How I Grew My Boss to 30,000 LinkedIn Followers in 6 Weeks Using AI

Welcome to the Franchise Marketer podcast. I'm gonna talk about how you can create viral LinkedIn posts with AI and also how I grew my bosses LinkedIn presence to 30,000 followers in around six weeks and made him a LinkedIn top voice. Once again, using AI to help in the process plus an AI tool that can make this a lot easier for you as well. So the first things first, with LinkedIn, I think it's an amazing platform for people who work in franchising, franchise also recruitment. I'm gonna do a whole separate episode on the numbers and why and a bit of more of the how, but I just first want to talk about, you know, how to create posts that can go viral with some methods that I picked up just over the last year and a bit from taking it really seriously. So the first things first, there's an extension called Clio. Now they're updating their extension, which the new ones out in 14 days, but it's called K-L-E-O Clio. And it's an extension, which basically, you go to anyone's LinkedIn profile and you click on it and then you touch the extension in the side and you can see in order all their posts and you can rank them from who's, what are the most likes and shares, et cetera. You can see what posts have generated and let's say the most likes over the amount of time. And now when you do that, you can say, right, this post is generated 4,000 likes and then 3,000 and go in order of what's their most viral posts. And then you can analyze it. So you can look at the photo, you look at the formatting, you look at the hook, and then you can replicate it yourself either manually or what you can do is you can even screenshot it or you can copy and post, let's say the caption or the extended caption that they use. You can go to chat to your PC on an equivalent, upload it in and say, act as a LinkedIn expert. I'm trying to go my LinkedIn. I've taken this post from a big creator's viral posts. Analyze for me why and give me the format or the frameworks to why this post went successful. And then what it'll do is analyze the posts and we'll give you the reasons why it thinks it went viral. And then you can ask it to, well, based on what you know about me, if you do use an LLM a bit, can you create a similar post in a similar style, et cetera, and make it a 10 out of 10 viral posts? Give me three versions. And then what it'll do, it'll give you three versions based on that. And then you might need to tweak them a bit, but it'll do a pretty good job. And it's all depending on how much information you're giving chat to your PC. So for me, I have a project where I have a personal brand document and that's where I chat in there all the time. And then it will use that every time to then craft the post. And not everything's gonna be good. You have to then still manually edit it and you wanna try and really read it out loud and make sure it makes sense. But then that's a really good way to shortcut the manual writing process. Now, there's a lot of big LinkedIn creators who will say that it's cheating and all that sort of stuff. But if you're a time poor person or wanna grow and don't know where to start, it's a really good way to learn and a really easy way to get some viral LinkedIn posts. Now, the next thing you could, or I'm gonna actually tell you how I've done it, is Jim Penman is the CEO of Australia's largest franchise. And I've grown into probably 30,000 followers, things like nearly 31,000 in around six weeks. And that was using a similar method. So basically what I did is I set up his profile for one to convert it. In his tagline, he's the CEO of Australia. Jim's Mowing, et cetera. So he's got some great recognition there. We improved his profile picture. But the main thing for Jim was his posts. Now, Jim is a pretty well-known person in Australia. So it's definitely been a lot easier to grow his profile than just someone who doesn't have a profile or is not known at all. So not saying I'm a genius in any way in regards to how I've done it. But what I've basically done to keep it authentically in his voice, he's got a new book called "Know the Success." So I've taken that book and I put it into Chatchapiti and created a project around it called Jim's LinkedIn. In the project files, I put the book, but I've also put a whole bunch of hooks and examples of other big creators from LinkedIn, which I've scraped on their most viral posts and put them in as an Excel spreadsheet. So when I then go ask for a viral post from Jim's book, it will use that other reference material to then give me some suggested posts. Now, the way I do it with this one is everything with LinkedIn I do for Jim anyway, what I think you should do is all story-based or personal stories. I think that that works the best. If you don't know what to write about at the start, write about your personal experiences, it may feel a bit cringe or weird, but it does work. So when we do that, I go to his project file and say, "Give me three stories from Jim's book "in chapter one or what three stories "will resonate the best for the LinkedIn audience." And it'll give me three suggestions and I might say, "Well, I like post number two. "Give me three posts based on that. "Make it a 10 out of 10 "and read between a one to three grade level." And then it'll give me some suggestions and I'll take one of those, get it up a little bit and make sure I use a photo with a PS and with a repost and with a question as well to try and get some more engagement. And then that's what I'll post. So I'm gonna go a bit more detail on LinkedIn about how to grow your LinkedIn with tactics and things like that in another separate episode. But that's pretty much it. So using AI, creating an authentic voice with project files, using actual knowledge base, let's say from Jim's book, for the posts or the posts you see from Jim are from his words. They're just rewritten it in a LinkedIn, let's say viral format way. And with Jim as well, I always make sure I use a photo that's from his archive and things like that. But I don't do what you should do on LinkedIn which is engage 15 minutes, engage before and 15 minutes, engage after a sort of post and goes which is what they say not to do. But I'm gonna talk more about that in another episode. Now, if that sounds like all too much for you and that's too hard, you can use some software. Now there's a tool that I've got which I've been playing around with. I'm not a affiliate or anything for this and it's called Scribe, S-C-R-I-P-E.io. Now basically it's like your personal brand software tool. So a lot of people get people on hire people for to do their LinkedIn, which I think is not a bad thing at all. But this thing, if you don't have that money, basically, you connect up your sources with some podcast episodes you've been on. So maybe some writing, a whole bunch of different things and then that will train it to be in your voice. And then you can tell what inspiration you're like and you can follow certain accounts. And then you can create posts from your knowledge base and from your tone of voice and things like that as well. So it's got some really cool features. It's a bit buggy still, but I do think the post that I've generated for myself and it's from my knowledge base, you can do them with an LLM if you have time to train it and get in prompted and go back and forth. Whereas this thing will give you a whole bunch of draft posts based on your tone of voice and knowledge base. You'll get one or two really good ones out of it without having to prompt it. And that's the difference. It just shortcuts the prompting process and having to go back and forth with an LLM knowing what to ask as well. So it's called scrip.io. The great thing about it, which I thought was really cool is you actually can do an interview with the AI for your personal brand. And AI will ask you questions about yourself and then it will take that and then convert it into text. And then you can then have your posts based on your actual word. So it's not from AI or anything like that. It's from your actual knowledge. And then AI will clean it up a little bit after formatted to a LinkedIn post that knows it's gonna work as well. So it's really cool. I'm gonna have you some of these posts, but I had edited them. And the great thing about it is that it's a new sort of new tool that's been developed. I think it's really trying to make LinkedIn a little bit easier and a little bit more manageable for people who build a bunch of existing content or who know they wanna grow, but don't know what to write. So you can use your existing data to help you with this as well. So that's it from this episode. I hope you got something out of it. If you did, please drop me a line as well. I'm gonna do some lot more stuff around LinkedIn. As I said, I think LinkedIn's massively underutilized by people in franchising. Massive advantage if you're in recruitment or if you're growing a franchise brand or if you're in franchise marketing and you want your company to do a little bit something with recruitment. You can boost the founders profile and post this thought leadership ads as well. So that's something I recommend looking at. But until next episode, I hope you have a good week and hope you get a lot of out of it as well in this episode. Really love to hear from you. I'll drop a review soon. So please feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]. - But I want to talk very quickly to Joel Kleber who is a CEO, the A-I-C-E-O. Well, I don't know if he's responsible for it or he is it for the gyms group like Jim's Mowing and the many other franchises that they have. They have over 5,500 franchises from a gyms group. He's online. Joel Kleber, good morning and thank you for getting up nice and early Joel. - You know, I appreciate the interest. Thank you. - It is a fascinating thing because I was reading a bit about your backgrounds. Fascinating on the basis you came through a lot of homes as a kid. Where did that fascination start with technology for you? - Well, I've been a gyms for a long time and you know, Jim obviously getting a bit older now. We always get the question with succession plans. - Yeah. - So, you know, what happens if Jim passes away, et cetera. And over the years, Jim and I, we've done a lot of content, a lot of podcasts, videos. We would do a lot of media. So I thought, well, now we've got technology which can actually make use of that content. So basically you can ask this AI avatar of Jim, you know, a question and it'll give you pretty much a 100% true answer to what he said from all this content over the years. So it's a matter of, you know, preserving his legacy. You know, how can we get, you know, what would Jim's and his situation and that we can have a really accurate answer now based on all the content and all these interactions from over the years. - Just give us an example, Joel, if you can for those listening right around Victoria and South Australian to Southern New South Wales right now, what's that going to mean for people maybe that might already be working as part of your group? - Well, basically, you know, we already have a lot of use cases. So if people go to our website, we have a chat with the Jim function on there. And basically you can engage a chat function and click a video. And then what you get is you get a video avatar of Jim, which is pre-recorded. And then in real time, you can ask it a question and these virtual digital avatar will give you an answer back based on all of his content over the years. And the unique thing with this one is that it's not taking an answer from any external sort of places. A lot of these AI chat bots, you know, they make up answers all the time. This is all from music content. So basically it's converted, you know, all his video and audio books and stuff to around 1.3 million words. And the answer that you get from that 1.3 million word knowledge base. So it's 100% accurate to Jim so that, you know, something ever happens or, you know, he's not around. We can ask, you know, Jim doing this situation, you get a really fairly accurate answer. And a lot of companies in America, a lot of the venture capitalists and big people over there start using these sorts of things and create a digital mind for themselves. So that people don't know, you know, can't get on to whatever they'll ask their digital version of them and they can get a fairly accurate answer. - Joel is resistance useless? - Yeah, pretty much. I think it's coming quick, but it's not coming as quick as people might think. But yeah, the technology moves every day. Like every day there's some sort of new technology and software dropping and how can you integrate it into your organization? It's quite scary how quick things are moving and it's a bit of a gold rush at the moment. But yeah, you've got to try and move with the times. And I think this sort of technology we're trying to use is something that, you know, in five years or six years, you'll see quite common with a lot of companies. - I think presumably, Jim, the exec group, including yourself, have probably said, look, we've got to do this. We have no choice. We're going to fall behind if we don't investigate this, examine it. - Yeah, 100%. You know, and I think, you know, how can you use your knowledge and make that, you know, there's a lot of knowledge and stuff from over the years, like even yourself before the interviews you've done over the years, how can you actually convert that knowledge into something that data that people can then actually access? So that's the key. Because we've done a lot of content with Jim over the years, like we've written a lot of books and we've done mountains of podcast and video interviews. Now that's all been converted into sort of digital mind and people can access that anytime and get at 100% that answer. But this technology is not just used for CEOs and authors and stuff, it's used for people who might be about to pass away and stuff and they can upload their thoughts and things into a digital brain and people can access it. There's a whole bunch of different use cases for it that's coming out. So it's, yeah, in the future, you probably will have everyone will have their own sort of digital mind before their thoughts and all their things they've done over the years that people can access anytime. - Hands up still only really investigating it for the first time, maybe in the last few months. It initially feels weird, but then after a while, it actually, it seems, it makes sense. - Yeah, it does, but it does. I think as the technology gets better. So quite now the video avatar, when you engage, you literally get Jim staring at you with a video call into you. It's a little bit stiff still, but that's going to get a lot better as the technology improves. And within a year or two, it'll be quite seamless. But we've already had the use cases for us have been quite interesting. We've actually got franchisees and people who maybe can't get onto this a poor person in the day. They actually asked this a question instead 'cause I can see the conversations on the back end. It's quite amazing how long people actually spending and how accurate the answers are they're getting back with it. So it's from a support point of view as well. It's been quite good for us. And that wasn't the intention of us originally, but that sort of been a secondary thing we're sort of finding at the moment. - Where to next, Joel? If you had that little crystal board, you're going down to the next five years. - Ah, the next five is very, very hard to say. I think a lot of companies are going to try and implement AI as much as they can. But I can say that I think, there's a lot of research showing that if companies, people know that you're using AI for voice calling on these voice agents and things like that, it puts them off as well. So I think even though it is the next big thing with organizations and how they can integrate AI to sort of, I guess, reduce head counts and all that sort of stuff, I think people are going to sort of push back against it and sort of some of the stuff is already saying that, people don't think positively of a company who overly use it or know if they're using like AI voice agents and things like that. So there might be a bit of a push back against it, but it's quite exciting times. It's hard to predict and it's moving so, so quick. It's very hard to keep up. - Don't you wish you were going to be around the next 45, 50 years? You probably will be. - Yeah, we'll see, but yes, even if you're not, you know, you can have your own digital mind and you can sort of live forever now if you have these sorts of things available to people. - I'm trying to work out how I can get a couple of numbers up on the races over the weekend, Joel. - Well, you know what? You can ask AI, you know. - Yeah, thanks. - Put the tracks from the chat to see what comes up. - Great to talk. I hope we talk again, Joel, from time to time. - No, thanks. Appreciate it. - Chief Marketing Officer of Australia's largest franchise. Franchise, this is Jim's group. - There you have it, a quick little interview on 3AW about the AI gym. I have to get up at 5 a.m. for that one as well. I'm just basically in nobody. So I have to take what I can from the way of personal branding. And I think I'm just doing interviews where you can online, no matter what time of day or night is a good thing as well to get yourself out there too. I will talk some hacks about getting your own media. There are some really cool things you can do, a little hacks. We're finding people on X and LinkedIn with journalists, but I'll talk about that in future episodes. But until next episode, I hope you enjoyed it. Please leave me some feedback or leave a review. If you do want a console, click a link in the show notes.