LinkedIn Isn't Social Media: Shay Thieberg on Building Authority Without Becoming an Influencer

Jeffro Fulkerson: 0:17

What if the most valuable marketing channel for your business isn’t a social network at all, and you’ve been treating it like one? Well, Shay Thieberg is the co-founder and CMO of MAIA Digital, a LinkedIn focused B2B agency and one of roughly 30 LinkedIn certified marketing experts worldwide. With a master’s in social psychology and decision making, he’s delivered more than 800 LinkedIn workshops, lectures at Reichman University, and he hosts his own podcast, The LinkedIns. So today, Shay’s gonna help us break down why LinkedIn is a business channel and why Real expertise beats all the AI generated noise, and how you guys as service business owners can build authority without becoming a full time LinkedIn influencer. So Shay, welcome to Digital Dominance.

Shay Thieberg: 0:59

Thank you for having me. What a nice intro. Thank you for that.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 1:02

Yeah, absolutely. Now, I mean, Shay, you came into marketing with your masters, like I mentioned, social psychology, decision making. How how did you end up going all in on LinkedIn?

Shay Thieberg: 1:07

Mm-hmm. If I go back to to my studies, I think the reason I I chose social psychology and not just the regular psychology when you treat people, I wanted to get into phenomena. I wanted to understand how stuff are ticking, like what can affect someone purchase your product, what can affect someone getting into your store. So I started with those types of questions and While studying, I was also working as a social media manager, have a background of photography and videography, so always revolved around content. and then one day it came to my mind that hey, I should do something with it combined between my managerial expertise with my newly acquired master degree in social psychology. And back in the days when I just started, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn. So it was a big thing back in the days and I s I thought to myself, hey, something big is happening here. Maybe I’ll be one of the first to jump on this train. And the rest is history.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 2:24

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it sounds like a lot of your background and skills kind of converged into this and now you call yourself the LinkedIn psychologist, which makes sense. so knowing that, what what’s one thing about human behavior that a lot of business owners get wrong when they’re trying to show up on LinkedIn?

Shay Thieberg: 2:41

In my perspective, it’s the definition, differentiation between self-promotion to reputation at scale. I think that a lot of people tend to address LinkedIn as a self-promotion tool. Like if you’re posting on LinkedIn, you’re probably looking for a job. If you’re posting on LinkedIn, you’re probably trying to sell something. But that’s not the case. Most people are on LinkedIn to network, and in order to network. network creating more opportunities and to create those opportunities you have to take your reputation and scale it up. So if you have a good project at work, if you’ve done something recently in the volunteering section or as part of your extracurriculum this is the place that you can actually advocate not only the stuff that you did or doing but also the value of them how it helped you to meet new people and that’s for the long run creating authority people will address you will remember you for example myself as the LinkedIn psychologist so I want to meet people in several touch point touch points along my career and I have a really great example from a few months ago I posted a post an article about how to turn CEOs to go viral on LinkedIn. I thought Jeffro that people gonna snatch it, they’re gonna grab it. Here’s Shay secret sauce, this is how he’s he’s gonna do it. He’s gonna show us all the secrets, the bits and bytes. A week goes by, 26 likes. A bummer. That sucks. Like all everything that I I did, 26 likes. But two weeks after, I’m getting a phone call from the CEO of one of the largest corporates globally. That we all know. from his secretary. Hey Shay, the CEO saw your post on LinkedIn. he wants to set up a meeting. I’m coming to a meeting, and I asked him, You’re not following me, you didn’t like my post, and you haven’t commented how I’m here. He told me, I saw your some of your latest posts, and that one actually got my attention. As a CEO, he told me that he don’t want people other people to see his likes, his comments, and the stuff that he’s doing. So maybe the decision making that we’re aiming for are not proactively showcasing that they are engaging. But they’re over there, they’re seeing your stuff, so you just need to keep showing off. Showing up. Yeah, the LinkedIn lurkers. Exactly.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 5:25

LinkedIn lurkers, they’re real. So, but so that’s a great example of how it can work, right? And people see your stuff. but what about the times where you didn’t get that call and you still got 26 likes and the next post you only got, you know, a dozen or whatever? And that seems to go on for a while. Because I think a lot of owners on LinkedIn are told, hey, it this there’s all this huge potential, and they start posting stuff, but it feels like it’s not going anywhere. So what would you say to those people?

Shay Thieberg: 5:54

Back to basic networking. Before you post, engage. I don’t know if you saw, but whenever you are commenting on someone else’s post, you can see how many impressions you got to your comment. So if I’m commenting, I saw one of your recent podcasts. I saw some of the messages, some of the comments on LinkedIn. So If I’m commenting on this person with the 400k followers, I’m commenting on his post, I’m actually riding the wave of his network. So you can actually use comments as a growth engine. So go back to basic, grow your network by commenting, and I’ll share a quick hack. Whenever you’re commenting on someone else’s post, even if you don’t know him. The people that you’re commenting on their post, they will be the first in line to see your next post. So if I’m working for an instance with a cybersecurity company and they’re flying to a Black Hat in Vegas, so I’m taking the profile of the founder and I’m commenting on his ICP list. And therefore, whenever the next time he’s going to post, those people gonna see his next post. So commenting before posting can actually get you back on track.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 7:28

So essentially posting and ghosting doesn’t work. You’ve got to actually invest time into LinkedIn to network and connect with others, comment on their stuff. Yeah. And that makes sense. I think a lot of people do treat it as just another social platform. I’ve created a piece of content, I’ll also also post it here, but they don’t spend the time to develop that network and posting and you know, commenting and everything else. So that makes a lot of sense. So you’ve also said, you know, LinkedIn has become a business channel, not a social media channel. 

Shay Thieberg: 7:35

Yeah. It’s a two street way. Yeah. Exactly.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 7:58

Describes that or at least helps us understand how it’s different. and so now I think that’s really useful information because now that that lets us know if we want to do well on LinkedIn, you’ve got to be proactive there, not just, you know, throwing stuff up and saying, why isn’t it working? That was great content. That’s not the point. That’s only one piece of the equation. here’s another question then. you know for service business you know, it could be an accountant, commercial contractor, or consultant. What should they do on LinkedIn first? Should they make the company page? Should the owner be the one posting about it or the team members? What does that look like?

Shay Thieberg: 8:37

That’s one of the most common questions I’m getting. it really depends on your size and your goal. If you’re a freelancer just aiming to stay freelancing, I will stick with my personal profile. Your personal profile on average will get 10 times more impressions and visibility. but if you want to be an authority, if you want to enlarge your team, you want to recruit, you want to promote, so you do need to use also your Company page. But here’s the secret sauce. Because some companies do realize that they need to use both the founder profile and the company page. But they neglect the other employees. Whenever you are bringing to the game also your employees, you’re at least duplicating your amount of exposure. you are riding again the waves of their networking. You’re getting into more perspectives. So we sing every time that we’re involving those three, the employees, the founders, the thought thought leaders, and the company page, that’s the trifecta.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 9:52

Okay, so the LinkedIn trifecta are those three. And how does that fit? You’ve talked about trust to business. Can you walk us through that as well?

Shay Thieberg: 9:58

Yeah, I call it T2B. A lot of people talk about B2C, B2B, I call it T2B, trust to business. I’ll give you a quick example. I don’t know if you know or heard, but LinkedIn is currently ranked as the most cited source in LLMs. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Gemini. So people are looking for you on LinkedIn, but also looking for stuff on those LLMs. And LinkedIn is the number one source. So whenever you’re investing in your LinkedIn presence, you’re building authority and trustworthiness also in those AI chatbots. so trust to business is being out there, is to deliver value, is to generate conversation and not only share posts like I was delighted to participate, which are super cringe LinkedIn posts.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 10:55

So what about I’ve I have seen lately a few different folks doing experiments, you know, posting something on LinkedIn, then a couple hours later they go search on Google for the phrase that they put in their post and they’re ranked for it already on Google and it cites that post. So are you seeing that as well? Is that consistent or is that kind of a one off thing?

Shay Thieberg: 11:14

I think it might be due to the fact that people are still exploring this entire GEO thing when you’re actually appearing on on those LLMs. I guess with time it will be less promptly. but yeah, LinkedIn does affect LLMs pretty much. It’s more, it’s important to mention, more for B2B, not that much for B2C. So it’s really depend on your audience and and your goals and and the stuff that you’re actually promoting.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 11:47

Makes sense. So here’s another question. You’ve also talked about ROL or return on LinkedIn and looking at business metrics, which is obviously important. But what should an owner on LinkedIn actually measure? Because there’s impressions, there’s clicks and likes, and it’s easy to get you know disappointed if things aren’t as high as you want. But but what’s a realistic first signal to look for, let’s say in the first 90 days or something?

Shay Thieberg: 12:09

First first thing first, not followers. That’s the number one asking from every client. We want to raise your following, our following, and I always ask them why. So not followers, but followers are KPIs. impressions are KPIs, website clicks are KPIs, ROL I refer to shorten the time of recruiting, enlarge the deal flow. So ROLs we are measuring for the longer term. So as a marketer, when I’m building a strategy for for a company, I’m not building a marketing strategy. I’m building a business strategy, which means that I want to sit in the room with whoever in the in the organization and understand what are the business goals. Because LinkedIn as a business tool can get you to those business tools. By the marketers tools and recruitment tools that it possess. so I’ll give you a quick example. For example, LinkedIn today can integrate it with your CRM. So you can check the influence, the long term influence of LinkedIn on your funnel. So you want to see how influential LinkedIn is part of your entire process. so that’s just as a quick example.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 13:33

Okay. So here’s another question. because obviously if we’re gonna spend the time as owners and invest it into LinkedIn, we wanna know that we’re getting that return. Let’s say we wanna expand our sales pipeline, get more inquiries from LinkedIn. You mentioned earlier about returning to basics and doing commenting. Does that include direct messaging? how much time should we spend doing commenting and whatnot beyond just the the post?

Shay Thieberg: 13:58

So I’m not a big fan of direct messages unless you are commenting and pre-gaming, teasing a little bit. Just not just falling out out of the blue, just actually generating the the initial engagement. but in terms of what are the best practices, you need to optimize your profile. It should look like a business card. People need to understand what you do promptly. Then Enlarge your network, comment on people to generate spark more conversation, post at least at least once a month, minimum. If you can do once a week, even better. so I always like to do this challenge of 30-day challenge of 30 comments, 30 new connections, three posts per month. So that’s about it, but you want to stay consistent. So LinkedIn is about a marathon and not about Sprint. And if I’m trying to recap everything to another quick hack that you can actually do on a daily, on a weekly basis, is whenever you’re posting, go to your likes and just connect with the people who liked your recent post. It’s simple, but people are missing this one out. And that can be a game changer.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 15:29

Yeah, that’s a simple thing. It makes a lot of sense. All right. So what about the content side? Obviously that’s that is one piece of the puzzle. does it make a difference if you’re doing text posts versus image posts or video? Have you seen yeah, what’s the different responses to those?

Shay Thieberg: 15:45

Yeah, first thing I love the videos that you are posting. Check your profile obviously before. So I really like the videos that you’re doing because they’re super authentic and they’re not too well done, like too promotional. They’re you just open up the camera and you’re sharing your thoughts over there. So with videos, they can be deceiving because you won’t see a lot of likes and comments for videos because people are watching. So you need to check the the the watching rate. but videos are working phenomenally on LinkedIn, if you measure the right thing. one of the things that I think businesses and professionals that want to scale their reputation are missing are LinkedIn articles. I don’t know if you’re aware, but whenever you’re publishing a LinkedIn article, you also can send them through email automatically if you’re attaching it to a LinkedIn newsletter. I saw that you’re not utilizing this tool yet. But maybe after today’s show. But the kicker is that remember that that I said that LinkedIn is the number one cited.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 16:44

Yeah, I’m not.

Shay Thieberg: 16:44

Source in LLMs. So 60% of the impact on LLMs or from LinkedIn is coming from LinkedIn articles. But only one percent of businesses are using LinkedIn articles, so long form posts.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 16:46

I will.

Shay Thieberg: 17:12

On LinkedIn by using articles and newsletters can actually give you a major edge.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 17:20

Okay, thank you. I’m gonna start doing that. ‘Cause I’ve already started doing.

Shay Thieberg: 17:22

You should. And by the way, you can consolidate some former content that you had just as a monthly recap. you can obviously share some blogs or take the tips from this podcast, transcribe it, and use it as another newsletter. There’s so much thing that people can do. So, as a bottom line, my go to tip is just repurpose. Just repurpose. You already invested in creating a piece of content. There are so much.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 17:27

Exactly.

Shay Thieberg: 17:52

Stuff that you can do following with this type of content. People are not always logged in. people forgot what you said. If you have an important message, for one person it’s better for him to re read it, for other people to watch it. so you you need to repurpose the messages, the strong messages that you want to advocate.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 18:17

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so just to recap, for anybody who’s listening, fix your profile, clean it up a bit. you probably don’t need a company page unless you’re larger and you have employees to also help promote the business. and then your content should just be kind of straightforward, sharing your thoughts and make sure you’re commenting on other stuff first. Because together, those things are going to be what moves you forward on the organic side of LinkedIn. So now I want to take a minute to talk about the paid side, which you know, LinkedIn ads. What’s your take on when does that make sense for a smaller service business to run LinkedIn ads and when are they going to be a waste of money?

Shay Thieberg: 18:54

Whenever you don’t need leads, don’t start LinkedIn as if you need leads. LinkedIn is amazing for top of funnel. It’s having a hard time to deliver the expectations of people who think that they can throw money in and see leads out of it. So I wanna get a little bit more methodology methodology to into a methodology that it’s called the 95-5 B2B rule.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 18:57

Ha ha.

Shay Thieberg: 19:24

The 95-5 rule in B2B says that in any given moment, only 5% of your current ICP is in buying decision, which means that 95% are out of market. So you cannot constantly promote only to the 5%. It’s nothing. There are so many marketeers fighting for their attention. So, as an always-on approach, my recommendation is to promote. Valuable content to the 95% that are currently out of market. Because when the day comes and it will come, you want to be the first in line, the top of mind option when they going back to the decision-making position. So, my tip for LinkedIn ads address it as a top-of-funnel channel, market to the 95% that are currently out of market with valuable content. You will gain a lot of data and for the day that you will you will need leads, you can use this audience for remarketing with much better results. So always on by the 95-5% rule will also cost you much less money. For the longer run, you will gain much more data, and you will see better results looking forward.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 20:48

Right. So in practical terms, that means the content of your ads is going to be speaking to where those ninety five percent are at right now. It’s not and the call to action is not gonna be sign up for this five thousand dollar product. It’s gonna be here’s a thing that helps you do this step for free that you may mu may not have even realized you need to do right now, but here’s why it’s helpful and valuable. Right. So you’re just kind of dripping out helpful things to stay top of mind over time.

Shay Thieberg: 21:14

You want to make people get and grasp why they should work with you. By the way, I never did to myself as a LinkedIn ad specialist, I never used LinkedIn lead generation for myself. So I’m showcasing, I’m delivering a lot of values. So people like, hey, that’s the guy that I want to work with. Remember the story with the CEO that reached out to me? He saw me several times. And by the day that he needed me, he remembered me as a top of mind persona that can help him achieve his goals.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 21:54

Do you find that people when they’re looking in their feeds, do they respond differently to the same video that’s organic versus one that says sponsored in the top?

Shay Thieberg: 22:03

Yeah, I think for the we can see it in metrics. I think for the ads one with a sponsored one, they will engage much less. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t watch it or dwell on it. but yeah, we will see the difference. This is why I always said that it’s a mixture. I won’t go into ads without a solid company page, personal profile, and a good solid cadence of posting.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 22:32

So organic side is first. Once you build that up, then maybe you can consider stepping into the ad side.

Shay Thieberg: 22:38

Exactly.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 22:39

All right, well, that makes a lot of sense. I mean we’re gonna wrap up soon, but if if one of our listeners, you know, if they remember only one thing from this conversation, what do you want it to be for them?

Shay Thieberg: 22:50

I want them to remember that they s this entire AI slop era, it’s deceiving. It looks like everybody are po is posting with AI and everything, but it will calm down. LinkedIn is working tirelessly. they already declared in a recent study that they know to recognize 94% of generated AI content. And within this article, they are stating That the thing that they are looking for from their users is the subjective perspectives. So stop thinking about your next post just to keep on on with the cadence and start share your thoughts. Your thoughts are much more valuable than your schedule post that you generated with ChatGPT. I always I also like to say that you can Twitterish a little bit LinkedIn and just sh shorten your post and and just share your thoughts. So that’s my tip.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 23:59

All right. Well, I appreciate it. Shay, this has been really helpful, I think, for our listeners and for me as well. Now I’m gonna go do some articles on LinkedIn to set up the whole newsletter thing. but it it’s helpful to kind of reframe LinkedIn as a business channel, and knowing how to measure the success of our efforts there, you know, what it actually takes to be successful there and why it’s worth still showing up there. 

Shay Thieberg: 24:07

Can’t wait to see.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 24:23

Shay, where can our listeners find you? Connect with you on LinkedIn, learn more about MAIA and all that. Obviously LinkedIn, but

Shay Thieberg: 24:27

LinkedIn. That’s my channel. I always say LinkedIn is my inbox. It’s my everything. I book my calls from there. That’s my go-to platform, obviously. and it’s super funny because my wife, she’s a recruiter. So at the end of the day, we are both in bed, both scrolling through LinkedIn. It’s super funny, but that’s what we do, and yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 24:50

Awesome. and those of you listening, maybe this week, rewrite your LinkedIn headline. Look your profile. Why don’t you start there? and then figure out a short post you can do that has your true opinion. It’s not something that ChatGPT spit out. it doesn’t have to be super polished, but just it’s you, right? So thanks again for listening to Digital Dominance. Thank you again, Shay. make sure you guys subscribe, share this with someone who’s on LinkedIn and trying to do better. And we’ll see you next time. Take care.

Shay Thieberg: 25:09

Thank you.