ModumUp - Social Selling for B2B (ENG)

ModumUp’s Marketing Director, Ekaterina Altbregina, shared insights about LinkedIn limits and some tips on what to do if you get blocked.

🔸First, let’s talk about connection request limits. LinkedIn allows you to send about 200 connection requests per week. If you are just starting to develop your profile, we recommend not sending more than 80-100 connection requests each week for the first two weeks. Once you have regular profile activities, you can increase this number to 220 requests.

With the help of automation tools, you can increase the number of connection requests sent per week to 1000. But you need to tread softly and not send all 1000 requests simultaneously, but spend a couple of days sending them sporadically. Otherwise, there’s a risk of getting shadowbanned.

🔸Secondly, there is also a limit on the number of messages sent per day. It’s better not to send more than 50 messages a day with the same text. And we suggest not doing it too quickly, otherwise LinkedIn will decide that you are using automation and will block your profile.

The same goes for endorsing skills and leaving likes for posts: try not to do this back to back, otherwise LinkedIn will see that you’re opening profiles too often and performing typical actions every time; they’ll then restrict actions in the profile.

❓What do you do if your profile is being restricted and requests passport verification?

One of the obvious actions is that you need to send a scan of your passport; it’s important that your name in the profile matches the name on your passport. Otherwise, LinkedIn may not restore access to your profile.

After that, you’ll receive an automatic notification by email that the application has been accepted for consideration. And after 3 days, you’ll get an email with questions about what activity you have done in your profile. You answer the email and you’re warned about which actions can no longer be performed and the profile is restored.

This is how profile recovery goes in normal situations, but sometimes it happens that you send a scan of your passport, but there ’s no response from the LinkedIn support team. What should you do then?

1. Write an email with the subject "Profile blocked" + upload the passport scan again
https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/ask/sdsupport

2. Write an email, using the link for requests about profile hacking. The support team responds faster to such messages
https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/ask/TS-RHA

3. Write a post in your Twitter profile and tag the LinkedIn team with a brief description of your problem. They respond very quickly, because such companies always take great care of the brand image and promptly respond to public inquiries.

That’s all we’d like to tell you about the limits on LinkedIn and what to do if you are still limited. Take care and wish you successful work on LinkedIn 🙂

#linkedintips

Hello everyone!

Today we’d like to announce our first video on YouTube. We’re all a little nervous, so we hope you’ll support us 😃

ModumUp’s International Projects Director Sofia Lopatkina talked about the Social Selling Index (SSI) - an indicator of your activity on LinkedIn.

Click on the link and find out what sections it consists of, what you should take into account in each of those sections and how you can boost your SSI in general:

https://youtu.be/VUbYpG57BvQ

#linkedintips

We’re proud to announce our next case study with the international fintech company EXANTE. The Social Selling agency ModumUp helped generate B2B leads through personal employee profiles on LinkedIn.

We’ve established a mentoring group for EXANTE employees including Country Business Development Directors, Heads of Regional Sales, and Senior Account Managers from different countries: the UK, the USA, Greece, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Italy, and Singapore.

All the training and support processes were dedicated to the Social Selling approach - the building and developing of personal brands on LinkedIn to generate potential B2B leads among clients and partners.

We conducted two corporate mentoring groups with 20 participants in total. Thanks to this course, the EXANTE team had active conversations and calls with leading banks, brokers and other financial institutions from many countries.

Follow the link to read the full case study: https://modumup.com/case-studies/exante

#modumup_casestudy

ModumUp’s International Projects Director, Sofia Lopatkina, shared her insights about using LinkedIn notifications for follow-ups.

There are many creative ways to refresh the conversation with a target audience. This is especially relevant to those that don’t respond to your messages or disappear at some stage of the conversation.

🤔But how often do you check your “Notifications” section? Have you ever seen LinkedIn notes such as “Congratulate John on starting an additional position as Chairman at Burger King”, “Congratulate Maria on five years at Tesla”, or “Wish Alex a happy birthday”?

If you’ve tried to reach out to your prospects several times but failed to get a response, and suddenly you see they’re in your Notification section with some announcements, be sure to send a message and congratulate them on their happenings. It’s quite difficult to ignore someone and not answer with at least a “Thanks!”. It’s a chance to renew your conversation with a prospect.

#linkedintips

Today we’d like to share our case study on how we generated B2B leads for Microsoft Azure cloud services by using the Social Selling method.

We worked with 1C, a distributor of Microsoft solutions. We began our collaboration with Natalia Mikhaleva, the Director of distribution for marketing and business development. 1C sells Microsoft products through a partner network, and the client realized the partner channel was a limited resource since most partners don't organize any marketing activities.

Therefore, the company decided to attract customers on its own and transferred leads to the partners via a new method – Social Selling.

Here are some different activities we used:

🔹Posts. We published posts on Natalia’s page and within industry groups.

🔹Comments. We regularly commented on her connections’ posts and publications within groups and replied to target audience comments. It grabs the attention of potential leads and increases a post's reach.

🔹Private messages. We transitioned to direct communication gradually without spamming.

We used exclusive content and short offer approaches among lead generation mechanics.

For example, the first approach is about offering some interesting materials (research, checklists, instructions, etc.) within a post. Then we distribute content in private messages to all who’ve shown interest and reacted to a specific post. Next, we send something extra, e.g. cases on the topic, additional useful materials, etc. In the final stage, we offer more detailed communication and arrange a phone call or meeting to discuss options for cooperation.

Together with Natalia we created a proposal post to share Microsoft's materials on digital transformation, and we received 88 reactions. Among them, there were 48 respondents to the next step, just above 50%. As a result, we received 11 leads, with whom we managed to organize a call or a meeting. Natalia and her colleagues talked to everyone about transitioning to Azure.

🔍If you’d like to know more about our results with the short offer approach and target audience features, follow the link: https://modumup.com/case-studies/1c

#modumup_casestudy

ModumUp’s founder Olga Bondareva gave an interview to a US media outlet Starter Story, where she talked about her passion for social media that led her to build a $1M per year business.

Olga shared her backstory and experience at Microsoft as the Head of SMM and special projects for Central and Eastern Europe. At that time, she learned about Employee Advocacy and Social Selling.

In the article, Olga explained how she started her own business, what the initial process looked like, and how she got her first clients and began establishing the company.

For example, she said ​​that her brand and personal social media pages had worked the best because she wrote a lot about her work and described the methodology of Social Selling.

Olga also shared her recommendations of tools, films and series she found interesting and could help with business development.

If you’d like to read the general story of ModumUp’s development, follow the link: https://www.starterstory.com/stories/modumup

LinkedIn hashtags: why and how it’s better to use them

Unlike Facebook, hashtags work effectively on LinkedIn and can be used in two ways:

- to promote posts
- to find the target audience

🚀Post promotion on LinkedIn

We usually use 3-5 thematic hashtags with 5000 to 500000 followers for each post.

Why do we recommend using no more than 5 hashtags?

So that we don’t fall into the shadow ban, which can be expressed in different ways: for example, you publish a post, but it doesn’t appear on your page, or it isn’t shown in your connections' feed.

❓How do you choose interesting hashtags for your target audience?

In general, we base our content strategy on the fact that your posts should answer questions from your target audience - they must be useful and talk about your product. Therefore, it’s quite convenient when you publish a post, and LinkedIn automatically offers you hashtag options with keywords from your post. But there’s a nuance here; you don't know how many subscribers these hashtags have. Therefore, it’s better to select them manually. You can check the number of followers directly on LinkedIn.

We try not to use hashtags with more than 500,000 followers, so our post doesn’t get lost in too many other publications with the same hashtag.

🚀Find your target audience

There are two ways to search for a target audience using hashtags:

- search by hashtags with the name of target companies or industries.

But in this case, you need to be prepared that you’ll most likely find product posts of your target audience or publications about random news from target companies. There usually isn’t so much useful content here, and there’s not much to comment on.

- search for competitor influencers' posts and see your active target audience in the comments below. This approach takes more time, but you can gather a profile audience that’s ready to respond to your content.

This way, you can quickly develop your LinkedIn profile and become an industry expert if that’s your motivation.

#linkedintips #hashtags #linkedinhashtags

ModumUp’s Marketing Director, @keti_alt, shared the template we use to analyze hypotheses’ effectiveness during LinkedIn lead generation.

How we calculate the metrics:

Connection Rate: (the number of accepted connection requests/total number of connection requests) * 100%

If the Connection Rate is higher than 45%, it means your profile inspires trust.

But we also noticed that the benchmark for this metric depends on the market:

🔷 In the LATAM region, 60%
🔷 In MENA, SEA, and Europe, 40%
🔷 In the USA, Canada, and Australia, 20-25%

Response Rate: (the amount of answers/number of sent messages) * 100%

This metric highly depends on a solid business proposal, but our benchmark here is 25%. If it’s higher, that’s great!

Conversion Rate: (the number of leads/amount of answers) * 100%

Our benchmark for this metric is 15-25%.

🚀🚀🚀 BONUS TIP

If you enter a new market and see that your lead generation on LinkedIn isn’t successful, take a step back and do some customer development. Get feedback from potential clients and industry-leading experts. Write them a private message on LinkedIn and ask for a call. Have confidence that you will find people who will be ready to help you.

You’ll have successful lead generation once you’ve collected enough information about the market and understand what kind of business proposal your potential clients are looking for.

#linkedintips #linkedinmetrics

Social Selling to an audience of IT executives. The NetApp case study

In our case study, we’d like to share NetApp, a hybrid cloud data services and data management company. We'll talk about how we helped a NetApp representative communicate with IT executives from target companies on social media by inviting them to the offline event. 

As a result, we helped our client connect with 473 IT professionals on social media. Two hundred and ten people regularly interacted with the content about the conference. It must be said that active communication with the target audience also continued after the event - the client sent follow ups with valuable insights, answered questions, etc.

To know more what we did before, during and after the even please follow the link: https://modumup.com/case-studies/netapp

#modumup_casestudy

How to grow the target audience quickly on LinkedIn from scratch 

Ekaterina Altbregina @keti_alt from ModumUp shared several tips that help you with audience growth:

1. Get your free trial month of LinkedIn Sales Navigator

2. Use Sales Navigator’s filters to find your target audience: 

- company size
- job titles or functions
- industries
- locations

3. Use additional Sales Navigator filters:

- choose 2nd-degree connections 
- a very helpful filter "Activities and shared experiences" --> "Posted on LinkedIn within 30 days". So you can find active Linkedin users who are more open to communicating on LinkedIn

4. After that, add LinkedIn group members in which you are the participant as well. People prefer to add users with something in common, even if you’re in 3rd-degree connections. In that case, there are more chances they will accept your connection requests

🔥🔥🔥BONUS TIPS*

1. Add a message to your connection requests only if you want to add an influencer –  these people put in a lot of effort to develop their profile, and they wouldn’t add people without a reason. In other cases, there’s no need to add a message to your connection request.

It can increase your Connection Rate only if you know the local language of your target audience, and it can help you become closer to your potential customers and partners

2. Use LinkedIn outreach automation tools to get your target audience email lists and upload these contact files to your LinkedIn profile: «My Network» --> «Contacts» --> «Add more contacts» --> «Upload a file».

It will help you add not just 200 representatives of your target audience in a week, but 1000. 

#linkedintips #audiencegrowth #salesnavigator

How CDEK Enters New Markets Via Social Media

We’d like to share a case study on our collaboration with CDEK Global, an international logistics company, over the past year and a half. 

We had two goals - attract potential CDEK franchises from various countries and provide provisions for cross-border supply chains.

Over the last 16 months we have the following results for attracting new franchisees via Social Selling:

🚀We collected a base of 1,977 entrepreneurs from Western Europe, in which 1,790 people engaged with our client's posts regularly.

🚀We generated 55 leads who the client qualified as the target audience after they had the first meeting.

🚀The client closed 2 deals for more than 200,000 euros.

🚀BONUS profit*: We attracted 2 potential job candidates and 2 contractors.

You can find more details about this project (the Social Selling scripts, several lead generation approaches, results of our second business goal, etc.) here: https://lnkd.in/emkAQkdY

#modumup_casestudy

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