The LinkedIn Land Grab

​The way social media is acting right now is similar to the land grab in the late 1800s. Marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk said it first, “people’s attention is like prime real estate in Manhattan, New York during the era of the land grab. Properties were selling for $100 instead of $10,000,000.”

I’m not an expert in content creation or marketing, but I want to give a bit of feedback from my experience starting an insurance agency from scratch and making my efforts really count, considering I’m running as lean as possible. I’m going to tell you guys a little bit about what I’ve been doing with content creation and leveraging my free resources such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

I believe we’re all in the pursuit of the same thing, which is people’s attention. Without someone’s attention, they’ll never know who you are. And if they don’t know who you are, you’ll never sell to them.

Videos are a great way to get in front of a lot of people with your message and multiply yourself across several platforms.

Not only is it easier to get a quick message across and more entertaining, but you’re able to build rapport with your audience much more effectively than text or pictures. 

Have you ever seen a show or a movie several times and it starts to feel like you actually know that character or host? Studies have shown that after 4-5 times of seeing someone on video, the human brain begins to process that engagement as if they have met in real life.

We have a great opportunity in front of us considering these platforms are FREE and haven’t been massively tapped into by large corporations because they still believe in the traditional models of advertising, for example, TV commercials. And we all know that nobody is watching TV commercials with Netflix and Hulu taking over. 

Even if you do watch regular TV, there is a high chance that when a commercial comes on, you’ll probably pull out your phone and your attention will shift to one of the major platforms (FB, Instagram, Linkedin, etc).

There are 2 key ways to create good content with video:

• One is to bring massive amounts of value to your audience. For example, tips to save money on insurance, or frequently asked questions.
• The other would be to just be entertaining. This is where you need to get creative like being funny, cool, good looking (sadly), etc.

​Many people think that in order to have “quality content” they need a nice camera or a nice background. That’s not the case in today’s world. The most important thing is what you’re saying and the amount of value you’re bringing, whether that’s through value or entertainment. Also, people sometimes like to watch videos filmed on a phone because they seem more genuine. 

This article is more about motivation to take advantage of the opportunity that we have in front of us, and less about how to do it. This opportunity may not be there for much longer, so take action!

For you business owners out there that have the resources and financial ability, it might even be worth hiring someone part-time to come in and film and edit videos that you can post on FB and Linkedin for your business. I know I would.

By the way, LinkedIn is dominating right now. It’s acting like Facebook did back in 2010 where organic reach was much higher. I would take huge advantage of LinkedIn especially if you do a lot of commercial and B2B work.’

I hope you found some inspiration from this. Good luck!