The Playbook for Growth on LinkedIn with Rich Swerbinsky

Rich, the Executive Director of the OMBA, has over 33,000 LinkedIn followers, and he walks through live examples, simple scripts, and a weekly routine that you can immediately implement into your own schedule to build your brand and grow revenue on LinkedIn.

Originally aired live on September 29, 2026. 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 1:17

All right, let's go ahead and get started, everyone. Um, my name is Rich Swarbinski. I'm the executive director of the Ohio Mortgage Bankers Association here with a fun little 30-minute session I call the Playbook for Growth that I just like to do monthly as a nice little benefit for our members. I am a huge LinkedIn nerd my whole career, decades. Um, and I I like to always say, I'm not a social media, I'm on no other social media outside of LinkedIn strategically. And it has been honestly the best thing I've ever done in my career. I mean, really more than anything I've done, just committing to this platform, committing to staying present, using it to make connections, to learn, to engage in conversations, to perform strategic outreach to people. Um, man, it has been everything. And as we go through this, um, if anybody has any questions, just throw them in the chat. I'll try to jump over and check the QA as often as I can. So, but uh gonna go through today. This is the condensed version of like a 70-minute presentation that I've done, God, probably 20 or 25 times this year in front of audiences. Um, so trying to extract what I think is the most critical elements to having strong digital professional presence. And we're gonna go through that all here today. So there we go. So, what will you leave with at the end of the 30 minutes? And and I I say to everybody when I when I speak to people on this topic, like this can be an insanely impactful 30 minutes for you if you allow it to be. You know, the the the reality on things like this when you sign up for a session like this or attend a session like this, at the end, everybody's rah-rah. Oh, hey, this is he's on to something here. Um and then a week later, you know, you've forgotten everything and they're doing nothing. Don't be that person. I'm begging you, please. This is fun, it's easy. Build it into your professional DNA, and man, you will just start to see the results. We're gonna go through a profile that converts your LinkedIn profile page, incredibly important. Hooks, like the opening hook of a LinkedIn post, is everything, the first 140 characters. I mean, so many times, amazing posts that get little to no impressions because the opening hook, which is all people see, remember, um, sucks. So a posting rhythm, right? How to get into a daily routine, DMs, direct messages, how to turn connections and uh, you know, engagement with your posts into actual conversations that can lead to business results that you want, AI prompts, and a seven-day plan to put this into motion. Why does this matter right now? I mean, think about it, right? Like the way that we promote ourselves in this industry, it's changed dramatically. As recently as like six, seven years ago. Think of think about how the mortgage industry and mortgage industry professionals promoted and marketed themselves in their companies. Newspaper ads, TV ads, radio ads, bagels and donuts in real estate offices, open house flyers, like almost all of that crap is gone. Almost all of it. Where did it go? Here. It's all here. People live on these things. If you've never seen what it's called an iPhone, people walk around with them in their pockets and they just stare at them all day. And if you are in business, if you're in the business of growing or building anything, how can you not be here? I don't understand it. It makes unless you're like, I got three years left, I'm done, it's over for me. Um, okay, that I get it, right? Okay, but but you got anything left in like two, three years left, and you're not working to be better on digital. To me, it's pretty short-sighted. Um, especially right now, right? I mean, the market sucks right now. Let's just be honest. I mean, it's been bad for a while, but it seems like it's just getting worse this year. So, what are the majority of your competition doing? They're crying, they're moaning, they're, you know, they're quiet quitting, they're surfing the internet. While psychopaths like me are realizing that the competition is slowing down as we go into the holiday season of a crap year. And I'm like, I I love Q4, and I love about November 10 to January 10, because the whole rest of our industry is working at about 30%. And I'm like, I already, if I'm going at 130, I mean, the the opportunity, the exposure, the traction when you come out the back end of it to me is better. So this is a time right now where everybody's chasing for a shrinking pool of transactions, where relationships, brand, what people know about you and your employer, they matter more, not less. I mean, the big keep getting bigger in mortgage, right? I mean, you have to find ways to differentiate yourself. And building strong personal brand, company brand on LinkedIn is a way to do it. Your competitors are already doing this, right? I mean, even if you're like an anti-social media person, at least you have to moat your castle. If you are not present digitally in 2026, you're kind of invisible, uh, you know, and that's just the reality of it, you know, and um and it's gonna be very, very tough for you. So uh it's real talk. So all right, so your LinkedIn profile. Anytime anybody is curious about you, anything, right? You're trying to recruit them as an LL, a uh uh potential referral partner, uh, a borrower that you're talking to about a pre-approval, the first thing they're gonna do, they're gonna do one of two things. You're gonna Google your name, first thing that'll come up is your LinkedIn profile, or they're gonna go to LinkedIn and search your name. Either way, it is gonna send them to your LinkedIn profile. The statistics say they're gonna be there for eight to 12 seconds, and you have to leave them with a crystal clear impression of who you want them to see, right? So, you know, photo is not on here because it it kind of is obvious. Like, don't have the cropped out photo from a wedding 12 years ago is your LinkedIn photo, right? You can even get AI photos now that are amazing. You can't even tell their AI. It gets better and better every day. Like 50 bucks. You upload like your 12 favorite pictures of you, and it gives you like a hundred different photos to choose from. So it's important to have a good photo. Um, the banner, uh, we'll skip the number two for a second. That's all to show up there at the top. Some people's is blank, like it's a way to put your contact info, the company you work for, where you live, you know, like a popular thing with with LOs that I like is, you know, if you live in Cleveland and you work for Huntington Bank, right? It's a nice picture of the Cleveland skyline, you know, maybe the Huntington logo, and then, you know, your email address, right? Like something like that. It does a bunch of things. It says, listen, I'm from Cleveland. Maybe you wouldn't want to brag about that. I I brag about it. Um, I work for Huntington, good brand, good name, good bank. And three, this is how you get a hold of me, as opposed to something that's blank or some generic manner. Your headline is right underneath your name. And if it says like loan officer at Huntington Bank, that's a major loss, right? Um, helping families into homes for 25 years, certified mortgage banker, Huntington Bank since 1996. Like, how much better is that than loan officer at Huntington Bank, right? So it not only does your headline show right under your name on your profile, but every time you post, it shows right under your name. The first 80 of the 100 of the 220 characters. So it's critically important. And all you have to do is work with AI to make a great headline for you. Be like, give me five different awesome headlines for my LinkedIn profile, better than what I have now. You'll love one of them. Just below the headline is your about section, and it is important to opening hook is here, is also important because you only see the first few sentences, right? So, what you put in though is you want people to click more, the same way you want people to click more when you make a LinkedIn post. You have 2,600 characters available, but the headline is what you do and who you serve. The about section is why you are better than the competition. What makes you unique in your current role, in your past role, your experience in the industry? What have you done? Do you serve on boards? Are you involved in the community? Like it is who you are, and it is critically important. Because, you know, again, when people, those eight to 12 seconds that I mentioned, how are people spending that time? They're quickly looking at your picture and your banner, they're reading your headline under your name, and they're reading your about section. That's the 10 seconds. So that's what everybody's gonna see. So it's important to have those good. And then some sort of call to action at the bottom of your about section, be like, hey, and if you're you know you're looking for a great lender to help you with your first home purchase or uh, you know, to to work for, this is how you get a hold of me. So the hook is everything, right? So it's I've I've is the more and more I do presentations on LinkedIn, the more I focus on opening hook. Because I coach about 35-ish executives in the mortgage industry. Um, and I'm working with all of them on LinkedIn content strategies, right? So I am seeing in my own posts, I post 18, 19 times a week and digest and analyze all the analytics ruthlessly. But I'm doing the same with my coaching clients. And it has really, really impressed upon me the last three years the importance of opening hook. The first, you know, 140 characters of the post, right? And every single time I have a client that's like, oh my God, I finally made the post about blah, blah, blah, and was so excited and got 200 impressions. It's always opening hook, right? It you have to extract the most interesting part of the post, even if it's in the middle from two from the middle and into the beginning, or or in addition to the middle in the beginning. Um, and you know, you see the hooks that die part. Like, this is what you don't want to do. Stuff that sounds like AI, stuff that sounds like corporate crap. Um, I'm excited to announce the humble brag stuff, you know, things everybody knows or agrees with, right? It's and then you see the hooks that work, right? The like starting mid-story, like she bought her home at the worst possible time. Here's how the story got better. Or, you know, here's the silver lining to this story, right? People love specific numbers. I do a lot of LinkedIn content with just stats on the mortgage industry. People love numbers, they love tangible numbers, right? You see this here. Same market, same rates. One LO 40 mil, the other 15. I want to click more. What's the difference between the two? Right? This is building the intrigue to make people click, quick, click that more link. I almost quit this business last year. Rate isn't why borrowers switch loan officers, like a contrarian take, right? You want to get people's attention and you want to make them click on the more link. I, the number one AI prompt I use, and pretty much every post I make is, you know, suggest five potentially better opening hooks for this post, taking a completed post and putting it in Clog. Um, and you know, I'd say like half the time my hook is the right one, but the other half the time it's not. And the difference in opening, it could be the difference between like 200 impressions and like 20,000. I kid you not. So these are some of the numbers around LinkedIn, right? You can make posts up to 3,000 characters. Um, and I do a lot of 28 to 2,900 character posts now because I'm writing on like more complex industry things a lot of times. Like I'm writing posts just because I'm so seasoned, I know what's gonna perform on LinkedIn. Um, that so if I'm making a post that I know is going to perform well, right? If I'm making a post about Nex's business model potentially not being legal, UWM running out of money, um, FICO vantage something. Like I know those are gonna do good. I'm trying to make the post as long as I can. Because what determines how many people see your posts? Number one is do they did they click the more link? How many people are clicking the more link, right? If in the first hour of a post being live for you and more than normal people are clicking the more link, it's gonna start showing it to more people. Once they've clicked the more link, that's not the end of the analytics that the LinkedIn algorithm is looking at. How long do they stay on your post, right? The longer they stay on your post, the better your future content is gonna be. Not only did they click more, but they dwelled on this post for like 90 seconds. That's why I use a lot of images in my posts. Sometimes maybe the opening hook won't get the person to click more, but the image will. Or maybe just stopping to look at the image, those extra one or two seconds, like it all adds up, right? So I'm not saying make every post, you know, 2,800 characters, but if you have one you know you are reasonably certain is gonna do great, then that it becomes a small advantage because it's gonna take them longer to read it. Even if they just skim, it's gonna take them longer if they're skimmers and don't read anything fully. Sweet Spot though, you know, is you know, in that like kind of I'd say 1700 to 1900 character length. Um, comments, you can have 1,250 characters. And on connection request notes, it's 300. So um just some numbers that I like to throw in here because um people don't know this stuff. The content mix that works. I love this slide. Like a lot of people are like, what do I talk about? I don't know, you know, I don't know what to post on LinkedIn. Well, there's a lot of stuff to post, and there's some ideas here inside the graphic, but I coach people in a 50, 30, 20 content mix. What the hell does that mean? Right. So if I'm making 18 posts a week, it's two every day and a third some days, like half of my content is nothing but just value, right? Um, and humor. I use a lot of humor. Humor is value. Entertain, inform, educate, right? Um, insight. Um, so just providing value. This is what's going on in my local housing market, right? Hey, the Fed meets on Thursday. This is some things to keep an eye on. These are the big economic economic numbers coming out this week that could really move your rate sheet. Um, you know, hey, this is an experience I had with the borrower where we were able to, you know, take them and work through complex situations to put them in a home. I didn't think like we were going to be able to, right? 50%, just completely selfless value, no sales, just pouring into your feed. It's the biggest advice I could give on content. Outside of be consistent. Be consistent and be selfless, right? Just providing value for your network. Well, what is my network? What is value? AI. I'm a loan originator at Huntington Bank. My audience is real estate agents, other referral partners, LOs. I'm trying to recruit, my own colleagues and potential home buyers, B to C as well. Um, give me 50 ideas of posts that would be of the most value to this audience. There you go. Like 15 of them might suck, but you know, I'll do a lot of like, oh, I like number one, three, eight, fourteen, seventeen, twenty two, twenty six, and thir one. Start a new list with those and give me 20 more post ideas along those lines. Being good at AI is so important to being good at content. I I say it on every one of these. I truly believe the two big, if you are in the business of growing, building, selling the two biggest superpowers in business going forward, be better than 95% of the world at AI and be great at making content. And they're highly correlated. So 50% value, 30% human. What is that? These are human posts, like you know, team pictures, paying homage to a boss or a former boss that that had value to you, stories from your past, um, wins, losses, the you know, the person behind the title, um, just human aspects, right? Your personal brand falls in here, right? Like it's important to build personal brand. I, as a non-social media person, it took me a long time to embrace this, and now I'm seeing it so clearly how important it is. And anybody that follows me, you see how I do it. I'm not, you know, taking pictures of my food or my, you know, it's or my kids. Nobody even knows really anything about my kids. It's, you know, teen parenting in general, pets, food, sports, AI, emerging tech. Like these are things I love to talk about that are not mortgage. And people love that stuff more than the mortgage stuff. It gets people to read my mortgage stuff. And then 20% direct, right? Um, the ask for the business, right? But but do it subtly and in the side door and not salesy. And after giving four posts of value before that fifth one is an ask that is done the right way and creatively, right? Give, give, give, give a little bit more, give again, and then ask. Here, you want to know what the rest of the world does? Ask, ask, ask, ask, ask. Nobody wants to be sold to. Right? It's just the reality. If all you're doing is showing up on LinkedIn three times a week and sharing company page crap or making sales posts, nobody is gonna read your stuff because nobody wants to read that crap. They'll read it from me because I'm giving insight and humor and pet pictures and other stuff. Um, and then I kind of come in the side door with the ask. And it's not even a like sign up for my consulting, it's it's done creatively, right? Hey, I was talking with the client this morning. And so it's I believe in like what I kind of call inside out sales. You never sell, just create value and follow the warm leads. So, what to actually post in mortgage, right? I mean, we could go on and on here. There's so many different I I have a presentation that is the part two to the expanded version of this. It's called I Don't Know What to Post. 75 plus examples of posts at work in the mortgage industry. And of those 75, like 50 of them have like eight different tangents you can take off any one of them, right? Again, the beauty of AI. You don't need to be some, you know, like market expert anymore to make a Monday morning post about the big economic numbers that could move the markets this week. Because of my friend AI, right? Like, I mean, I know a lot about the markets. I still use AI to make my posts. I mean, people that say don't use AI to make social media posts, it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. It's incredible at it. The correct thing to say is don't use AI to make posts that look like AI. My AI is so trained, like if I See one little thing that looks like AI. I'm like, what is that shit doing in here? I'm like, you know, I want my stuff to sound like me, not you. Right? So it doesn't take that long to train your AI on this stuff. You just like like anything in life, you gotta want it and you gotta do it. The more you do anything, the better you get at it. AI and content are no different. And I am thanking my heavens that I've spent a lot of time on my career because it allowed me three and a half years ago to leave a job that was very well paying, that I love, to go to zero. Because I had created the flexibility and the leverage for myself by building a large following and reputation in the mortgage industry, almost all on LinkedIn. So market translations, show your work, right? Like, what do you what did you do today? Like I tell people, like, I don't know what the post. I'm like, what's the most interesting thing you did today in your job? It's almost always something really interesting, like that would make for a great post. Spotlight your people. This is an easy one, or referral partners, or some sort of business partner, like show them a little love, right? Pay it forward, right? Take a position, have an opinion on something, and just be a human, right? Like the the youth baseball game, like uh the thing you screwed up last week, something you do that you're actually good at, that you feel is like a superpower. Show the human side of yourself. So posting is just part of it. The other half is, you know, why are we doing all this, right? Like I hate social media. I mean, ironically, I'm hosting a session on it, but I love the results of it. You know, I mean, I love that, you know, it's allowed me to do what I love in my career. You know, I don't love like I have, you know, me and my girlfriend have four teenagers. I would prefer they were not on any social media, to be honest. But it's, you know, I also love money and love being better at my job than everybody else, right? Thus, I must love LinkedIn. I love, must love digital for my profession because it's like trying to win without it. It's like trying to fight somebody with your number one hand tied behind your back. So we're on the plan. This is all about growing customers and conversations and transactions and checking account balances, right? So you have to engage, like even me, right? Like I have a bazillion connections. I post more than anybody. I'm one of the most read people in the mortgage industry. Nobody is just sending me DMs and emails like, send me your consulting contract. Like, I've got to fish it out, right? Who's liking my post? Who's commenting? Who's viewing my profile, right? Look for the clues. And then a couple days later, hey, my name's Rich. I just love connecting with other awesome pros in the mortgage industry. Um, you know, if you have five, 10 minutes one day these next couple weeks, we'd love to put the face with the name. That's the same DM I've sent for 15 years. Slight variations of it. So we have to engage with people on the platform to create those conversations. What is engaging on LinkedIn? Commenting on other people's posts, replying to people that comment on your posts, sending connection requests to high value people of yours, and sending direct messages, um, using DMs to get in front of somebody, use your profile day later, send them a DM. Don't mention they viewed your profile. Just be like, hey, my name's Rich. Love meeting new people. You have five minutes, one day this week or next, I'd love to jump on a call or a Zoom. Try and then and then you kind of work, I do at least move it to individual email or text or phone. So DMs. I to this day send about a hundred DMs a day um to just decision makers at mortgage companies, and you want to know why? Because it takes about 20 minutes. And it's the most ROI, it's the biggest ROI get of any time I spend. If you send five DMs, you're not gonna get any replies. If you send 10, you might not get any replies either. If you send a hundred, you're gonna get like three to five replies. Oh, three to five on a hundred. Would you not spend twenty minutes to get three replies and maybe three meetings or five? I would. I mean, how is it only half an hour? Copy, paste, change the first name. Good morning, Joe. Uh my name's Rich. I love connecting with other uh professionals in the industry. If you got five minutes one day these next couple weeks, no, I'd love to jump on a call or a zoom. Copy, change Joe to John, to Sue, to Mary. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It works. Nobody wants to do it, right? The key to being good at sales, you have to do the things other people won't do. You have to be consistent, you have to have systems, and you have to do the things you don't want to do inherently, and the things other people won't do. And I can tell you, I've I've known hundreds and hundreds of people in this industry that are all they do is bitch, but they're not putting in the work either. So 30-minute daily habit, right? Oh, I don't have time for this. I don't have 30 minutes in my day. You have 30 minutes in your day. It's never been slower in the mortgage industry, ever. Ever. It's the slowest it's ever been. It's crickets, right? Even when it was slightly less crickety, you still have time. If you legitimately, I know you don't understand. Look at my calendar. I don't have any time. Well, look at how you're managing your time. And get rid of the 60 minutes that's the least productive and replace it with this. Because this is important and this works and this does build to something, right? So um, you know, you do have the time. Uh, you know, you do have the time. Go to bed a half hour earlier and wake up half an hour earlier. How about that one? There you go. 30 minutes. Discipline. Well, I don't want to go to bed 30 minutes earlier. All right, then keep doing what you're doing and have no pipeline. Um, but how do you what do you do on a daily basis, right? I I people I coach, I coach them to block 15 to 30 minutes in the morning for what I call like, comment, uh, like, comment, uh, like, share, comment, connect, right? Scrolling through your feed, getting the news for the day, liking posts. The like is a quick way to drop on somebody a little, hey, here I am. Um, and also it it affects your feed. What do you see in your LinkedIn feed? You see whatever LinkedIn thinks you're gonna have the most interest in seeing. How do you tell them that? By liking posts, right? So if you see somebody's content that you think is awesome, go to their profile and like their last 10 posts. You'll see everything they post for like as long as you keep liking them. So um send some connection requests, right? Um, comment on a few posts, maybe send a few DMs to people you'd like to meet. Um, and then start to work towards a content strategy. The results compound. It's like exercise. It really is. Like if you go out and walk the dogs three times this week in the morning for half an hour, like you're not gonna be in shape. You're gonna be in maybe slightly one percent better shape at the end of that week. You do that every day, every week for a month, then you're gonna be in better shape after a month. You start like jogging the dogs like four miles a morning, four times a week. You do that for a month, do that for two months. Being good digitally professionally, so much like exercise. It creates ancillary benefits and it is it compounds upon itself. AI as leverage, not a replacement, right? Some ideas on prompts for ideas for LinkedIn posts, summarizing complex news stories to get a post you can make, connection request, language. Oh my, AI is so good with social media. It just makes everything better. And then what do real results look like, right? This is a real story of a five-person bank mortgage team that I've now coached for over a year. Um, and these are real numbers, right? This is real, real numbers. I mean, it's I'm I'm telling you that this works. There's very few things in life where I can sit here and say, I know 100% for sure this works. It does. Just most people are not disciplined enough to stay consistent with it. This is way funner and way easier than exercise. It's way funner and way easier than almost every other business def activity. People just want to make excuses, eliminate the excuses, commit to it, and realize that it's gonna take a couple months, like anything in life. You know, if you're just you want immediate results, then you know it's not gonna work for you. It's not realistic. So some stuff not to do, right? Like being just overpromotional, the flyers, the posting. This is this is me with real exercise where I'll go crazy for like two weeks and then do nothing for two months. And then you gotta kind of start over, right? Like, don't do that here. The black hole ignoring comments and messages, corporate crap, corporate buzzwords, thrilled to announce, humbled and honored. Like, who talks like that? Come on. Um, the broetry post where you know every sentence is its own line. Like, who does that? Like the LinkedIn nerd community, oh you know, space your like that's it's idiotic. I I the one sentence per paragraph thing is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Uh it's it's just it screams AI, too. So your next seven days, right? You want to implement this, right? Just get started, right? Fix your profile. Two posts this week, one value to your feed, one human, right? Make sure it's got a good opening hook. Start commenting and connecting with people on a daily basis, and then watch the analytics, right? Posts that are doing better than you thought. Work with your AI to deduce exactly why. Posts that do worse than you thought, it's almost always opening hook, but figure it out and don't do that as much. So, but good stuff. That is the condensed version of this presentation. Um, if anybody has any questions, I am the easiest human, honestly, in the mortgage industry to find. Um, email, DM, I'm on LinkedIn constantly. Um, OMBA. Yeah, you can't not find me. I love following up with people that have been on these presentations. So if you have any questions, shoot me a DM, shoot me a text, shoot me an email, and I'll help you, you know, kind of get from point A to point B. So I want to thank you guys for taking 30 minutes out of your afternoon for this session, and I hope you guys got something out of it. All right. Have a great afternoon, everyone. We'll see you on the next one.