Looking Back on LinkedIn's Amazing Year and What's Ahead in 2021: Liam Darmody

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Mark Evans: You're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight, tools, and tips for marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in twenty five minutes, more or less. LinkedIn has had quite the year, emerging as an engaging social platform that drives content, connections, connections, and conversations, and shedding this reputation as a place for headhunters and job seekers. So how did this happen? To find out, I reached out to Liam Darmody, director of revenue operations for HomeSnap. Liam has established himself as a leading voice on LinkedIn and as important, a go to resource for people looking to capitalize on LinkedIn. Given LinkedIn's growth this year and how people are using it, I wanted to connect with Liam to look back and as important, look forward. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Liam Darmody: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Mark Evans: First, happy holidays. I hope you're, enjoying some time off before we get back into it next week.

Liam Darmody: I am indeed. Same to you. I, I've taken the week to, just kinda decompress from craziest year ever and, take it in and then prepare for for the upcoming year, which hopefully will be much better. Can't really do worse. Right?

Mark Evans: Yeah. Exactly. Well, if you both of us are half full, kinda glass full kind of people, so hopefully, it will be a better better, happier, and healthier year. So you and I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. It's been awesome this year, and we're gonna talk a lot about the platform and how it's evolved and how to get value out of it. But before we do that, when you're not on LinkedIn and it seems to be like you're on it a lot like I am, what's your day job?

Liam Darmody: I've I've been in the technology startup scene here in Washington DC area for pretty much my entire career. I graduated from college here in 2005, started out as a recruiter, at a startup tech firm, and then, went to work for a few different startups in the area. And I've always kind of been the sort of jack of all trades master of none, so to speak, which is a good thing for a lot of startups because things change so quickly and, you know, it's always kind of a moving target and you need people that can be agile and, you know, really adaptable. So that's kind of how I got into the role that I'm in now. I've evolved sort of over the years to be in revenue operations. Currently, I'm working for a company called, Homesnap, which is a real estate productivity tool for agents, realtors. We're responsible basically there for, aligning sort of sales marketing and customer success and customer support, teams, kinda like a project management function within the organization. It's a great great company, phenomenal culture. I love it there. You know, we're we're, we had a banner year this year, and we're looking for a really great year in 2021. So that's that's been really exciting for me. Operations is is a passion of mine because I like solving problems, and I like people, and I like communicating and collaborating. And that's really what operations is mostly about in my experience.

Mark Evans: So LinkedIn to me has been a very interesting place. Now prior to the end of April when I lost my job due to the pandemic, I didn't spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. It was a place where I would go from time to time. Maybe if when I was looking for a job or just poking around, it wasn't a place where I look for content. It certainly wasn't a place where I I had lots of connections, but most of those people I had met at conferences or had, they you were friends and things like that. When I was footloose and fancy free from an employment perspective, there wasn't many places to go. So for whatever reason I decided to check out LinkedIn, I got hooked. Like a lot of people, I spent a lot of time there and have really seen the benefits. As someone who like me spends a lot of time there and focuses on best practices and really how to get value out of it, what's your take on how LinkedIn has evolved this year and how and why has it become a social network? Because in many respects, think that Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, has to be surprised by how LinkedIn has grown and how people are using it.

Liam Darmody: For sure. I mean, I think, you know, there's so many stories of companies that are in the digital space that this was a banner year. Right? Bringing people together and having people, you know, relate to one another is something that if you if you have a platform that enables that, it's a really good thing. 2020 was a good year for those companies. You know, I think was Microsoft surprised? Perhaps. I think there's always I I sometimes say that LinkedIn kind of has a bit of an identity crisis because, you know, you've got this platform that was created in 2004. So it's been around for such a long time. You've got 700,000,000 users on the platform, but a fraction of those users are are monthly active users and an even smaller percentage, you know, single digit percentage of users are creating content on the platform. And so there's this weird sort of stigma associated with LinkedIn where you're not supposed to post on there. You're not supposed to show emotion. Right? It's a professional network. You know, you just put your resume park your resume on there and make sure that you stay in touch with people that you've worked with. But LinkedIn has has sort of coined the phrase join the conversation for some years now. And I remember when I first heard it, I was kinda like, what? Join the conversation? What conversation? There's nothing happening. Nothing happening on LinkedIn. But now it's really starting to sort of take stride. Right? And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that people genuinely are becoming a little bit more comfortable showing their personal side in in a professional social network. The fact that we are all hunkered down for the most part, you know, networking and and I mean, I loved nothing more than being in the office and the banter of the office and running into somebody in the coffee room or the kitchen and going to lunch with people. And all of those things that make the professional workplace somewhat personal and enjoyable are gone. Right? Like, you just can't replicate them really, at least not as not as effectively. To me, it makes a lot of sense that a lot of people have sort of found LinkedIn and sort of discovered, oh, well, we can have those types of conversations. We can have those interactions with people on this platform and and really kinda get some of that water cooler banter.

Mark Evans: One of the things that I find interesting is the number of conversations the number of connections and conversations. So the fact that you and I are doing this podcast is a direct correlation to our activity on LinkedIn. We've connected. We comment each other's posts. We go back and forth a lot. And people's willingness to be engaged and as important have conversations is really impressive. Like I've reached I probably had more than a 100 conversations this year via LinkedIn as a result of LinkedIn. It's been amazing. Let's say I've talked to people all over the world, but what I do wonder about is what happens when hopefully soon COVID phase into the background and we start to go back to the office even in a hybrid kind of way when you do get that interactions with with your fellow employees, when you can go to events, do you think that what we're seeing on LinkedIn today will continue? It's almost like we've given each other permission to connect with each other virtually, and I think that's one of the most impressive things.

Liam Darmody: That's a good question and I know a lot of people are sort of thinking about it right now. Personally, I think about all of the other industries that have been impacted by technological advancements and and and the Internet. Right? Once people have a taste of what it's like to use LinkedIn in the way that you and I have this year, traditional networking just doesn't necessarily make quite as much sense. Right? It's it's it's a lot more labor intensive. You go to a networking event and you see maybe 200 people and you walk in and you're like, okay. I'm here for two hours. I can probably have a dozen conversations. And of those dozen, maybe two or three turn into something that makes a lot of sense. And then you have to sort of think, well, who do I want to talk to? You're scanning the room and it's just it's an old school approach, right? It's an inefficient and leave it to an operations guy to sort of figure out like that's inefficient, right? You look at other companies or other industries, right, when you started to be able to do online banking. People were terrified of online banking, right? They didn't want to have their details on the Internet. Now, when's the last time you went and saw a bank teller or used an ATM? Hailing a now that Uber exists, hailing a cab with your hand just doesn't make sense. It's just why why would you have to wait for somebody to drive by you and pick you up, right? And I think that that networking is kind of like that, right? And and and to take it a step further, LinkedIn is is essentially like the the world's largest networking event. Right? It's twenty four seven, three sixty five if you want it to be. It it it has no geographic limitations whatsoever, and you have the added advantage of being able to learn a little bit about somebody before you decide to reach out and introduce yourself. And that is something that you don't get at networking events, really. And and that is where I think the real value lies. It is that you you can sort of curate your own network and you can expand your network globally. Right? And as as we continue with the work from home, the the fact that so many companies are are comfortable with people working from home now or or maybe not comfortable but have to deal with it means that you wanna have a global network. You wanna have more people that are in interested in the things that you are in different places because geographic location no longer matters as much. It's not as limiting as it once was. So that that's kind of I think people will continue to do it, especially younger generations. Right? I think that's the other thing. You've got, you know, people that are in their twenties right now going into the business world. They're used to living their life online. They're they're not used to holding back. I think that will actually drive a lot more conversation on the platform and and utilization. And I think those who participate are gonna benefit a bunch and those who do not are are gonna maybe regret it a little bit.

Mark Evans: Yeah. The one thing that struck me is before COVID, I'm a marketing consultant and I have to do a lot of prospecting and meet with people and the amount of time and energy that I spent meeting people for coffee. So you gotta you gotta get there, you gotta do the coffee meeting and maybe it works out and you have a great hour long conversation or maybe you're twenty minutes in and you realize that it's not going anywhere or this isn't really a good connection. And then you gotta come all the way back and it's it's two or three hours out of your day. And now I think about it and and I do wonder whether I'll ever have a coffee meeting with someone again unless they're a really great prospect, unless, like, it's really somebody I wanna meet because we can do the we can get this connection. We can really, establish a relationship. So a couple questions for you, just shifting gears in terms in terms of how you and I use LinkedIn is, a, how long have you been active on LinkedIn? And we can define active in different ways. And what's been your approach this year? Do you have you had sort of a a strategy, or has it just kind of evolved as you've as you've gone through the year?

Liam Darmody: So I've been on LinkedIn as long as I can remember really. Think don't I think it was created in 2003 and I probably was on it no later than 2005 or 2006. I suspect that I was probably on it in college, Definitely in 2006. But active the way that I am now, only this year. You know, lot of that stems from the fact that I I I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn. I had, my wife and I had our daughter in 2019, so about a year ago. She was born in November. I was at home and I was thinking, you know, I keep seeing all this content on LinkedIn and I wanna learn more about why this trend is happening and why people are taking to LinkedIn. And so I spent a lot of time on the platform in that month kind of just absorbing and learning. Then in January, my sort of resolution was to one of my resolutions was to just become a bit more active and build a personal brand. Right? You start hearing this term personal branding. Right? It's a big buzzword right now, certainly on the LinkedIn network. So I wanted to learn more about it and see if I could sort of take a crack at establishing one. I I went all in and I I I sort of fell out of love with with Facebook and Instagram, kind of just post pictures for my family to see my my kids and whatnot. But LinkedIn was a place where I was genuinely finding meaningful information, you know, not just Forbes articles, right, like people, thought leaders, people that, know, you've got Gary Vaynerchuk posting stuff on LinkedIn all the time because he's talking about how massive the organic reach is on that platform. You know, that's where you sort of go to find information about things you're passionate about. I think for people like myself, that's really useful. Want to be learning about things that I'm passionate about, things that I care about. I like the professionalism element of it because it sort of is self regulated. Right? Because people don't wanna see people don't want their employers to see them being jerks online. Right? Cats. And and yeah. And so there's a there's an element of, you know, it it levels up the content a little bit. Now that's not to say that there isn't plenty of clickbaity spam content that's that's permeating the the platform, but for the most part, you know, you just unfollow people or, you know, you can get rid of that stuff. And so you can really curate your feed on LinkedIn to be pretty relevant to topics that you care about and people that you care about, which which for me was really, really beneficial this year. Strategy wise, you know, I I coined a phrase, which is which is pace equals growth, and that's patience, authenticity, consistency, consistency and empathy equals growth on LinkedIn. And and you know, putting out content, not overthinking it too much, right? I think that was something that I struggled with a lot in the beginning. Oh, what are people going to think and and not having to worry about dealing with likes and things like that. Like, it's so you see all these people that are getting hundreds or thousands of reactions and you're like, I want that to happen to me. But you you have to have patience. Right? It has to happen, gradually and you have to kind of establish the things that you care about and establish your voice. And so that's very much what twenty twenty has been for me. It's been a bit about finding out, you know, really what are those things that I care the most about from business standpoint. And for me, it's it's it's emotional intelligence, it's leadership and empathetic management, you know, the the human in human resources, and and it's it's personal branding and and LinkedIn connection and connecting with other people. Those are the three things that I kind of have honed in on myself this year and all of my topics in some way shape or form the content that I create relates to those. I've posted I think 535 posts in a in a year, which doesn't feel like that much, but I can't I guess it is. And it's just, you know, it's I I say it's like replace Netflix and chill. Like sometimes I'm just LinkedIn and chill or I'll be Netflix and chilling and I'll have LinkedIn on in front of me and I'm doing two things at once and sort of digesting content. So it's become a hobby for me this year and that's what's fun about it.

Mark Evans: Yeah. And I think what's what's interesting to me is the content creation side. And you mentioned the fact that you've you've posted more than 500 times. And from the outside looking in, for a lot of people, that's astounding. They're like, you spent that much time. You wrote that many words for LinkedIn. And when you're in the midst of it and you're having these conversations and you're posting things that you don't really like sometimes you snap something off and sometimes it's a big thing. And I just find LinkedIn to post on LinkedIn to be relatively easy. Now keep in mind, I'm a writer by profession. I spent fifteen years as a reporter, writing 200 words for a LinkedIn post is pretty easy. I can breathe and write 200 words. Now whether those words are any good, that's something that other people can decide. The content creation side of it is really interesting to me because you've got people like Dan Sanchez that advocate that you've got to post every single day. And not only that, you've got to post more than once a day. That's a lot of work. I do curious about your approach to content and and what do you think about how people should approach content overall? Because if you're not really into LinkedIn and someone says you got to post every day, that can be pretty intimidating. At the end of

Liam Darmody: the day, I think it's really about not overthinking things. It's hard because there is that stigma associated with it. People think about LinkedIn differently than they think about Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat. Right? You know, back in the day, people would post multiple posts to Facebook every day and they wouldn't think twice about it. But there's all this pressure on on people to to create the right content or content that their employer approves of or whatever. And so I think that that is a big piece of it. Right? You want to be able to figure out what you I I call it finding your why. Right? Like why are you trying to be on LinkedIn? What are you trying to accomplish? What are your expectations? Do you want to be a thought leader in your space that just, you know, is constantly cranking out content related to that and and then getting followers? Do you wanna just showcase how you think for potential employers to get more familiar with you, you know, if they're interested in learning about Do you just want to have a place to go and digest information? That's okay too. Right? There's no right or wrong way. I think that's the thing. Right? Like, it depends on what your goals are and what your expectations are. And for me, what I noticed is that I started to use LinkedIn as a as an infotainment source. So I would learn information on LinkedIn. I'd I'd learn different perspectives about business and things that I care about. I'd learn from other people That sort of ended up getting me entertained. Then as I was on here, you know, engaging with people's content, you know, the comment section of of a of a person that has a large following is typically a pretty fun place to be. You can see all sorts of different perspectives. It's literally like a conversation. Right? I I kind of view each post on LinkedIn as this like little micro networking event, so to speak, or micro conversation. And and and that leads to inspiration. Right? So you start thinking, oh, I like this I like this topic. Then I'll just have my running list of notes and it's like, I'll I'll write about this someday or I'll write about this someday. And because LinkedIn has that like try not to over post, you know, there's all that speculation about the algorithm and whether it dings you if you post too many times, etcetera. People think, okay, well, once a day, maybe twice a day, but not too much more than that. Whether that's true or not, I have no idea. You're able to sort of think about, okay, well, I'm going build a backlog of things that I want to post about as the inspiration hits. I always advise people to really understand what their why is. Find your why, find your inspiration, find your voice, and then find your tribe. Let the rest take care of itself.

Mark Evans: That's great advice. One of the things I wanted to ask you about is the biggest lessons that you've learned about LinkedIn this year. And for me, it's about conversations because I think there's such a focus on connections and building up that connection count and figuring out whether I should accept connections or who I should reach out to. The thing that I learned that sometimes gets lost within the whole LinkedIn growth phenomena. It's the fact that turning connections into conversations. And it's a simple act of reaching out to somebody like you and saying, hey, Liam. I love what you're doing. I love the kind of insight that you're offering about how to use LinkedIn. Would you be open to a conversation? What has amazed me this year is people's enthusiasm and their willingness to talk and I have yet to be turned down by anyone. One person turned me down and I knew that person and I was totally surprised. Was like, Well, this is not the way that the game is played on LinkedIn. My lesson to anybody is Boo. Yeah. Boo. Exactly. Don't be satisfied with connections because connections are are just one way to play the game. It's about the conversations that delivers value. So I'm curious about some of the big lessons that you've learned this year from from being on LinkedIn.

Liam Darmody: Yeah. I mean, I'm with you completely on the conversation piece. Sometimes it feels like LinkedIn is the dating site is the wrong analogy because that's the the the antithesis of what LinkedIn should be even though some men or people forget that that's the case. It is an opportunity to find and meet new people and develop relationships with people that you never would have known existed otherwise, right? I think the phenomenon is that we're no longer limited to our little bubble of who we come across coincidentally in our own geographic sphere. We now have the ability to say, oh, I I really like this person. Like, Mark Mark's content really resonates with me. I I'm gonna connect with him so I see it more often. And then we have a conversation about some stuff and we go back and forth in the DMs and like it's like a friend finder a little bit. And and I think that in the same way that when dating apps started, people were like, oh, don't wanna be online dating. Online dating. No. I'm not gonna do that. That's pathetic. But now, like, nobody would think of doing it doing it the other way. It's just the Internet helps you connect with people better. You know, LinkedIn is helping you network and build a connection with people in a different way. And I think as the world continues to evolve into a place where physical location matters less than skill, ability, and relationships, that's gonna be a pretty powerful thing for the platform. The lessons that I've I've sort of learned are are that people want to be people want to connect, people want to converse, people want to relate to other people. Some people don't but you know, most people want to have those conversations around topics that they're passionate about. You can't really get that on other platforms, right, because there's a discovery element that doesn't exist on the other platforms so much. Right? On Facebook, you're kind of connecting with people that you know and, like, you have the Facebook groups which are phenomenal actually. Like, their groups are their group functionality is way better in my experience than than LinkedIn's. You know, you are able to find people, you know, you find your tribe. That's that's sort of the coin that was was the phrase that was coined by Brian Schulman who's like the video king of LinkedIn. It's right. Right? You find a little tribe of people that you you like to talk to and and engage with and you enjoy their content and they enjoy yours and that's really great. I guess on the on the flip side of that, you know, I think you I've learned that LinkedIn is a business platform and there are a lot of people there to do business and a lot of people who are there to do business may just be putting content out or having a persona that they're they know is gonna generate revenue for their business, but that's not necessarily their intention or that they're not necessarily there to be super authentic or they're just there to sell. Right? They're not there to really make relationships. So it all depends on you go about finding people and relating to people and conversing with people and identifying what their true authenticity and their true intentions are.

Mark Evans: Yeah. I think that's the thing about LinkedIn. For people who aren't on LinkedIn yet which is I mean there's 720,000,000 people who have LinkedIn accounts, not to say that all of them use it on a regular basis. You really have to going back to your your why. Why do you want to use it and to figure out like how do you get value from LinkedIn, get the most out of the time that you're gonna spend on it, whether it's an hour a day or once a week or a couple days a week. I also wanted to ask you about something that you launched recently called LinkedIn enthusiasts. I guess you're upping your game or you're expanding your game or you're moving into new areas. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what is this thing that you've created and why did you do it and where do you hope it will go?

Liam Darmody: So, you know, Linked enthusiasts is is a is a basically a page that I created for people that are passionate about the platform like I am. And there's a lot of people like that out there and, you know, I think for me personally, LinkedIn isn't the only thing that I wanna be talking about every day. Right? That's not my identity. I care about tech startups. I care about revenue operations, sales, marketing, customer experience. Like, all those aspects of business matter to me a lot. And what I found myself sort of thinking about was, okay. Well, how much time do I wanna spend talking about LinkedIn on my personal profile page versus a page that's dedicated just to LinkedIn? All of those things come into play, right? You know, you I'm not the kind of person that creates content ahead of time. I I I write down ideas when I have inspiration, but I don't create an editorial calendar. I know people that sort of sit down on Sunday and just bang out all their copy for the week. I can't do that. I'm not that way. So, you know, I sort of got to this point where I was saying, okay, well, how am I going to actually talk about the things that I want to talk about without feeling like there's an opportunity cost associated with it? If Liam Darnady is more than just LinkedIn enthusiast guy, that's who Liam Darnady is. Right? But LinkedIn enthusiasm is part of my part of my hobbies, part of my passion and I think that's why I carved it out separately so that I could post more stuff about LinkedIn without necessarily taking over my entire profile as just the LinkedIn guy. Like that's not who Liam Darmody is. It's just a piece of me.

Mark Evans: Well, ironic thing about writing about LinkedIn is that people love commenting and engaging on LinkedIn. Right. And that you tend to get caught in this is it's like a self fulfilling prophecy. If you want engagement, you post about LinkedIn and around and around it goes. I wanna ask you one last question. Earlier this week, I talked a little bit about where I thought LinkedIn would go in 2021 and and most of it was was focused around monetization because I think Microsoft slash LinkedIn has a huge opportunity to extract more revenue from from this business as the platform grows. And some of the things that they'll that I think they'll introduce, I think video is a huge opportunity for LinkedIn. I think I think analytics for personal accounts is huge opportunity for them to add value and maybe monetize it. I'm curious about how you think the platform will evolve this year and whether monetization will be something that it will pursue and whether you expect maybe enhanced functionality. I guess a lot of people there's a lot of things that a lot of people would like to see.

Liam Darmody: I mean, I I do think that there's going to be a lot of evolution if you sort of think about it. This new path of LinkedIn, it's like being a a start a startup with 700,000,000 users, and you're trying to engage as many of them as you can. And you're trying to build as much engagement on the platform as possible when, you know, the platform wasn't really originally created for that. So your your entire user base is not really accustomed to that purpose for your platform. So there's definitely gonna be a lot of involve a lot of focus on, you know, increasing engagement on the platform, you know, the prompts that they have when you when you, you know, get a message from somebody, things like that. Like, they want to have people on the platform engaging on a regular basis. So I think you're gonna see a lot of things like that. I have to also give a shout out to Andy Foote who is, you know, mister LinkedIn sites. He is a a phenomenal LinkedIn trainer, and he had a post recently that was like his predictions for the for the next year. He's put a lot a lot of thought into the platform for probably a decade. He's got a lot of great insights. I think monetization will absolutely be a part of it. LinkedIn is part of Microsoft. Monetization is gonna be important for sure. How they do it? I don't know. And I think there's definitely plenty of avenues in which they can sort of squeeze more revenue out of the platform for sure. I hope that they are able to maintain the integrity of the communication and the relationships that are on the platform because I think that's where most companies that are in the social space fail. That they sacrifice the authenticity of the platform and the relationships in in in exchange for the ad revenue. And so I think maybe the fact that LinkedIn has been around as long as it has and is part of a much bigger organization that has sort of a longer timeline and a longer runway will give them the unique ability to approach that really cautiously, take it the right way, and make sure that they're balancing, keeping people that are interested in the platform engaged and also making money at the same time.

Mark Evans: Okay. One final obvious question. Where can people find you online and HomeSnap as well?

Liam Darmody: So, linkedin.com/in/linktoliam is my URL for my profile. Leiamdarmody.co.co is my website, just a personal website. And, the LinkedIn enthusiast page on LinkedIn is is where I'm going to spend all my time nerding out about LinkedIn going forward.

Mark Evans: Awesome. This has been a great conversation. Like you, I am totally all in when it comes to LinkedIn. I've seen tremendous ROI this year and anybody who's not capitalizing on his potential is missing out on something really amazing. Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Liam, visit marketingspark.co/blog. If you have questions, feedback, would like to suggest a guest, wanna learn more about how I help b to b companies as fractional CMO, consultant, and adviser, send an email to Mark@MarketingSpark.co. I'll talk to you next time.