I’m a big wrap for Linkedin. It’s my jam. It’s where I am spending a lot of my time meeting new people and developing relationships. For me it’s a great platform to connect with business professionals and keep in touch regularly – either with people I haven’t met in person yet or even keeping in touch with people that I have met in real life but just want to keep engaging with after a networking event.
This article is about connecting with people that you may not have met in real life first. I just want to repeat that it’s about connecting the people – it’s not about spamming people and trying to sell them something straight away/ I have the same problems as everyone else does. Sometimes you connect with people and they will end up just going immediately to a sales pitch. They won’t get to know you. If they won’t get to know what your actual concerns are it’s not really possible that they can actually help you.
Connecting with people on LinkedIn is a simple process – it’s not necessarily an easy process. It can be time consuming but it is a simple process. There are three main areas I want to cover below
Who do you want to meet and talk to?
Before connecting with people on LinkedIn you actually have to decide who you want to connect with. There’s a couple of reasons for this – by knowing who you actually want to talk to, you know exactly how to write your profile. You know exactly how to word every section of your profile so it speaks to your target audience. Knowing who you actually want to connect with and talk to a LinkedIn also allows you to create your list of prospects that you’re actually going to reach out to and try connect with.
I like connecting with a variety of audiences – Professional Service industry people, Rotarians, digital marketers and sports management people. I like connecting with people who I can work with and also those who can teach me something and add value to me and add value to my network. Not everyone I connect with on LinkedIn is going to end up a customer but everyone that I connect with I hope to learn something from.
Write and share content to boost your credibility – make it shareable
You have to be regularly writing content on LinkedIn. You should be sharing posts and links to other articles that will be interesting for your network. You should also be writing your own long form posts. I have a strategy for this. I write a blog post on my website like this one (in fact this one will be part of my strategy.) I will write this blog post then I will go to LinkedIn and put a shorter version of this blog post – basically a summary version as a LinkedIn article – and then share that with my connections. Some people will click through the website, some people would just read the abridged version on LinkedIn I am ok with that as long as they see my content
Actually talk to people
I’m always talking to people that tell me that LinkedIn doesn’t work. Oftentimes these are people that just collect connections (this is how I like to describe it.) They will connect with anyone and everyone on LinkedIn but then never talk to them again. That’s just silly – you need to be regular connecting and conversing with people in your network on LinkedIn to actually be able to leverage the value of the network.
Don’t be one of those people that just sent a generic connection request without tailoring your introduction. It’s ok (not great but ok) to do this with someone you know really well just to establish a LinkedIn connection but it’s not ok to do this with some of these never met before. Just send them a message saying just a great to meet you thought you’d like to connect but give them a reason for connecting. Maybe look at their profile first and see if there’s a shared area of interest that you can use as a conversation starter – it might be you both support same sporting team, it might be that you both went to the same University. You could just reference shared connections – there are lots of ways to do this. After the initial connection, before the sale you should also reach out to them fairly regularly – you could share with them content that you think I may be interested in, you could share with them a blog post that you have written and ask for their thoughts, you could share with them a LinkedIn group or point out a particular discussion and ask them what their feelings are about this particular discussion – encourage them to get involved. If you have started to develop rapport – and some conversations backwards and forwards it maybe now time to either organise to catch up in person for a coffee if you live close to each other or to organise a Skype call or something similar you can’t actually expect LinkedIn to work for you if you’re not actually going to talk to people
So there you have it – another article in my 365 day blog challenge. Just some quick thoughts on LinkedIn and how I use it to grow my business. If you’d like to find out more about how LinkedIn to work for you please get in touch today