LinkedIn’s Untapped Branding Potential | Sam Swirsky

Ann Kraus: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I'm Ann Kraus. Our guest today is Sam Swirsky. He is a brand strategist and runs the brand strategy for LinkedIn and Facebook at Acquisition.com, which is a portfolio company that helps entrepreneurs grow and scale their business. A native born Texan, Sam now lives and works in Las Vegas. He is obsessed with the game of pickleball and plays it two to four times a week. His best advice for building a personal brand, just get started, make 100 pieces of content and then reevaluate From there, your audience will tell you what resonates with them. Sam, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Sam Swirsky: Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here. This is one of the best, most professional productions I think I've gotten to be a part of as a podcast guest. Ann Kraus: Great. I'm so happy to hear that. Thank you so much for saying that. And let's talk about LinkedIn. Let's talk about why is LinkedIn important for brand building? Sam Swirsky: Yeah, absolutely. LinkedIn is kind of overlooked by a lot of people, right? It's not as popular as maybe Facebook or YouTube or a lot of other brand building platforms. But what people don't realize about LinkedIn is that for B2B, there's none better than LinkedIn. The average social media user on LinkedIn makes about 277% more than the average social media user on another platform. So there's a lot of movers and shakers on the platform, a lot going on, and it's just kind of overlooked. So if people get on LinkedIn, they have a huge advantage compared to people that are only using certain platforms. Ann Kraus: And do the rules of personal branding, do they also apply to businesses and agencies as a whole? Sam Swirsky: Yeah, I would say so. My two favorite people... or favorite people in the space, the Hormozi's, Justin Welsh. Both of them have the attitude of give, give, give, right? Justin might say, "Give, give, give," then ask. But then the Hormozi's say, "Just give, give, give," until your audience ask. But it's all kind of the same general idea. I think that's probably the main thing that people kind of miss out on is you've got two types of people on LinkedIn. You've got people that are either only asking, they're only making posts that are asking, "Hey, give me your business," or they're only giving value and they never ask because they're afraid of the reaction of your audience. But there's a really good middle ground. So I think it applies in pretty much all circumstances to pretty much anyone. Ann Kraus: And one of the things that I was wondering when I was thinking about our chat today is how can agencies or other businesses use LinkedIn or how can they actually inform their employees to use LinkedIn, their personal branding, that will actually impact the entire company? Sam Swirsky: Sure. That's a great question. So for a long time, companies have been very against employees having... oftentimes not all companies, but employees having their own personal brand because they feel like it detracts from the business or if they're on LinkedIn and they're building a brand, it means they want another job, which anyone who spends a decent amount of time on LinkedIn knows that it's not all just about the job search there. But Mark Williams has a great podcast called LinkedIn Formed, and on that podcast, he states that what he's seen is that more businesses are coming to him and saying, "Well, how can I help my employees build their brand and thus improve the visibility of the business?" And that's something that wasn't really discussed before. It was something that was definitely shied away from. So I think definitely people connect with people, and so if you're wanting to build your brand on any social media platform, it's probably going to be best done by using the individual profiles of the people who work at the company. Ann Kraus: Okay, interesting. So that it's not just necessarily that the agency's scared that they're out there looking for another job or putting themselves out there anymore. Sam Swirsky: Right. I think it's changing. I mean, it's still very much there, but at the end of the day, nobody owns an individual brand. So a company could say, "Hey, you can't build content," but they're really just doing themselves a disservice because if your employee is a fan of the company, like when I work for a company, I'm a super fan. I'm kind of old school. Back in the day when you worked for a company, you told your friends, you bought their products, you advertised them. You were proud to work for that company. That's definitely how I feel when I'm working for a company like Acquisition.com. And I think there's a lot of other people who feel the same way out there. And if the companies would encourage them to promote the company, they would see a lot of good returns on that investment. Ann Kraus: You mentioned in the opening bio, put a hundred pieces of content out there. That's a lot, that's a lot of content. Where do you suggest that, even if it's just Ann or anybody, where do you suggest that I gather 100 pieces of content? Sam Swirsky: Yeah, that's a good question. I think, so when I started on LinkedIn, I had put out a post that it was an article that analyzed the beginnings of a lot of different creators on LinkedIn. I put a lot of legwork into it, and in my mind it blew up at the time. Looking back, it wasn't really a viral post, but it kind of got me started really actively on the platform. And from that I decided, I was like, "Well, if I'm going to be here, one viral post isn't just going to make me," so I committed, I posted for 550 days straight on LinkedIn, which is not typical. And I think I don't even really recommend that. It's going to be difficult for people to find a hundred pieces of content that they can make if they're not totally passionate about the subject. Because I think what we often do is we say, "Okay, well, I would love doing this, or for my agency, this is the main thing we do," but I don't think enough people are going to be interested in that, so I'm not going to focus on this for content. Instead, they focus on something that maybe they're not as passionate about or their company isn't as passionate about, and they do that and they burn out. And so if you can spend all day long talking about a certain topic, that's the topic to focus on. One of the easier ways to do it is via long form video. So that's a technique that some agencies on LinkedIn will use when they're ghostwriting for clients is they'll say, "Okay, let's meet for an hour a month and do basically a podcast type interview," then they'll go and they'll cut that up and make it into different posts on LinkedIn. But even for Acquisition.com, I'm able to do it right, a lot of the content that I'm able to. Now, most of it is just repurposing. I'm not speaking for Alex and Layla, but I'm finding the content that they've already done in video and just transcribing it into a written word post. But once you have long form video or you make shorts, there's plenty of tutorials online where you can take one long form piece of content and make 20, 30, 40, 50 pieces of content from that one piece of content. So that's probably, if somebody really wants to get involved, if they're like, "Okay, I want to get on social media, I want to be on different platforms, and I want to have several posts a week," there's probably no easier way to do it than that. Ann Kraus: That's great advice. And I think that it's also very good advice to show that the company has to back the employee, that the company or the agency or the business, whatever it is that they need to help provide some of the employees with some of this content. Sam Swirsky: Absolutely. Yeah. If you have a company, a lot of your employees are super fans and they're going to post some stuff that maybe talks about their own individual knowledge, but they're going to want to post about the company as well, and there's definitely a synergy that can happen between the employee and the employer for that. Ann Kraus: That's great. Sam, thank you so much for this information. And you've already mentioned a podcast, so I do want to ask again though, is there a podcast or a book or anything that you recommend that's been instrumental in your success? Sam Swirsky: I definitely recommend The Operating System by Justin Welsh. Hugely valuable for anyone getting started on LinkedIn. Also, $100 Million Offers by Alex Hormozi. That was his first book in the series. He has $100 Million Leads now, but start with Offers. It's where you need to start. Ann Kraus: Awesome. And this seems like a silly question to ask since we've been talking about LinkedIn, but what is the best way for viewers to learn more about you? Sam Swirsky: Yeah, definitely my LinkedIn profile. It's not a silly question, but that's the best place. Go to my LinkedIn profile. I have a resource called the Great LinkedIn Resource Guide where I've put together about 240 different resources for anyone who's wanting to get started on LinkedIn. Took me a while to compile it, but it's definitely worth it. But I'll give access to anyone who reaches out for it. Ann Kraus: Awesome. Great. Sam, thank you so much for being my guest. Sam Swirsky: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure being here. Ann Kraus: And thank you all for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buy-in and workflow solutions. For more information, visit simply.fi. I'm Ann Kraus. Thank you so much for joining us, and I look forward to seeing you next time.