Category: LinkedIn

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LinkedIn

Basic LinkedIn Prospecting Processes – 2020

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Prospecting on LinkedIn is the process of finding the right LinkedIn Members to consider moving to LinkedIn Connections and then into conversations relevant to your business or career goals.

Prospecting is not just for salespeople. There are lots of different roles in all industries where prospecting could be beneficial. Possibly for future clients, employees, business partners, resources, mentors, friends from the past, and peers to learn from.

Basic LinkedIn Prospecting is a set of practices I use to grow my LinkedIn Network and build some level of a professional relationship with my growing LinkedIn Network. These basic prospecting tasks can be used by any LinkedIn Member focused on growing their business or achieving their career goals.

Here are the six primary steps you should consider when doing Basic LinkedIn Prospecting:

Step 1 – Before starting to prospect on LinkedIn, I recommend you make sure your LinkedIn Profile is written well, telling the viewer who you are today and what you do in your role. A clear LinkedIn profile can help the people you are prospecting for to be more informed of your relevance to them and your business.

Step 2 – Additionally, building a strong LinkedIn Network with people you know, can help you discover even more people you may want to know.  This is synonymous with the 6 Degrees from Kevin Bacon story. However, it works even better. The more 1st level connections you have, the more 2nd level LinkedIn Members you can get to. Furthermore, the more relevant 2nd level LinkedIn Members you turn into 1st level connections, the more 3rd level LinkedIn Members become 2nd level LinkedIn Members. This amplifies the ability for you to connect with even more relevant LinkedIn Members.  I recommend consistently working to connect with LinkedIn Members you know. Use your ‘Rolodex’ or client list, peers, friends, neighbors, association membership lists, etc to determine who these people are.

Step 3 – Research companies relevant to your prospecting and business goals. Begin building a list of the companies, and even individuals that you need/wish to connect with. This list of companies and individuals should be a living list. You’ll remove names from the list as you disqualify them and add new names to the list as you discover new companies and individuals relevant to your business goals. You may have multiple lists based on different business and/or career goals.

Step 4 – Find relationships between your existing LinkedIn connections and the companies / LinkedIn members you want to connect with. Where possible, reach out to people you know and ask them to introduce you to the right people at your target companies, or with specific LinkedIn Members you wish to get into a conversation with and ultimately connect with on LinkedIn. I recommend asking for these introductions via either email or telephone, not via LinkedIn message.

Step 5 – Create a consistent LinkedIn Engagement routine. With a Strong LinkedIn profile and a growing list of LinkedIn Connections, engaging on LinkedIn will significantly increase the opportunity of being seen, being trusted & respected, and possibly contacted for business/career conversations.

Step 6 – Continue researching, connecting, and engaging on LinkedIn. Find opportunities to help your LinkedIn connections and to get into relevant and mutually beneficial conversations with them.

Practicing these Basic LinkedIn Prospecting tactics can help you to become more efficient with the individual activities and to be able to grow your LinkedIn Network focused on your goals.

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LinkedIn

Commit to the work, reap the rewards using LinkedIn – 2020

Hand pointing at a Action word cloud Illustration.

Using LinkedIn requires a commitment to regular activities. Yes, this requires an investment of time. It does not however have to overwhelm you.

The best way to get meaningful value from your use of LinkedIn is to commit time every day using this business tool.

Years ago I developed an activity template to help me pay attention to what I should do on a regular basis. I based this activity on approximately 15 minutes per day.

If you were to invest 15 minutes a day using LinkedIn as a business tool, could you create enough value to justify the cost?

I have proven for myself that the value is significantly greater than the cost, for me. 

However, I know that a big part of this ROI is that I invested time to become efficient using LinkedIn. I had to practice the activities to be able to execute them in the least amount of time possible.

This practice, although an upfront investment, will pay off in the long term use of LinkedIn. Don’t forego this activity.

The activity template I developed may not match exactly with what you want to do, based on your goals using LinkedIn as a business tool. 

However, the template is a good example of something you may want to work from.

I have also updated this template based on the current version of LinkedIn  Here is my 2020 LinkedIn Investment Template:

LinkedIn Investment Guidance

(Adjust as you need for your own purpose & goals)

Monday (15 Minutes)

  • Review your Feed – Don’t spend too much time here, however look at your network’s activity, paying close attention to content from or about your target audience.
  • Comment on posts that are relevant to who you are and what you do. Strive to Comment rather than Like.
  • Share posts that are clearly relevant to who you are and what you do. Always tell your network why you are sharing the content.
  • Review new LinkedIn Invites from your My Network page. Accept relevant invites and Message or Call them back and thank them for the connection.

Tuesday (15 Minutes)

  • Review new content from #Hashtags or Companies you are following.
  • Comment on relevant discussions.
  • Share a simple post that may elicit an engaging conversation from your LinkedIn Network. Make sure the post is relevant to your target audience, and not about you or your business.
  • Say hello to a few LinkedIn Members that may be relevant to what you do or who have shared new content. Use LinkedIn Messaging or better yet phone or email.
  • Review your Notifications for content and/or actions of interest/relevance to you.

Wednesday (15 Minutes)

  • Request a focused recommendation from someone you did work with.
  • Share a Celebratory or Kudos Post about a LinkedIn Member who you engaged with last week and appreciate.
  • Share a link to a book or other website articles that you enjoyed and/or benefited from. Tell you network why.
  • Review the Who Has Viewed your Profile Page to see if anyone relevant to your business/career showed up. Consider sending them an invite.

Thursday (15 Minutes)

  • Give a trusted LinkedIn Member a Recommendation. Make sure it’s meaningful and relevant.
  • Use LinkedIn Search to find other LinkedIn Members who are of interest and relevant to you. Send an invite with a personal note.
  • Invite your target audience or their influencers to a coffee or lunch meeting. Be specific and focused, don’t look for your friends, rather, look for new potential clients and/or business partners.
  • Send private messages to direct contacts and group contacts and engage in relevant conversations. Make the conversation all about them until they give you permission to make it about yourself or your business.
  • Introduce your target audience and their influencers to others on LinkedIn – This is a powerful give feature. (FYI – I routinely include their LinkedIn Public Profile URLs in my emails to my contacts when introducing them to other contacts who are on LinkedIn.)

Friday (15 Minutes)

  • Peruse New Connections and reach out to those you have not said hello to yet.
  • Check out competitor LinkedIn Company Pages and Individual Profiles.
  • Learn something new about your target audience and influencers.
  • Build a list of companies, industries, markets, etc for your Monday research.
  • Read a few of my LinkedIn articles.
  • Write a new LinkedIn article of your own, focused on your target audience, and relevant to you & your business.

If you want even more help using LinkedIn as a business tool, consider joining our
Private LinkedIn Support/Training/Coaching Group

Categories
LinkedIn

What Content Types should I use on LinkedIn?

Deciding what types of content to use in our LinkedIn posts is often a big decision for most active LinkedIn engagers. We sometimes challenge ourselves with these hard to answer questions:

  1. Should I write blog posts?
  2. Should I create videos?
  3. Should I use images and/or infographics?
  4. Should I curate content from other sources?
  5. What about Documents on LinkedIn?
  6. Should I write posts as short stories or just a few sentences of compelling text?
  7. Should I experiment with LinkedIn Polls and Events?
  8. If I have LinkedIn Live, should I do regular events?
  9. Should I write LinkedIn Articles?
  10. Is it worthwhile to use LinkedIn Kudo Posts or Celebration Posts

These are all great questions. 
However, there is no best practices or standard answer to these questions.

I help my clients answer these questions with these ideas:

  1. The more diverse your LinkedIn Network is, the more diverse content types will appeal to across your entire network. There is no single content type that will appeal to your entire network.
  2. You should use different content types to deliver different types of messages. A simple image or text post could deliver a single thought for your network. Where a blog post, LinkedIn Article, or YouTube video could speak to multiple points around a single topic. There is no single content type for all conversations.
  3. Some LinkedIn members will spend time reading long posts. Some LinkedIn members do not want to invest more than a few minutes consuming your content.
  4. On some days you may have time to write a compelling blog post or create an impactful image. Yet, we often get busy and still want to ‘give’ our network something and simple post may be all we can do today.
  5. If you are not comfortable creating graphics, videos, blog posts, or LinkedIn Articles, then don’t lead with them as a primary content type. Be good at what you are good at. However, maybe try your hands at doing something different that you could eventually see yourself doing. Idea – Curate or outsource creating the content types you are not comfortable doing.
  6. Here’s an interesting analogy. Sometimes the baby wants mushed peas. Sometimes the baby wants apple sauce and even ice cream. Feed the baby the food it wants and it’ll grow. Feed your network the content types it wants and your relationship will grow.

Regardless of what year it is content, focused on your target audience, will always be important. Find ways to curate or create diverse types of content and your LinkedIn Network will be appreciative.

Here is the YouTube video on this topic:

I love helping business professionals who want to use LinkedIn as a business tool. If I can help you and your sales team, let’s find a time to talk.

Teddy

Categories
LinkedIn

Master Webinar & Virtual Presentation Tools NOW!

Virtual Communications

As we try to figure out how to navigate through this pandemic (#COVID-19) virtual communication tools will become very important for us and our customers/prospects/clients, etc.

A few I believe may be very important to master include:

And, I’m sure there are many other options for remote/virtual communications tools we could be using during this pandemic.

What are you doing now to become familiar with these tools?

Have you researched what your clients/prospects etc are using?

I love using Zoom for my webinars and global conversations. I use Skype, Slack, Evernote & Google Docs every day. Many of my clients use these tools as well.

Virtual conversations through these tools is not new. They may be tools you have not considered or thought you needed.

Here is an offer. If you want to experiment with these tools, let me know. I will gladly help any business who wants to start experimenting and then using these tools.

I wish you all the best as you navigate this pandemic

/Teddy

Categories
LinkedIn

How often should I engage on LinkedIn?

I get asked this question often and thought today would be a good day to answer this question here.

There is no single answer that fits everyone and/or every business or industry.

Typically my general answer is this:

Figure out the amount of time you can commit to engaging and sharing content on LinkedIn and stick to it. If you can’t sustain the activities, adjust your commitment and keep going. @TLBurriss

The magic of social engagement is sustaining the level of activity you decide to do for you.

A minimum amount I often encourage people to consider is 1 post and 1 comment on a relevant post each week. When you get good at navigating LinkedIn you’ll find this to be very easy to execute on and thus easy to sustain.

Once you get into this ‘groove’, take a look at these KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

  • LinkedIn Profile Views.
  • Groth of your LinkedIn Network (with relevant connections).
  • Post engagement #s.
  • Phone calls, emails and/or LinkedIn Messages to discuss business.

You should never share and/or engage on LinkedIn just to do it. We have to have a purpose and goal for our actions. For me, my purpose is to develop my brand, drive profile views and ultimately get into conversations about business.

I’ve discovered that ramping up my activity of Engaging and sharing has a direct result on my brand development, profile views, and the ‘phone calls’. I do far more than most people, however LinkedIn is my home and business focus.

How much time are you investing in your LinkedIn engagement and posting? Is it creating value for you? Should you consider adjusting your investment of time and maybe the content type (a conversation for another day)