EP NNA 119 – Leveraging LinkedIn: Why You Need To Be On The #1 Social Media Platform For Business

Do you have a LinkedIn account? If you have one, how often do you post? If you’re not posting daily, you need to start doing that now. LinkedIn is one of the best places where you can find deals. Go out there and start finding or sharing your deals! On this episode of Note Night in America Scott Carson shares the five ways that he and his team are using LinkedIn to find deals, raise capital, and expand their network with their target audiences.

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Leveraging LinkedIn: Why You Need To Be On The #1 Social Media Platform For Business

I am glad to have each and every one of you joining us from all across the country. We have a little bit of international flavor. People from over 120 countries tune into the show. I was doing some research on YouTube and Vimeo. We have some international flavor for the show, as we have been doing this for many years. It’s hard to believe.

Welcome to the fourth quarter of 2022 as we get this ball rolling. If this is your first time, we are honored to have you. Make sure you hit subscribe to the show. I’ve uploaded twelve new episodes of and some new stuff as well for you. Check out all of our episodes of Note Camp LIVE, this show, and The Note Closers Show Podcast out there.

We have good stuff to cover in this episode. How many of you are using LinkedIn on a daily basis, weekly basis or never basis? “What about monthly?” Monthly doesn’t count. Once a month might as well be never. David Hartley said, “Daily.” It’s good to see it there. John, come on, buddy. “I have never heard of LinkedIn.” Zip, you are killing me. Sherry says, “That’s weekly.” That’s good.

You are looking for note deals. If you are looking, you are in the right spot if you don’t use it on a daily or weekly basis. I know that Larry Hoffman on here is doing it daily. Zip says, “I know LinkedIn.” I know you do. RJ says, “Weekly.” We got to bump you up to daily. It’s good to see you out there. In this episode, we are going to talk about leveraging LinkedIn, specifically about the top five ways that we find note deals. We will talk about how we raise capital with it.

You are going to want to take some notes. If you are not using the number one social media platform that’s business-designed, that is not fakebook, twiddledee on Twitter or ticker tacker. If you are in business, you need to be on LinkedIn and leveraging it daily, not once a week. That’s not enough for people to see you. If you are doing it monthly, you are not being seen. By leveraging LinkedIn, you will find more deals, raise more capital, and honestly, have a lot more success.

Part of the reason we are doing this is that we are in the fourth quarter of 2022. If you are looking for note deals or assets to buy, maybe they are not notes. Maybe you are looking for self-storage or mobile homes. I don’t care what it is, you need to be sharing what you are looking for on LinkedIn. Let’s get into the content. I’m going to open up for plenty of Q&A as we get through this thing. You will learn a thing or two about LinkedIn.

How Note Investors Use LinkedIn

We use LinkedIn in different ways. We use it to locate bank asset managers for deals by doing a search for the different job titles on LinkedIn. We started off by contacting them on an individual basis. LinkedIn limits your account. If you are brand new or don’t have a big account and are not active, they may limit you to twenty connections a day. Unfortunately, they limit me to about 100 connections a day.

You can also connect with note investors by doing a simple search for note investors. This has been very effective in finding notes to buy and sell, especially over the last couple of years. When banks were selling a lot of notes, we leveraged LinkedIn to find stuff from investors like you and me out there. We like connecting with real estate investors. Not everybody is labeled as note investors, even though they are in a lot of cases. There are people that are buying. We also connect with real estate investors in different parts of the country, especially if we’ve got assets available for sale.

We also use it to find and raise capital. A lot of real estate investors are funding sources. We also use LinkedIn groups. Most people don’t leverage LinkedIn Groups at all. Most of the time, there’s not a lot of action besides people posting something. I’ve logged into LinkedIn Groups where I talked about something, and 1 week or 2 weeks later, it was my post up there or a bunch of pitches. The great thing about LinkedIn Groups is that they will connect you with a lot of people that are 2nd or 3rd-degree connections from you as well. We use these to find people that we are not necessarily connected to and go from there.

We also share our video content on LinkedIn Live. This will be going live on LinkedIn. We show this on LinkedIn Live. We also connect with our followers each week direct by email via newsletters that they have. We will talk about that in a little bit. We are also posting social media content that educates and entertains. It tells people exactly what we are looking for.

I had people come to me all the time saying, “I’m looking for deals.” “That’s great. Have you posted what you are looking for?” “I’m looking for duplexes and fourplexes.” “I’m not that guy. Why don’t you go to LinkedIn and post what you are looking for?” “Are you not going to send me any deals?” I’m like, “The deals you are looking for, I don’t target. Go post to LinkedIn what you are looking for.”

The thing with LinkedIn, you have to realize that 80% of sales come after the fifth contact. LinkedIn is one thing that you’ve got to spend time on and connect with. You don’t want to pitch-slap somebody. What is pitch-slapping? That means where you send a connection and suddenly pitch or try to aggravate them. “Find me a deal.” You’ve got to add some stuff. I will talk a little about that connection.

Leveraging LinkedIn: On LinkedIn, 80% of your sales come from your content. You need to spend time on it and connect with your contacts. But don’t pitch slap them once you get connected.

Finding Deals

What is the first thing in finding deals? Everybody, if you got a brand new profile, you can usually connect somewhere between 10 to 20 new people a week at least. If you’ve got a seasoned account where you’ve got over 5,000 followers or connections, you can go up to 100 new connections per day. That’s prospecting and basis.

How do you find more deals? You talk to more sellers. We are specifically looking for assets. Our assets are non-performing notes. They are the first liens on residential and commercial property. We do a search for special asset managers and then connect with people. We do a second search for secondary marketing managers and start connecting with them. We do another search for whole loan traders or whole loan trading desks and connect with them. We then search for a chief credit risk officer. There are hundreds of thousands of people that have that job. There’s no way you can connect with them all but you can start.

What you want to do is when you are looking and searching for profiles, make sure you narrow it down to the United States contacts. People have a job title in the United States, and that will narrow down some of it. It will also give you a lot more effective people. If you have been around since 2021, you’ve heard me praise and rave about OctopusCRM.io. This helps us automate our daily connections on a regular basis by logging in.

We pull a list of asset managers. On Monday, we send a list to investors. On Tuesday, we send them special asset managers. On Wednesday, we send them to secondary market managers. On Thursday, we send them to whole loan traders. On Friday, we send them to the chief credit risk officers. We log in for the first five minutes and start it off. It sends somewhere between 50 to 100 connections throughout the day or in the first hour, too. We can then do something else. I can go for a walk and have my morning coffee but I’m already starting the networking process and getting things going.

One of the things that we do besides sending a message of fewer than 300 characters is that we also want that to be longer. I like to include a short video in my message of what I’m looking for. What have I done? I’ve gone and created two-minute little videos, “What am I looking for? An asset manager?” Let me share this. This is the message I sent to an asset manager named Barry. At 10:00 AM, he got my message. Why at 10:00 AM? It is because I was out walking from 9:00 AM to 9:30 AM.

This was one of the messages that went out, “I wanted to see if you might be the right person. I would like to see if you have any loans on your books that you might be looking to move this quarter. I have been buying NPNs for my own portfolio since 2008. I’m buying in most of the major markets.” I then put my link in there. That link is the link to this video on YouTube. “Let’s talk,” and it takes them on, “What Notes Are You Looking to Move This Quarter?”It’s just me talking a little bit about what I’m looking for and about my business. People love this because it pops up with my smiling face in their inbox.

It took me less than 5 minutes to send out 100 invites because it’s automated through Octopus CRM. It’s great. With Octopus, I can technically merge the first name, last name, business, and job title and set it up to start, go out, and do something else. When they accept my invite, this shows up in my inbox as they receive it. I know to follow back up with that person later. It’s also good to do with a variety of other fashions. We use this in a couple of different ways that I will share throughout.

The second way that we do it besides contacting bank asset managers is the second part it. We like to look for note buyers and sellers daily. Most of you could do twenty a day if you don’t want to reach the bank asset manager but look for note buyers. It’s the same thing. We search using names from past note sales. You can always look for note sellers and note buyers as a general search.

What I like to do is I will go on here individually. I get a list of people that have bought notes or look at assignment searches and search for the assignment of mortgage. I can jump on here and look for notes of company names. If it’s an entity, I will look at the entity. I will search the AOMs or the Assignment of Mortgages for first mortgages. If there’s a contract for the deed list that has been sold or I can see the deed transfer, I will look for the same thing. It’s the entity on the transfer docs to see who I need to reach out to.

I look for the signer. Whoever has signed off on the transfer docs is usually somebody pretty well up at the company. That usually gives me a great name to reach out to. It is either an asset manager or a company owner to get the right person that I need to talk to about potentially bonding deals they have. I will send a connection request with that same short little video.

I also will post, “We buy notes,” images, and posts on what you are looking for. We post this on a regular basis. It’s very simple. This is another one. I send this out to people as a podcaster in real estate. I wanted to get booked, so I posted a link to my show here. It is the same thing. I followed up with her to see if she was an investor. I asked to see if she was going to be in Orlando because I was looking for real estate investors and podcast hosts. They were going to be in Florida. I reached out to them, and it led to some meetings.

Here’s the thing with what I’m talking about. Post what you are looking for. I went to Canva and created two images. One is with a green background with white lettering, and then one is with a white background with green lettering. We have it posted to LinkedIn on a daily basis at different times before 3:00 PM. This went out at 5:00 PM because Monday is usually a later date for asset managers.

I posted this out, and it has led to people responding, “I’ve got deals. I’ve got notes for you to take a look at.” They were both institutional and owner-financed notes, both performing and non-performing. We’ve automated that by using Buffer.com to auto-post daily to our social media and LinkedIn. You can use the free version of LinkedIn and use 1 of the 3 profiles that are likely to be linked to your LinkedIn profile. The post doesn’t cost us anything.

Raising Capital

Raising capital is very important when it comes to note deals. You can search for self-directed IRA investors. Type in, “Self-Directed IRA investor or SD IRA.” Search for those folks and start reaching out to them. Depending on how big your profile is, you may see 10 or 1,000. If you are looking for real estate investors in your state or city, you could type in, “Real estate investors in Austin, Texas, or real estate investors in Cincinnati.” It will give you a list of people on LinkedIn. That’s a great search to reach out to local investors that are serious.

It is the same thing. Send them a short message. You can pull over up to 1,000 people from your searches into Octopus CRM. You can automate that and say, “Fellow Cincinnati investor, I would love to talk with you. Here’s what we are working on. I thought you might be interested in seeing what we are doing here locally,” with a short little pitch deck video.

I love doing the whole raising capital side by looking up and searching for names of people who have used their IRA to fund either a purchase of a property or buying a note. We pull a list of contact names and jump over and do the same thing. Let’s say it’s Les Paul or Paul Riley, who lives in Philadelphia. We will go and look up Paul Riley in Philadelphia and see if he’s on there. We will connect with Paul and say, “I saw you used your IRA,” because it listed his name as equity trust for the benefit of Paul Riley. It was an asset in the county of Philadelphia County. We will connect with him there.

You can also go to the different self-directed IRAs or investor groups. There’s a couple that has 7,000. Another one is 3,000. A few have 100. Start connecting with people there individually in the groups and say, “I see that you are in this group. Are you looking to fund deals? I’ve got some deals available. Here’s my pitch deck video.” It’s effective when it comes to raising capital.

You are going to have people that aren’t spending any time on LinkedIn. They don’t have any connections. That’s fine. The idea here is that if you are spending some time on LinkedIn and they don’t respond in two weeks, you can always cancel the invite and reuse that for somebody else. “Does LinkedIn limit you to have a maximum of 2,500 pending invites?” If you start getting the tap on the shoulder like, “You’ve got too many invites sent out. You can’t send any more,” you got to go back and delete some of those.

Leveraging LinkedIn: If you’re doing a deal through LinkedIn and they don’t respond, you can always cancel the request and reuse it for somebody else. LinkedIn limits you to have a maximum of 2,500 pending invites.

I like posting in the group and sending an email to the members that I want to talk to. You can use the free version of LinkedIn for this. The paid version gives you some InMails. They are credits to send people that you are a 3rd-degree removed from or not a 2nd-degree connection. This is an effective way to raise capital, “I saw that you are in this group. We are in the same group together. You are looking to fund some deals. I’ve got some deals that need funding. I would love to talk about what you are looking for.”

These things are a little bit differently than most of you. We share our edutainment. What is edutainment? It’s education that is entertaining. We always share our show, videos, and even our TikToks. We started doing that. I challenged myself to do one a day from Monday through Friday, at least during the business, and we shared that. People have seen it.

We have been approved for LinkedIn Live for a few years. LinkedIn Live is LinkedIn’s live streaming service that you can share. Everybody can post a ten-minute video on there. You’ve got to apply for it or to be in creator mode to get LinkedIn Live. It may have gotten a whole lot easier to get than it was when I got it but it’s very valuable.

When I share a video, we use Restream to re-share our videos and make them look like it’s going live. It shows up in my banner. If you are scrolling through, click on me, and I’ve got a video going live where you will see the smile on my face. You then see the video going live behind me, which is cool. People love that. I’ve gotten five compliments from people who say, “You are live now?” I’m like, “No. I’m talking to you. I can’t be live. It’s a replay.”

LinkedIn, honestly, is our number three viewership behind our website and YouTube. With our website, that is with our show and everything that is thrown there because we host our show on our website. If you take our website and show, our website gets 5,000 views a month and an average of 10,000-plus our show once a month. YouTube is second with 6,600 views or 6,800 views. We average about four subscribers a day.

With LinkedIn, people are looking at it. People are looking at your profile, and that’s a great thing. Oftentimes, you can see who has viewed your profile. For some people that have a brand new account, it’s not going to let you see a lot of people. If you have been around, you can often see them. What do you do? If they viewed your profile and it showed who they are, I will click on it and say, “Thanks for checking out my profile. How can I help?”

Leveraging LinkedIn: With LinkedIn, you can see who viewed your profile. If someone does that, just reply to them, “Thanks for checking out my profile, how can I help?”

Getting On Podcasts

I also like to get my message out with what I’m looking at. To all of you that are looking for deals, you should be out talking about deals. If you are going to go to a conference about apartments, notes or self-directed IRAs, instead of just being there, buying a ticket, and not saying anything, get on some podcasts. A lot of podcasts are looking for guests that do deals and creative stuff, so reach out to them. It’s a great way to get your message in front of 10, 100, and 1,000 people to tune into your episode.

Maybe you are a guest. Many of our students that have been guests on our shows have raised millions of dollars from reusing that episode. If you type in, “Real estate podcast hosts,” you will see there are over a ton of people. There are 2,800-plus profiles to connect with. I use this to book speaking guests and guests on my show as well. I’ve got five people I booked into my show that either I’m speaking on their show or swapping a show as well.

Let us talk about resharing. Your videos don’t have to be long videos. You can post a ten-minute short video on LinkedIn. Everybody should be posting if you got a deal you are working on. You can pull out your smartphone, flip it around, and do a screenshot. You are like, “ I’m working on this deal now or working on a tape here.” Share them. It gives you credibility. Say, “I’m working on a deal. I’m working on a fixed and flip. I’m working on a subject to deal with.”

It gives you credibility. When people see that you are talking about it, they are more likely to say, “He or she knows what the hell they are talking about. Let’s book her or him on.” Ladies, you need to speak more. We need more women speaking in the real estate space. There is nothing wrong with you, guys. God knows we got enough of us but we need a lot more women in the industry speaking about a variety of different things.

Here’s one thing in sharing stuff. It doesn’t need to be long. You don’t need to do hour-long webinars for eleven years straight. Start sharing what you are working on. You would be surprised at what people are looking for. Sherry Sigma said, “I’m available to speak.” Drop me an email. Tell me what you will speak about. For deals, case studies or stuff like that, you can always drop me an email at Scott@WeCloseNotes.com. Start talking about the deals you are working on.

Connecting With Followers & Leveraging Connections

I like to connect with my followers. This is a little bit different. I don’t like just connecting with people. I do want to connect with them and share stuff with them. We started a LinkedIn newsletter a few months ago. I’m not going to lie. We have been diligent about it in the first three months but we got busy with several events, the mastermind, our class, and then FinCon. I need to get back on the wagon with this.

Our LinkedIn newsletter has been a great way to deepen connections with our followers. What we’ve found is that you’ve got to have the creator mode on in your profile. Otherwise, you are going to post an article. If you are going to post an article, that’s fine. If you want to start a newsletter, you have to turn the creator mode on. It allows you to start a newsletter, which is free. It doesn’t cost you anything.

The great thing is that if you’ve got a newsletter, copy and paste it into the LinkedIn newsletter. The minute you are starting a newsletter, it goes on your LinkedIn profile, and people start subscribing. We were pretty lucky that we had 500 people subscribed in 4 hours. I was blown away by that. We are up to about 15% of our audience. 15% to 20% of our followers are subscribed to the newsletter, which is good. It’s about 15% average across the board.

I wouldn’t do it daily. I would do it once a week. All of you can come up with content once a week. It can be articles, a deal you are working on, a case study or something fun. The great thing besides posting it to the LinkedIn newsletter is that it also sends an email to their inbox, and they can see your information there. That’s what I love about this. No other thing will do that.

Reshare articles, videos, and thoughts. Larry Hoffman shared that he got a new guitar and people probably responded. It’s good to share some of the personal along the newsletter so that people get to like you. They pull rapport that way. Share your deals. Share funding opportunities. The biggest thing is that you have to start that momentum. Don’t just start sharing, “I got a deal. I need funding. That doesn’t work because nobody responded.” You got to give it time. You have to let your audience follow you, see if they like what you are going to share on a regular basis, and go from there.

Leveraging connections is also something very important. I like to go to the people who either have me on their show or I’ve had them on my show. I like to go and leave a recommendation for them. I also do this when I’m at an event, and I see a speaker that I like. I will go to LinkedIn, find that speaker’s profile, and send them a recommendation. People love this. This is one of the best ways to get a lot of new friends. They are like, “Thank you for leaving a recommendation.” It’s mind-blowing. It has led to some cool people that we are having over to the show.

It is the same thing. If you are working with asset managers and you have a good experience with an asset manager, leave them a recommendation. If they work for a bank, they can’t necessarily accept cash. Every banker can accept a gift one time a year up to $100. A bottle of whiskey, vodka or wine works well. I will do a little thing. I leave them a recommendation because that goes on their profile. If they end up leaving, it still sticks with them. It looks good when people are doing their search out there.

I’ve also used some polls to ask questions if I have done a deal from buyers. I ran a couple of polls, and it gave me people that commented on it. I went back in and sent a message to everybody that commented on the poll. I said, “Thank you so much. Is there any way I can be of service to you?” You can’t do all that. That’s individual. That’s a little bit more manually editing. You would have to do it all yourself. You can hire a VA to do it to log into your account but I like doing it individually. It’s great to say, “Thanks for voting. How can I be a service? I would love to schedule a phone call.”

It’s led to some good things, some vendors, and some other things that do add to the bottom line. Let’s put it that way. I’ve had some affiliates or some sponsorship stuff too that we are pretty excited about. I’m speaking at an event that I didn’t expect to be asked to. I’m pretty stoked about that. It is about leveraging and seeing who is commenting. Post a poll, “What do you prefer, rentals, notes or REOs.”

There are some people that do stupid things, and that’s fine. It lightens people up a little bit because God knows we need a little humor out there. Get creative. You can ask, “What are you looking for? What’s your biggest goal? Is it to retire yourself or your spouse, pay for your kids’ retirement or retire your parents?” That’s a good one I’m going to share. What’s your big why?

You can reshare images across your business profile pages. If you’ve got an LLC, go ahead and create a business profile. Most people don’t share there but go there and share it. It’s important to do that in content. This is something that I need to get better at. I have one for We Close Notes. I have one for this show as well. Share images across your different profile pages. A lot of times, LinkedIn will prompt, “Do you want to share this here or do you want to add this? If you post an article, do you want to share this with a group that you are a part of?”

Completing Your Profile

I also will look and see what is getting a lot of likes. I follow some folks and influencers on there. I like to see what they are posting and what kind of comments they are getting. I model what I post on what they do. The most important thing for you to add value that I didn’t have here is making sure your profile is complete. Make sure that your profile is 100% complete and that you’ve got some interesting stuff to make people think about. We will go into that and share some things differently but I will recap first.

First thing first, post videos and apply for LinkedIn Live. Have edutainment purposes. Connect with new contacts daily on Octopus. Start a newsletter weekly. Connect with your contacts. Go to the inbox and share some interesting things. It could be business plus personal. It’s good to mix it up a little bit there. Leverage groups. Connect with investors and asset managers that you may not be directly a secondary connection that I removed from. That’s valuable. I need to spend more time doing that because it has been valuable every time. I’ve done that.

Tell people what you are looking for, “I’m looking for a note. I’m looking for funding. I’m looking for apartments. I’m looking to sell storage.” Whatever it might be, share it. I like to put, “I buy notes.” If you want, “I buy apartments or mobile homes.” The idea here is to take these things that we’ve talked about and rinse and repeat them. This is not anything that’s difficult.

I spend less than probably 30 minutes on LinkedIn because the fact is I’ve set some stuff up to help automate it. I have five minutes in the morning to get my Octopus rock and rolling across those five platforms. I will respond throughout the day for a little bit and then spend about 30 minutes at about 4:00 PM. That’s when there are a lot of people. I have things that automatically post on there. That’s also when I go back in and will leave recommendations or see who’s commenting on things. I will use that stuff also to connect.

My VA helps me by connecting with asset managers and IRA investors by going here and tracking down their profiles. It doesn’t cost me to mail a postcard or anything like that. We pull their information off the county records and go in and see if they’ve got a LinkedIn profile. It’s only about 20% of the time that we get the names that match up but that’s still 20%. I don’t send that direct postage to your stamps. Some still do but if you are on a budget, every dollar counts. That is the way I like to do it.

I want to dive in here really fast. One of the most things you can do is to take some time and make sure your profile looks good. Make sure you get a good photo. Make sure your photos are showing up so your friends can see them. Make it look nice. Make sure you got a banner behind you over here. Make sure you got a good smile in the photo. Make sure your settings are set so that your photos show up to everybody. We got pretty good analytics. Make sure you put some featured stuff in your blogs or other things. We have activities. We shared a couple of short videos on there throughout.

Leveraging LinkedIn: Make sure that your LinkedIn profile is 100% complete. Make sure your profile looks good. You should have a banner and a recognizable profile picture.

We look at all our activities. This is something that we do on a daily basis. It shows what I like. Here is Larry. He is doing a great job. He said, “I buy notes.” He’s sharing an ad on there, too. He’s a great coach. I liked by my buddy, Scott Cassidy’s comment on that. Jessica Bircher posted, “Happy National Coffee Day.” She’s one of our students. She is a rock star kicking butt and taking names.

She’s also sharing a pool of assets on there. This is the thing, Rachel. You got to interact. You will be surprised by the wealth of knowledge and quality information that you will end up connecting with and go from there. “Somebody is looking for funding.” I got somebody messaging me that I connected with. That’s what I’ve got for you for this episode. It’s not too long. Dive into this stuff. Go and start your newsletter. Go start sharing.

Most of you here aren’t doing anything, and that’s a travesty. The reason I want you to talk about doing stuff and getting on there is that this is the fourth quarter of 2022. We got 66 days left in 2022. This is the quota of all quarters over the last couple of years that you need to be doing something. Start posting on a daily basis. If you give it 30 days and look back, you will see amazing things happen to your profile. Go from there.

Thanks, Sherry. I don’t know who is playing. It’s the Eagles and somebody else. Go, Cowboys. That’s all that I’ve got for this episode. Make sure you check out The Note Closers Show. Make sure you subscribe to WeCloseNotes.tv. If you are not subscribed to the YouTube channel, please do so and leave a comment. I would love to read your comments. Ask questions on our videos there. I’m the person that checks that and the one that responds, so please do so. Otherwise, go out and take some action, everybody. We will see you all at the top. Bye.

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