've worked with some tick tock influencers in the past obviously not anymore who um will create three to four tick tock videos per day stream once or twice a day on tick tock do

instagram stories be on twitter make your instagram posts being on linkedin making youtube vlogs once per week because they just need people want constant interaction and contact with them but with linkedin at least for me people follow me to learn they don't want to know what i'm having for lunch they don't want to know what car i'm driving to work they don't want to know like you know specifics as to things

they want to know generalist information they want to be able to follow me to learn more so once again for me i don't think it works that well you know i've tried some posts on there but literally the only engagement i've gotten off a story thus far is a friend sending me a message about something that i posted so you know it hasn't been great for me but this definitely needs to

be more features for sure if i was so basically another question from kirstie is saying um you know i've said a few times that my content is mainly curated news and commentary rather than more opinionated um do you think being more opinionated would benefit or harm your personal brand i mean if that is your personal brand no you know i've got some friends who are very outspoken on various platforms on twitter

and and big youtubers and this kind of stuff and they make they make their living off of giving their opinion and i make my living off giving my opinion a lot when i'm doing consultancy when i'm doing a feasibility study at the moment for brands in saudi arabia telling them what parts of the business they want to launch as crap and what parts are good um but i feel like for me

there's a time and a place and you know unless i'm specifically asked you know i've given a lot of opinions in this talk for example but once again they're always ended with this is what works for me and this is what i've done and if you see success from this too you know you might if you're doing exactly what i do but stay true to yourself and stay true to what you're

doing um you know i tried for a little bit i talked about this in a linkedin live i did last night you know i tried posting about myself a little bit more for a while my views bombed massively so i'm not the pool here it's just my knowledge it's my brain that is um so another um point here is establishing the right connections and how to drive discussion so this is uh

target adding for example so target adding is adding specific people of interest in certain companies or industries to gain contact or influence so what i did for a while was i went okay i'm new to this linkedin game i want to grow in some certain areas esl is the biggest esports company in the world electronic sports league based out of germany they're owed by swedish publicly listed massive group called mtg so

what i did was i searched for them or in this case let's say s in a football club let's say that you want to let's say you have a company and you want to make some sales in the football realm so what you could do actually i'll use this example and what i did was a league teams started getting into esports so on one of my monitors over here i opened up

every single a-league team on this monitor over here i had linkedin open and i went okay who's number one on the ladder city wanderers let's say it's them plugged them in there and added everybody that was in marketing community management business development growth executives all right next team add the next kind of people and then as these people would accept me i'd reach out to them with a message i reach out

to them with something that is clear very concise that gives them a compliment that shows them i understand who they are that show it's not a copy paste and a call to action so hey let's say i added mark hey mark been a massive fan of essendon you know i've been have been an afl fan of you guys since i was in grade one i chose you because i moved to tasmania

i was forced to like it like an afl team and my favorite colors were red and black and you happen to win the premiership so congrats you've got me as a fan i'm reaching out to you because i would like to you know have a meeting with you i'm working with this company here's what i'm doing in the space you know if i could grab some of your time otherwise i'm happy

to shoot through an email if you're not the right person for me to be in contact with please let me know let's catch up there you go that's that's an example of a message it's very clear very concise the worst types of messages that you can send uh hey i'd like to do some work with you because it puts the onus on the person on the other side and that let's say

that that's everything you said it puts the onus on the person on the other side to actually go through and to understand who you are and what you're doing like they you're reaching out to them you have to make their life as easy as possible and you need to make a yes no decision a lot of the time the worst thing you can do as a startup or a company in my

experience personal experience is taking nine six to nine months to get to a no terrible it sucks it's horrible you just waste so much time and you feel really defeated and that's that's happened a lot to me in the past in business until i changed the way i was doing things and we'll get quick no's rather a quick no any day of the week usually i'd rather quick know than a nine

month yes because it's just ridiculous you become a stalker at that point um also what happens when you accept people so let's say mark um added me and i accepted him it would probably come up underneath saying hey maybe you should add these other people that mark knows like xavier campbell like what do you read like brenton humphries like tyler emerson so that that's kind of similar to what this says down

here too this has given me suggestions for people to follow so you know a lot of the time you might do that and that's how i met my partners actually playside studios i was told by linkedin hey you might want to connect with these with these guys and girls and went yeah sure whatever i will turned out well for me um here's some examples of different types of content that i do

so on the left here is content that isn't in dot points but in very similar form so a merchandise release by 100 thieves the most amount of emotion i've put into this is it's fantastic um you know it's called the no camping collection here's when it comes out exactly here's some extra information that you won't get from any general article that's been provided about this and this shows my knowledge in the

space hundred thieves for your knowledge is an esports team drake the rapper is an investor um scooter braun who is justin bieber's manager is an investor and they do really good limited edition merchandise capsule releases this is one that that comes out what's the date today comes out soon in about two and a half days time um so i posted about it once again with an image or this was a video

in this case you just can't see the the play button um and i posted some extra information on there about a lot of this stuff sitting on stockx i mean if you want to grab an og drop from these guys like a windbreaker i think it was released at 110 they're about 400 bucks on stockx usd at the moment so it could be an investment um the next one here so this

is a little bit personal it's a picture of me many moons ago hunched over like a nerd at a laptop um but it's it's a thought from the industry and i found these generally happen a lot so you know how sometimes you'll have those kind of shower thoughts about it imagine you're sitting there and you just go all of a sudden like hey why do people keep posting this on facebook you

know why do they why does every single agency post exactly like this why do they use this word at the start why do they all seem to use this color and then just make a post about that and generally what you'll find is a whole bunch of other people go damn i've been thinking about that too and then you'll actually drive some good discussion so what i did here was i talked

about how in my personal experience uh cash prize pools might have helped to undermine a lot of the tier 2 and tier 3 competitive leagues in esports um 15 year old kids don't want to compete in tournaments unless they have a chance to win a thousand bucks which is crazy because what kind of 15 year old kid who's playing in a volleyball or an afl tournament expects to win a chopper shop

not many at all um not many if any to quote a famous poet um but you know looking looking at that that was just a thought i had i posted it and hey that's this is probably the closest to a personal opinion but it's because it's experience that i've lived throughout this period of time you know i made sure to really explain and articulate my stance on that and then here's another

one as well so i do podcasts we break down a lot of podcasts into two to three but it's about to become six different snippets these snippets will become video not audio only because we do a linkedin live that turns into a podcast now we dual purpose doing that gary v effect you know create one piece of content and make 60 pieces out of it but this is what we'll do here

so i'll post these up quite well as well i haven't found necessarily on linkedin that videos have performed better than text posts that have performed better than text posts with images i haven't i haven't found anything like that but i believe through anecdotal evidence that linkedin posts with links will perform not as well as others so that's just my findings uh kind of kind of in that area as well so once

again just just posting quality as much as possible and all hail to the new king which is carousels so a carousel is essentially what we do internally is this is done in photoshop these are um six different images that are created in photoshop and then are stitched together as a pdf in exactly this order then the pdf is uploaded to linkedin and it comes as a sort of carousel like you would

see on instagram you know instagram you can post five images and then people can tap next next next next next to see through all the carousels this is like godly absolutely godly on linkedin for exposure for drawing um uh information about yourself out for gaining engagement for reaching out to new people and man for business leads like woof this has done so well for us so generally what these will be is

these will be um these will be um case studies a lot of the time announcements of things that are going up and things that are selfishly about us so there's an influencer marketing conference and expo happening right now um after today's over or this is over you should go take a look at it you can go to influencer marketing conference and expo.com i'm not paid to promote this by the way but

clinton sparks and i recorded a talk about this this is the carousel that we launched um to go out about that i went trending in hashtag esports because of this um clinton shedder and his instagram went quite well for those who don't know clinton sparks he's a dj and producer he worked on lady gaga's born this way album his songs feature people like pdd and macklemore um he is the vp of

business development of phase clan the biggest esports team in the world he brought interface clan offset the rapper yo gotti um ray j who you may who you may know from kim kardashian he convinced mark wahlberg's kids to play video games or convinced michael warburg to let his kids play video games because he didn't want him to et cetera et cetera so clinton and i did a talk together about the convergence

of gaming and culture and all that kind of stuff too but what we tried to do with these is we try to make every single bit of the carousel as punchy as possible so people will click through next next next next to read them all so you've got to bring people in with something cool travis scott did the skin in fortnight i think it looks pretty cool with the splash behind it

so we released that you know marshmallow the dj he did a thing in fortnite as well and then we try to make every single uh one of these carousels punchy you don't want any filler in these whatsoever because you want people to get to the sixth as much as possible and um yeah that's where that's where i'm going to leave it so i think um yeah thanks to the organizers for having

me and thanks to you all for for listening to me rant on today um i just got there in time which is fantastic if you want to connect with me on linkedin you can head to linkedin.com forward slash info smithy mayo or you can look up chris smith a white guy with the name chris smith it's very common might be hard to find me but my profile photo is is um here's

me with like a blue background if that helps if you're a visual person or you can find me on instagram i don't post much once again not my scene i'm too nerdy and not good looking enough smithy mayo or you can find me on twitter which is where the game is hanging out which is smithy mayo or big esports.gg so thanks everyone and i hope you enjoyed some of my you know

anecdotal and personal evidence in history posting on linkedin for me you know a lot of people love to talk a lot of crap about linkedin i think rightfully so but hey every platform's got a lot of crap on it so if you can be the type of person that cuts through the chaff yes you're not going to get 600 likes per post because you're going to be posting quality but hey you're

going to be getting leads off that which is important and obviously it doesn't happen straight away you know one thing i didn't talk about is linkedin for me started as a digital resume you had only the people who you've worked with you get them to endorse you you get them to write um endorsements about you as well then it turned into hey if i find an article that i find interesting i'm

just going to copy paste it into linkedin maybe someone else will find it interesting then it became hey chris let's spam out as many people as we can who are relevant and now it's become let's make let's create the best content we can that's possible and people will come to us instead of us going to them thanks everyone uh if there's any more q a questions i'm happy to happy to answer