Over the years, LinkedIn has become the definitive online professional network, aiming not only to connect professionals all over the world, but also to be the main hub for information sharing between its members.
While creating an outstanding LinkedIn profile is a great way to position yourself as a leader in your industry, the real benefits of this platform begin to unfold once you’ve built a sound professional network. Connecting with your clients, prospects, industry influencers or business advocates is key for pursuing your professional goals.
LinkedIn offers a wide range of tools to help its members grow their networks and manage their contacts. To make the most of them, let’s go through these 3 steps to successful networking on LinkedIn:
1. Expand your LinkedIn network of contacts
There are several ways in which you can effectively do this:
- Make sure you connect with the people you work with every day such as clients, business partners or vendors. Also, send connection requests to people you’ve met upon attending an event or conference and reach out to the professionals you’ve been introduced to. This way you’ll always mirror your offline connections with your online network.
- LinkedIn makes it easy to find professionals that you might want to connect with through the “People You May Know” feature. Keep an eye on the constant stream of potential contacts and send one-click-connection-requests to the relevant ones.
While sending requests through this feature is quick and easy, the drawback is that you can’t personalize them.
- Import your email contacts though the same LinkedIn functionality, to receive contact suggestions. Make adjustments to the imported list before sending out connection requests to make sure you’re connecting to the people of your choice, rather than just mailing automatic invites to all email addresses. Similarly, the connection requests you send can’t be personalized.
- The Advanced People Search gives you access to a world database of professionals, tailored to your own needs. The tool offers an extensive set of filters that will serve your search purposes, without having to upgrade your membership to Premium. The tool allows you to further deepen the search based on an existing list generated on your initial selections. Don’t forget to save your search settings in order to easily apply them again in the future and also to receive alerts. Choosing a Premium package will allow you to save more than three searches.
- Reach out to people in Groups. Identify group members that would make valuable connections for your business and engage with them through discussions or messages. One major benefit of group membership is that you’re able to send direct messages to anyone in that group, without them being 1st degree connections.
- Following people is another way to extend your network on LinkedIn. Unlike a 1st degree connection that is a two-way link, Following establishes one-way contact. When you follow someone, you can see the content they post without sharing your details with them. You can, thus, learn more about their interests and current updates before asking to connect; this is a particularly helpful option when you want to learn more about a prospect before deciding to move forward.
- Make sure that your setting for “What others see when you’ve viewed their profile” in the Privacy&Settings properties displays your name and headline. This will increase your visibility and open up new doors for creating connections.
A rule of thumb for offering your contacts a valuable experience right from the beginning is to always personalize your connection requests by adding their name at the top of the invitation, how they’d benefit from connecting with you or, if the case demands it, reminding them how you met. Taking this time to personalize the message displays interest from your side and will increase the likelihood for your connection request to be accepted.
2. Manage your list of contacts
Growing your network of contacts requires effort but so does managing it. Fortunately, LinkedIn provides members with some really useful CRM features.
To ensure that you are soundly building a network of contacts, take the time to fill-in the dedicated space below the name and header right from the moment the connection was established. Click on the star to unfold the sections where your history with that particular contact can be recorded and start inputting details.
You can add notes, follow-up reminders, details of how you’ve met or tag them with different labels (more than one tag can be applied to a specific contact). Take this opportunity to segment your contacts in ways that will help you follow-up with them more easily, like prospects, clients, suppliers, industry influencers or press.
When clicking on the Connections tab of your profile, you will be able to see your entire list of contacts. To easily find your way through the network you’ve built, LinkedIn offers an extensive range of criteria to help you filter and sort through your contacts from Company to Location, Title or Tag. This feature even identifies potential duplicates.
You can further manage your contacts by exporting them to a CSV file. Note that you can only export the full name, email address, current employer and position.
3. Deliver value
Gathering an impressive list of contacts will not help you reach the results you expect, unless the people you’ve connected with see you as a valuable contact.
Here are a few ways of making sure you are delivering value to your network:
- Regularly post relevant updates or publish long-form articles. Show your expertise by sharing industry news, personal findings or Influencer material through daily updates. Also take the time to write a more elaborated piece of thought and publish it as a long-form post. Small but consistent actions like this can help you be seen as a thought-leader in your industry.
- Take every chance you can to reach to your contacts whenever something important happens in your network. The platform notifies you when one of your contacts is celebrating a work anniversary or took a new career step. In addition to these automated notifications, you can set up your own follow-up reminders for each of your contacts in the dedicated section below their picture and header. Doing this will drive the relationship forward and support you in achieving your desired goals.
- If properly managed through tags, your list of contacts will allow you to tailor your communication to specific segments. Send personalized offers or company news to a subset of your contacts through direct messages without being spammy or salesy, but rather having in mind how these can help the recipients.
- Last but not least, move the relationship forward by taking every chance to meet your contacts offline. Participating at a conference or travelling somewhere? Set up meetings and catch up in person with the people in your network. After all, networking is all about qualitative human interaction.
Valuable professional relationships are built through constant effort and technology surely helps. LinkedIn has significantly facilitated the processes of building and managing a network, but, in the end, it’s still up to you to put all these features to good use and grow your business through networking.
Learn more about how you can use your company page to grow your business and don’t forget to grab a free copy of our recent eBook: A Visual Guide to Creating a Perfect LinkedIn Company Page.