Interior designers know they have to be on Instagram and on Facebook and make sure all their pins look great on Pinterest. But LinkedIn is just a place to stick your résumé or look for your next hire, right? Wrong. LinkedIn can actually be a very fruitful networking platform if you put in the work and if you have a great strategy. And on today’s Wingnut Social podcast, we dig deep into how LinkedIn can pay off for interior designers.

Darla and Natalie welcome Joe Apfelbaum, CEO of B2B marketing firm Ajax Union to the show today, and Joe is all about LinkedIn. Joe started Ajax seven years ago to use advanced technologies to help businesses with their internet marketing. But what he realized is that many companies don’t actually have a marketing strategy, and many are ignoring a goldmine in LinkedIn. Today Darla and Joe talk about why LinkedIn can pay off, and why it’s so often ignored.

• [3:30] Where Joe’s passion for marketing comes from

• Joe on LinkedIn

• Twitter for Interior Designers episode

Darla tells Joe on this week’s show that she has 14,000 connections on LinkedIn, but she never really logs in. Joe draws the analogy of showing up to a networking party every day, but sitting in the corner and not talking to anyone. And this is actually most people’s problem with LinkedIn. It’s a very active platform, but few users are actually standing out by posting.

Joe cites some stats from Microsoft about LinkedIn’s usage. He estimates there are about 500 million professionals on LinkedIn, and 40% of those professionals log in every day. So what’s the problem? Only a million people are actually posting on LinkedIn. If you can create a LinkedIn strategy for posting every day on the platform, you can truly distinguish yourself. And Joe lays out how to build that strategy on this week’s episode.

On this week’s show, Joe staged a sort of LinkedIntervention with Darla, encouraging her to log onto the platform more often, and engage with the people there a lot more often. But direct messages on LinkedIn can be really sales-y and annoying, so Joe cautions that you need to have a direct message strategy. Part of that is genuinely wanting to reach out and connect with people with whom you could do business.

You need to ensure that, when reaching out to people on LinkedIn, you’re not burdening or spamming them. So that means keep your messages short. People don’t spend more than seven seconds reading messages. Get straight to the point, offer them actual value, and don’t sell anyone anything ever. Try to build an actual relationship with them.

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