How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

written by Houston Golden
Founder & CEO, BAMF Media
May 10th, 2019
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We are all about automating your presence on LinkedIn as a whole.

What if I told you could automate the growth of a Facebook Group using LinkedIn?

Even the process of acquiring customers?

Because you can.

I’ve done it. 

Whether you’re working in software, high-ticket services, or e-commerce, this will work for you.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to automate rapport-building with your audience, get them to take action, then sell them on your product or services. Once you’re done reading it, send it to your marketer so they can set this up for you or implement it yourself. 

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Create a 2nd LinkedIn Profile or Use Your Own

A 2nd LinkedIn Profile is against LinkedIn’s Terms of service. To avoid the LinkedIn police, don’t use the same name. Use a nickname. Now if it’s your actual profile, then it doesn’t matter.

The reason you’d want to use the 2nd profile is if you’re starting a second company, have filled up the connections on your first profile, or want to just test this process out.

Either way, you’ll need to start with optimizing your profile.

When people look at your profile, they decide whether you’re worth connecting with in several seconds.

These are the questions that go through their head when making this decision:

Do they look like a domain expert?

Do they look like a leader?

Can they help me?

If you can trigger a “yes” to each one, then you can connect with venture capitalists, Fortune 500 founders, and thought leaders – at scale.

It starts with the headshot because people mentally digest pictures before they read.

You don’t need anything over the top. As long as the viewer believes you put in the effort to take a professional headshot, then you’ve increased your add-back percentage.

What’s your add-back percentage?

It’s the percentage of the connection requests you send out that get accepted.

To take it up a couple of notches, ideally, you should have a picture of you smiling. The next step is optimizing your cover photo. There are three photos that will increase your add-back rate:

  1. You with a relevant influencer in your industry
  2. You speaking in front of prospects
  3. You at a local landmark (only works if you’re connecting with people in your city)
, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

Once your viewers finish judging your headshot and cover photo, they’ll read your headline.

The more thought leadership you can portray here, the higher increase you’ll see in your add-back rate. This doesn’t mean writing “Thought Leader” in your headline. You need to list tangible accomplishments or awards, preferably with numbers; otherwise, people won’t believe you.

If you’re lucky, they’ve given a check mark to your headshot, cover photo, and headline.

Now they’re reading your bio.

This is your opportunity to get them to click-through to your landing page. The biggest mistake I see from almost everyone on LinkedIn is lack of specificity. I don’t know what they do and how they can help me. If you can’t state your business proposition in two sentences, then you don’t have a business.

For example, take a look at my bio:

“We drive ROI for growing companies using cutting-edge growth marketing and growth hacking tactics. We’ve worked with companies like TEDx, Mixmax, Voo, LawTrades, Book in a Box, Deputy, and Autopilot.

Services include B2B growth hacking, PR hacking, chatbots, FB ads, SEM, growth strategy, personal brand management, and marketing automation.

We also manage a community, Badass Marketers & Founders, which has over 15,000 members. You can request access here: https://growth.chat/fbcommunity

Want to work with us? Shoot me an email at [email protected]

For all speaking inquiries, please visit: bamf.com

For more information about me, please visit: bamf.com

On my free time, I pursue my passion for understanding psychology and neuroscience, especially with how they play into creation, innovation, and social media.”

If the copy works, then why change it?

I have the same copy under my first job title.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

It doesn’t end here. You need to optimize every part of your profile.

Make sure you have a logo for each company you’ve worked at. If there’s no logo, viewers will assume the company didn’t exist.

If you’ve done everything listed, then your profile is optimized.

You’re now ready to expand your network.

Step 2: Connect to Your Target Audience

To connect to your target prospects on LinkedIn, get a Sales Navigator account. This will allow you to connect with your prospects at scale without getting banned by LinkedIn. Then download the Chrome extension, Linked Helper. Next, use the Connect feature of Linked Helper to send 175 connect invites to your prospects every day. No more as you’ll get your account banned.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

If you’re sending 175 connection invites/day, don’t use any type of sales message in your personalize connection request. This runs the risk of getting your account banned. Instead, use a message like below:

“Hey {firstname},

I’m looking to connect with fellow authors in New York. Looking forward to your updates. Cheers!”

The second important factor of not getting banned is keeping your sent requests under 1,600.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

To check if they’re under 1,600, click on My Network then Manage all. From here, click on Sent to see the number of sent requests you have.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

If you have over 1,600, then withdraw them by a hundred at a time. I’d wait several days without doing automation before withdrawing. The reason is not everyone is active on LinkedIn all the time so it may take them a couple of days to accept your request.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

Once you have requests automated and understand when to retract them, then you need to know who you’ll send them to. It’s easy to just plug-in your target prospect in Sales Navigator. You may get 10,000 results on the first try. Here’s the problem with this type of search: LinkedIn only allows you to hit 40 pages per a Search Query – that’s less than a 1000 people. So now you’re stuck with an extra 9,000 that’ll be hard to connect with.

To solve this problem, split your prospects by city or state. This way you can connect to more of these individuals with better personalized messaging. For example, now you can include the city name in your message. This will increase the chances of them accepting.

In the instructions I send to my virtual assistant, I use a Google Doc with the different cities I want to run search queries for.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

Now that you have the automation side down, the next step is to rock ‘n’ roll with an engaging content strategy.

Step 3: Repurpose Content at Scale

Niche-relevant pictures of quotes perform well on LinkedIn and in Facebook Groups. Depending on your niche, you can often find this content online already. For example, I want to connect with fiction authors at scale so I research influencers in the market whom they follow. I find Grammarly and with further inspection, I notice they have a ton of content I can repurpose from their Instagram.

I select the URL of each picture I want to use based on engagement and how relevant it is to my audience. I use the tool DownloadGram to get the PNG version of these pictures. Next, I ask a freelancer to remove all the Grammarly logos on the pictures and replace them with logos from our company. I do this because they’re pictures with quotes – not content to be taken seriously.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

I want the content to have variety, so I include long-form status posts. I take one of the hundred outlines from my Copywriting Bible book (entirely free), then change it up for the current audience I’m adding to my LinkedIn network.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

Here’s an example of an outline:

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

Here’s an example of it changed to a new audience (e.g. authors):

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

See how is that was?

The next thing you need is a posting schedule. If you have 30 – 40 pictures and 100 viral outlines, then you have enough content for a year – at least.

Your posting schedule could look like the one below:

Monday – Motivation picture/status

Tuesday – Grinding picture/status

Wednesday – Comic relief picture/status

Thursday – Appreciation picture/status

Friday – Gratefulness picture/status

Feel free to adjust it according to your audience’s content preferences.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

Keep in mind, pictures still need great captions. A little something to provide context like the picture below. The caption doesn’t have to be directly related to the picture. As long as the message from the caption overlaps a little with the picture quote – you should be fine.

Now you’re nurturing your audience. Once they know you and like you because of your content marketing skills, it’s time to reach out.

Step 4: Run Rapport Campaigns

Want to build a ton of rapport with your audience before you reach out to them? Here are a couple of easy ways. One is to have a virtual assistant find a positive article about each person’s company. It only takes a few seconds to plug-in the person’s name into Google News to pull up positive press pieces.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

Now you can reach out to them including a note that says,

“After I connected with you on LinkedIn, I came across this article about your company, Engagio. Great to see people in my network making a positive impact. I couldn’t help but reach out because of [x] and [y].”

Even if you’re reaching out to authors who don’t work for companies, you can still include a note of personalization. In this case, I have a virtual assistant find one of the books they’ve written so I can include it in my personal note. They usually have the name of the book on their LinkedIn or, at least, a link to it.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

For example, this author has a link to their book on Amazon.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

You want to send these rapport messages through email to your prospects. LinkedIn messaging isn’t scalable if you want to hit thousands of connections because it’s far easier to get banned than using email.

To get everyone’s email from your LinkedIn contact list, go to Settings & Privacy, then under Privacy select Connections and click Request archive.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

This will give you all their emails.

Before you send out an email rapport campaign to them, upload the email list to Facebook Ads Manager as a custom audience so you can run ads to them on Facebook and Instagram. Ideally, the ads will be positive press pieces you’ve been mentioned in, testimonials, company culture stories, or clips from speaking engagements.

Sometimes I’ll take one of the better performing LinkedIn posts I’ve written, then reuse that copy for an ad.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

Here’s an example post below where I took the same copy, then use it for a Facebook ad with a different picture.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

Once you’ve hit your custom audience with creative ads several times over, it’s time to reach out via email. This way, once they get your email, they’ll have already seen your content on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

Step 5: Email Prospects at Scale

Understanding how to email prospects at scale is a crucial skill. It will enable you to kick-off your Facebook Group with – possibly – 3,000 plus members. Enough to make you look like a thought leader in your niche.

Step 1:

Purchase three Mailshake accounts for sending bulk personalized emails with sequences.

Step 2:

Sign-up for a Google Apps account and create six different email addresses tied to one or two domains. Start by sending out 20 emails/day from each account for the first week. Then bump it up to 50 the second week. Then you’ll be sending 150/day in the third week. Make sure to not overlap your email sending because you’ll be using sequences. This is a quick way to get banned.

Step 3:

Create email sequences to join your Facebook Group.

Here’s my exact copy:

“Hey [first name]

I noticed we’re connected LinkedIn. I came across this article about your company, [company name]. Great to see people in my network making a positive impact.

For this reason, I wanted to personally invite you to a founder Facebook Group I run that’s very active (5,000+ members). 

The Founder’s Facebook Group is moderated by a few of the best, so it’s invite-only.

Our moderators:

  1. [Credible person]

  2. [Credible person]

  3. [Credible person]

You can join the Facebook Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/growthmarketers/

If you want to know more info, feel free to reply.

Cheers,

Houston”

If they don’t open the first email, I automatically send a follow-up email two days later that’s the same except for this line at the beginning:

“Hey [first name]

Wanted to ensure you saw this email from the other day.”

This works well because the chances are they forgot the original value proposition or never saw it.

Here are the responses I receive from this type of cold email:

“Thanks for reaching out! Glad to see you’ve been building this great community. I just requested to join your FB group and look forward to connecting. If there’s anything I could do to help out in any way, please let me know.”

Hi Houston!

Thank you for your email, I joined the FB group ;)”

“Hi Houston,

Thanks for the invitation!

Looks like an interesting group. I just sent a request to join it.

Looking forward to participating in the community.”

That’s not to say a few people didn’t respond negatively to me. Out of every one hundred people I cold email, I get maybe one complaint.

The solution: don’t email them again.

Step 6: Get People to Say “Yes”

The more people get used to following instructions from you, the more likely they’ll engage with a new call to action. It starts with the first comment. Once someone invests in commenting on a Facebook post, they’re more likely comment again.

You need to get people to open up on a more personal level about what they do. To facilitate this, you need to take the first step in opening up to give others the courage to step out of their comfort zone, too.

What does this mean?

You need to write about your personal experiences and tie them into your audience’s profession. The secret: use the same strategy for LinkedIn content for your Facebook Group’s content. This way you never need to think about new content.

The next step is to leverage comments. When someone comments on a Facebook post, then reply with a question to get them to expand on their point. The more comments they post, the more invested they’ll feel in the group and to you.

Now you have a Facebook Group running at full speed.

The LinkedIn Sales Navigator Tactic

A targeted community on Facebook is a great way to increase your organization’s reach.

Here’s another more sophisticated method that works.

Facebook groups are amongst some of the best platforms to build a community that engages with each other and LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help you build one with its hyper targeted approach.

This guide will show you how you should start using your LInkedIn presence to build a targeted community. A lot of people might find the task daunting but it really isn’t. You can use your LinkedIn presence to supercharge your targeted community’s growth on Facebook.

How Can LinkedIn Help You?

Here’s how automation on the platform helps you as a whole.

  • Leads – B2B Lead Generation
    The best time to use LinkedIn is to increase your organic reach. If you follow the several guides that we have outlined about the platform, you can easily turn it into a lead generation magnet that can churn out leads on a daily basis.
  • Press – PR Outreach
    PR outreach is basically hitting up people who have networks that can get news about your products or services out there. You can use PR outreach to created target communities of people who act as journalists reporting for you and your company.
  • Investors – Outreach for Fundraising
    Who doesn’t need money? A lot of people on the platform are looking to invest in the next best thing.
  • Talent – Outreach for Recruiting/Hiring
    One of the best use scenarios for the platform is to hire talent, and this is why everyone on the platform needs to make sure that their profiles are optimised.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator is one of the most powerful tools in a marketers arsenal. This is because you can use it to look for people who fit your ideal customer profile. It has an intuitive interface and you can use its search feature to look for your next prospects.

Here’s what.

You want to be able to pick out the best filters to make sure that you’re targeting the right people.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

Geography

In digital marketing, geography is important. In the age where everything is hyperlocal, it only makes sense to market to companies that you understand from a geographical perspective. There is a lot of benefit to knowing the little idiosyncrasies that come from a location.

At BAMF, we even advocate matching your materials to the locale you’re trying to target. 

Job Titles

Don’t target everyone.

You can make connections with almost everyone, but the goal is to target people of influence. These are the people that can purchase from you, boost your credibility, and are people that you can even learn from.

Industry

Keep your searches to one industry at a time.

You will want to focus on industries that will be interested in what you have to offer. Alternatively, target those with the same specialty.

Relationship

The second and third degrees are easy targets because in a way, you’ll already have a connection to them.

Putting it all together

Say you want to target people who are highly involved in the digital marketing or internet industry, what we’d do at BAMF is to set the filters to these sample parameters.

Geography – United States – we keep it broad so that we can hit up a lot of people.

Industry – Internet – the industry we want to target.

Relationship – Second and Third Connections and group members – Second and third connections are easier to approach because you are connected to them through a common denominator.

Job Titles – CEO, CMO, Founder, Co-founder, Entrepreneur and Managing Director – you want to target people who are key decision makers. People in these positions are thought leaders, responsible for making things happen, and potential prospects.

People Who Have Posted in the Past 30 Days

Here’s what.

You only want to target people who have posted recently.

Why?

People who don’t post are either on vacation or inactive. You can survive without the former and you don’t want to deal with the latter.

Inactive people are a waste of marketing resources and it’s better to tailor-fit your campaigns to people who want to actively engage.

The language of Facebook and LinkedIn is engagement because it is a sign that whatever they are engaging with is interesting and is relevant. Also, people who are active are more likely buy into the product or service that you are selling.

Whatever you do make sure that you limit your searches to people who have posted in the past 30 days. This is the market you want and it is what is going to sustain you in the long run.

The rest are barely worth the effort if you ask us.

Start Navigating with Sales Navigator

Stick in the parameters you want to limit your search to and you’ll get your Total Results tab.

This is the list of people you want to automate emails to.

Scraping the Sales Navigator Data

Create an account with Phantombuster so that you can start using their custom APIs and nifty tools.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

Go to the Phantombuster store and look for the “LinkedIn Sales Navigator Search Export.” This will allow you to start grabbing the profiles of the search that you’ve made earlier on the platform.

While you’re at it, install the Phantombuster extension so that your LinkedIn session cookie can be automatically uploaded.

In the field labeled “LinkedIn search terms” you can paste in the URL you got from Sales Navigator.

Keep going until you can launch your scrape.

Click “Launch” at the last screen and presto, you’ve started scraping.

Email Verification

Not all of these emails will be valid, so you will want to use an email verification service.

There’s one available on Phantombuster itself.

If you are looking for very specific emails, you can use an application such as Hunter.io to help you out.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

Hunter.io is also a great way to verify the emails that you have on your list. The reason you want to verify the emails is so that you don’t waste time on inactive ones or have too many bounces coming from your mailbox. This hurts your email deliverability rates.

It has a bulk email upload feature and the first 50 emails are free, so that’s a couple of dollars saved on your end.

Start Inviting People to Join Your Group

You can either message your connections on LinkedIn or send them emails to join your Facebook group.

We use a program called Mailshake because it’s easy to create drip campaigns using the app.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

You can create customized email communication using Mailshake and we love how it has intuitive analytics that help you track your progress.

It will even give you detailed analytics on your deliverability rates and allow for A/B testing.

These emails are essential because they serve as the first touchpoint for getting them to join your group. Remember there are plenty of ways to get them to join your group. You could offer them a valuable resource as an incentive, and if they want to grab it they should join it.

These incentives could be anything from free spreadsheets to tools that help people work better.

Make sure you create email sequences because a single email won’t cut it most of the time.

You need to make sure that you have follow up emails.

Another thing that’s important is that you pay attention to your insights. It allows you to create flexible campaigns and save time and resources.

Setup Growth Lead

For LinkedIn messaging automation, you can use Growth Lead.

If you checked out our guide in the past, you’ll find out how you can send your prospects an invite to join your Facebook Messenger group and Messenger List using an application like ManyChat.

Create a Custom Audience

While you’re at it, get your brand out there as well.

Grab those emails that you have an head over to Facebook Ads manager to create a custom audience. Target this audience with ads that are relevant to their demographics. This allows you to remarket to them and nurture the leads through your pipeline.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

At this rate you want to keep your ads in line with what you have going in your LinkedIn presence as well.

Check out how Houston does it.

, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC
, How to Automate a LinkedIn Profile and Build a Facebook Group To Reduce CAC

You want your presence on both Facebook and LinkedIn to be streamlined. It’s cleaner and it allows for an omnichannel experience. This makes things professional.

Plus, it’s a great way to make yourself visible, even before or after they get your email inviting them to join your group.

Think of it as subconscious persuasion.

Leverage Your Presence

You got a following in a Facebook Group and on LinkedIn/

The great thing about all of this is that you will be able to group everyone that fits into a specific criteria into one group if you follow all our steps above.

It’s simple really.

Find the people that you want in a group, communicate with them and get them to join.

Building a targeted community on Facebook can do wonders to your growth and revenue in the long run. A hypertargeted group will allow you to create bespoke campaigns that create engagement and boosts sales.

These groups are important to any marketer. They can be used to raise awareness and stimulate engagement. You can harness a group’s reach to increase your brand’s reach.

Creating a group might seem daunting in the beginning, but after you get the momentum going it’s only a matter of time that you’re controlling in the influence.

The best step you can take is to nurture influencer relationships in your niche by offering to interview them in front of your audience. This is an excellent way to build rapport with affiliates while gaining third-party credibility. From there, you’re off to the races on how you leverage your influence. Good luck.

About the Author

The name's Houston Golden. I'm the Founder & CEO of BAMF — a company I've grown from $0 (yes, really) to well over $5M+ in revenue over a span of 5 years.

How did I do it? Well, it's quite simple, really. I've helped hundreds of business owners and executives get major traction (because when they win, we win), I tell all on this blog.

Growth hacking is a state of mind. Follow along as I explore and expose the unknown growth strategies and tactics that will change the way you think about marketing.
Connect with MeJoin the Facebook GroupFollow Me On Instagram

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6 comments

  • Avatar for Houston

    This was an excellent article, Houston.
    Thanks for sharing your experience.

  • Avatar for Houston

    Houston, as always, love readying your content. You’re clearly mastered growth hacking – while being genuine, personal, and interesting.

    Glad to have met you in San Diego since 22 Social, and amazed at how much you’ve grown so quickly 🙂 Keep it up

  • Avatar for Houston

    Houston, as always, love readying your content. You’re clearly mastered growth hacking – while being genuine, personal, and interesting.

    Glad to have met you in San Diego since 22 Social, and amazed at how much you’ve grown so quickly 🙂 Keep it up

  • Avatar for Houston

    Any reason why a you wouldn’t do this with a Linkedin Group instead of a Facebook Group?
    I assume it has something to do with higher engagement at Facebook or the ability to leverage more data?

  • Avatar for Houston

    Any reason why a you wouldn’t do this with a Linkedin Group instead of a Facebook Group?
    I assume it has something to do with higher engagement at Facebook or the ability to leverage more data?

  • Avatar for Houston

    This was an excellent article, Houston.
    Thanks for sharing your experience.

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