When I speak at conferences, I often ask, “Who thinks LinkedIn is just a job site?” Many hands go up because they’re constantly contacted by recruiters and see them everywhere on LinkedIn, and they’re correct. Recruiters are indeed everywhere on LinkedIn (95% of them use it!). However, here’s the key point: recruitment is only the 68th largest audience on LinkedIn worldwide (25th largest in the UK).
What is everyone doing on LinkedIn then if it’s not just a job site?
Well it depends on your role, but I’ve seen it used in some amazingly creative ways, so I thought I’d write a couple of blogs on just that – ways to use LinkedIn that might help you do your role as opposed to find the next one.
Here we go with the first five:
1. Sales
This is the obvious one to me, driving referrals. If you build your network right with real and genuine connections to people you know you can easily get hundreds of referrals from your free LinkedIn account each week.
You can then use your connections to help shape any sales opportunity as in the modern large sales cycles there are 7 points of contact to address so LinkedIn can really help.
2. Finding suppliers / investors / publisher / resources / whomever.
As LinkedIn is the largest professional address book in the world then it is an easy way to get a list of good potential people to help you to drive your business or interests forward.
We’ve seen it used successfully to find investors (Angel, venture capital, private equity and even crowdfunding), publishers, suppliers of all types around the world and more.
3. Recognise people when you go to meet them in a face to face setting.
One of my personal favourites. When you go to meet someone in a busy location don’t forget to look up their profile on your mobile, see their face and then match it to the person walking towards you (or not!) so you can greet them professionally.
Suggest you put your phone in your pocket before you shake their hand though, then you don’t look like a stalker 😉
4. Reading ‘the ripples’ of connection invites to identify bad news or opportunities at companies.
We’ve worked with some sharp company and Plc boards that have a quick check on whom has invited them to connect in board / Senior Team / SMT meetings.
This gives them an early visibility of upcoming bad news as often senior teams panic network, and hence you can read the ripples across the boardroom table about businesses struggling or perhaps identify opportunities to acquire competitors.
5. Research
As LinkedIn contains the profiles of both business individuals and companies it is quite easy to see what they say about themselves, the messages their sharing, whom they interact with, who people look at after them, what they say to others in public, identify any themes, ask opinion about them or of them and that is without even being connected!
One of the constant themes we’ve seen is that people always think that everyone else uses LinkedIn like they do, and this is simply not the case!
Different people, functions and industries use LinkedIn to drive out different outcomes to help them in their roles and hence this series of blogs.