5 Tips for Networking After a Conference

We’ve read many articles and posts with tips on maximizing our networking at or before an industry conference. But what do you do after a conference to follow-up with the people you just met?

Most people have two go-to moves: send an email or invite them to connect on LinkedIn. Here are five ideas that expand on those two moves that might make networking with you more appealing:

1. Connect on LinkedIn with a personalized note.
The personalized notes you add to LinkedIn invitations now look like LinkedIn Messages when received. Until recently, these notes were not as easily noticed. When users made the exodus to the LinkedIn mobile app, they didn’t see the notes at all. But now your recipient will receive an alert that he or she has a message making the customized notes are even more important.

2. Change the timing of your email
Everyone sends a follow-up email the Monday after a conference. Why not connect the same day? Show the person you met that they are still top of mind later in the day or evening. If you can’t send a note while at the show, how about waiting one week? If there’s a real connection there, it’s worth waiting.

Either way, avoid getting lost in all the Monday morning emails and fires.

3. Hand-written note
My new “old” favorite. Emails, texts, and LI messages are quick and easy. For the most important new connections, take the time to write a note by hand and mail it. Your new contact will love receiving real mail.

4. Phone call
Pick up the phone when possible! But, when they don’t answer, don’t leave a voicemail. This is when you should send the email. No one wants to wade through their voicemail to hear your message. No one.

5. Share on Social
Share your pics from the event, the organizers’ links to handouts, or other sharable content immediately after the show. Use the conference’s hashtag so more people find the posts. Other attendees will find this helpful!

Last week on Social Geek Radio, Deb Evans and I discussed this topic in connection with some recent franchise conferences we attended. Please listen here or download on iTunes!

Tips for Using LinkedIn Video

Many LinkedIn users can now post native video directly from the LinkedIn mobile app. Grab your phone and check it now. If the posting area now shows a video icon, then access has rolled out to you.

Like a Facebook Live video, it’s easy to fire up your camera and share a video instantly or share a video already saved in your camera roll. But unlike Facebook, these videos will have business-focused content…I HOPE…

You can post this video from your personal profile as a representative of your brand (or your personal brand) instead of your company page. This is a great feature; your personal profile is much more powerful than your company page. You probably have more connections than your company page has followers. Besides, who really follows company pages and engages with them? I’ll tell you who: people who want to sell the company something or get a job there!

LinkedIn will share with you the company names and titles of those who viewed your video. While this will be good to know, perhaps someday the viewer data will become targeting data. But for now, this video you’re about to upload will be seen be your connections and anyone else with whom they share it.

As you’re trying it out, here are a few tips to consider:

Sales folks: don’t use the video to only push your latest sales promotion. Tell a story! Tell stories about your customers, some best practices, industry issues, and anything that would make someone want to have a conversation with you.
Marketing pros: Again, tell a story, and leave out all corporate-speak about comprehensive global solutions and enterprise services yadda yadda yadda…
It can be ten minutes long, but don’t make it ten minutes long. Start with 30 seconds. When your 30 second videos are so good that your connections want more, increase to one minute.

Jobs on Facebook

Who is your company’s best recruiter? Who finds the most talented team members capable of adding to your growth and culture? It could be your HR director, sales manager, or operations chief. Or it could be Mark Zuckerberg.

Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!

Last month saw a nice improvement in US employment numbers. 235,000 new jobs were added and they appear to be higher-paying as well as more likely full-time and permanent compared to those added in recent months and years. Some are calling it the Trump Bump. Another month like this and we’ll call it a trend. When we get to 500,000+ jobs, we’ll call it a boom.

A boom is great. A boom is welcome. But a boom will mean that exceptional candidates will be harder to find for your brand, offices, stores, service centers, franchisees, and locations. How will you bring them in?

The answer, as with many things in business in 2017, is Facebook.

Facebook Jobs

The Facebook Jobs app is slowly rolling out to business pages. If your page has the functionality now, you’ll see the Jobs tab in the recently-cleaned up apps list on the lower left side of the desktop version of your page. Desktop users will see your page’s jobs tab also on the left. Mobile users may find it in the horizontal scrolling apps on the mobile version of your page. But most users will find your job posting not by going to page (because who does that anymore!?) but by hitting the Jobs section in the mobile app where they will see compiled jobs based on their location.

So far most of the jobs I am seeing when I look at my personal Facebook app are for bartenders and food truck operators. This is supposedly only based on geography, but perhaps Facebook is targeting based on my recent posts!

Posting Your Job

If you already have the jobs function, posting is simpler than any job post you’ve even created in your life. First click that Jobs tab on the left to get started. Then click on the green Create Job box.

This takes us to a very simple “Publish a Job Post” area. Calling this “a post” is very smart and enticing; it’s fast, easy, and everyone has created a Facebook post. Like any post, give it a headline, add a photo (or default to your cover photo), put in the basics on the job and you’re done. This is so easy and fun that I think employers will create more jobs just to post more. We’ll call that the Zuck Bump…

But What About LinkedIn?

The Jobs on Facebook section is so easy to use for employers and job seekers that some have questioned the future of LinkedIn. While I support the position that Facebook is steadily replacing everything online, I think there’s plenty of opportunity for LinkedIn users for a long time to come. Some jobs – perhaps those on the higher end of the economic scale – may never appear on Facebook. And if we hit the jobs boom, employers will need to find candidates in multiple places and channels.

Reaching Franchise Candidates on LinkedIn

More franchisors have asked me about using Social Media for franchise development in the past 6 weeks than in the previous 6 years.

At recent events including FranTech, Franchise Leadership and Development Conference, The Chicago Women’s Franchise Network, and Springboard, my conversations have focused on using Facebook for not only generating new leads from your consumer customer base, but also engaging with candidates further down your franchise development sales funnel using Facebook’s Custom Audience Targeting.

And often, the next question has been: “But what about LinkedIn?”

Franchisors at these events ask about improving their results in finding candidates on LinkedIn. Many tried LinkedIn early in their online marketing journey but got bad results and quickly moved on.

I suggest that LinkedIn may not be appropriate for engaging with some types of potential franchisees, just as Facebook or other channels may not work for other types of prospects.

Recommendation #1: Before jumping into any social media marketing for franchise development, look at who your candidates are and where they spend their time on social media.

The Facebook Side

If your best franchise candidates are those folks who will be operating their own store or other franchise location day-to-day, Facebook is the best place to engage. They may be customers of a current franchisee who could visualize themselves running their own shop. They have an interest – and hopefully a passion – for your brand’s type of service, work, food, or culture!

At our FLDC panel discussion, Wild Birds Unlimited exemplified this type of brand. Chief Development Officer Paul Pickett shared how individuals on Facebook can engage with a brand that shares their passion and then picture themselves as owning their own store. I would add that being a great storyteller and sharing appealing images and videos is key in developing these relationships! Facebook is the most important place to spend your development time as this is where such future owners are already spending their time.

The LinkedIn Side

If your best franchise candidates are looking for an investment or for their next franchise award, let’s look at LinkedIn. Those candidates are in “the business of business” and invest in a franchise based only on return. LinkedIn is an excellent place to share information about your franchise’s value.

On the same FLDC panel, LinkedIn success was represented by ZIPS Franchising. ZIPS Vice President Aaron Goldberg does a fantastic job communicating on LinkedIn with potential business partners who are multi-unit owners investing in franchises.

At my FranTech Roundtable on Social Media in October, many Franchisors shared with me that they burn through their LinkedIn ad budgets quickly. Unlike Facebook where your boosted posts are easy for the right prospects to consume, LinkedIn puts you in a very competitive position to get a franchise development ad viewed.

Recommendation #2: I’m currently recommending not initially buying ads on LinkedIn. Instead, use LinkedIn as the one-to-one communication tool that Twitter was meant to be. There’s no advertising cost to engage with a person as another person!

LinkedIn may not be a great place to generate a completely new lead, but it is the best place to communicate with potential business partners with whom you’re already engaged.

Recommendation #3: Use LinkedIn for franchise development via your personal profile, not your company LinkedIn page. People buy from people. The goldmine of LinkedIn for any brand is in its use by company representatives as individuals. Sure, your company page needs to be updated and appealing. But the heavy lifting needs to be done from you as a business leader.

Recommendation #4: Use these tactics every day to get to the next level with your franchise prospects on LinkedIn:

*Share relevant business articles and blog posts that would be of interest to your candidates.

*Reach out to them via LinkedIn messages and InMails. Both have a significantly higher response rate than emails.

And remember the most important thing when promoting a business to prospective buyers on social media: even when you’re not engaging with them, they’re watching you!

IFA Digital Marketing & Technology Summit Roundtables

One of my favorite parts of each International Franchise Association Convention is participating in the Marketing and Technology Roundtables. Here’s the info for this year’s Summit:

Digital Marketing & Technology Summit
Sunday, February 23
9:00 am – 12:00 noon

The feature presentation, Innovative Lead Generation for Your Entire Franchise System, includes speakers Christine Merritt, Head of Business Development, Google and Lana Khavinson, Group Product Marketing Manager, LinkedIn. Ken Colburn, President/CEO, Data Doctors Franchise Systems, Inc will moderate this discussion.

After the presentation, participants will have the opportunity to share ideas and strategies on a variety of technology-related topics at roundtables led by experts in the field.

Please join me for my Roundtable, Facebook Contests and Coupons. We will discuss promotional offerings on brand and franchisee Facebook pages for contests, coupons, and other tactics for driving customers into your franchisees’ locations.

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