Category Archives: LinkedIn Strategy

Getting the most from LinkedIn in 2019

January 3, 2019 by ,

While it is the start of the year, it’s true – oh, and Happy New Year by the way! – checking and confirming that we are using LinkedIn in a focused and targeted way is something that we should ideally be doing on a continual basis.

Sounds all a bit harsh, but if we are doing to get the best return on the time that we put into our time on LinkedIn, then it’s important that we have all of the elements working together for us.

So, almost without further ado, here’s a few things to bear in mind as you do so:

1) Be clear what you want to achieve on LinkedIn

This, for me, underpins everything else. I consider LinkedIn to be a tool to achieve a goal, not a “place to hang out” – though there are clearly benefits in interacting with your target audience on here.

Nevertheless, most of us are using LinkedIn to achieve something and have our “day jobs” to fit in as well – therefore, we need to clear in our own minds what are our goals for being on LinkedIn – effectively, why are we spending time on there in the first place?

It might be to develop new business, recruit new staff, market your company or services, find a new role or simply network and use it as a personal branding opportunity. Whatever it is, make sure that you are clear about your aims and focus your efforts behind that – without an objective, you will in all probability be wasting your time on LinkedIn. (more…)

Article Categories: Advanced LinkedIn, B2B Advice for LinkedIn, Business Development on LinkedIn, Content Marketing, LinkedIn Strategy, Using LinkedIn
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Winning the LinkedIn Glitterball
(or how we are all sometimes like Ashley)

November 29, 2018 by ,

Let me quickly set the scene of my analogy today and identify a couple of the main protagonists. We are talking “Strictly Come Dancing” here – “Dancing with the Stars” for colleagues across the Pond.

As you might imagine, Strictly is ostensiously a dance competition – you dance well, the judges mark you highly, you stay in to dance again the following week, and the person who comes last is voted out of the competition after a dance off.

Except that it isn’t.

Granted, it is partly a dance competition … but it is also part popularity contest. Why so? Because it is not just the well informed judges voting on who stays or goes, but also us, the general “armchair experts” public. And while we do partly judge it on the dancing, we also bestow our voting favours on what we enjoyed and, crucially, on who we like.

And on occasions, it is the mix between these two elements which is crucial. (more…)

Article Categories: Business Development on LinkedIn, Content Marketing, LinkedIn Strategy, Using LinkedIn
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Saved searches and Search Alerts on LinkedIn

August 14, 2018 by ,

LinkedIn Groups searchThere’s a quick way to keep up to date with new people who fit the prospecting criteria you’re interested in, without lifting a finger. Essentially, new business prospects delivered to your inbox every week … automatically. Sounds interesting? Then read on …

When I’m using LinkedIn for targeted business development, my first port of call is unsurprisingly LinkedIn’s people search function – not just the initial search box at the top of every page but the filter filters that used to be called the “Advanced Search” in its previous incarnations.

Being able to target the type of person I’m looking to approach using a combination of job title, company, location, industry or any of the other filters that LinkedIn offers is an absolute godsend. That’s also why it always takes up an important slot in the “LinkedIn for Business” workshops that I run.

Creating the right search takes time though, particularly if you are going to make sure that you cover all the bases which will include variants of relevant job titles for the type of people you are targeting. (I talk about that in my “Think before you search” post in more details) Once you have done so, you don’t want to lose your work – instead you are going to want to use that time and time again, to build on it as required. (more…)

Article Categories: LinkedIn Advice, LinkedIn Strategy, LinkedIn Tips, Social Selling, Using LinkedIn
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People Also Viewed – do you really need it?

June 20, 2018 by ,

The ‘People Also Viewed’ section is an area that has great potential value to certain types of people looking at your profile page. However, unlike most other parts of your profile, this is one that you don’t directly control in terms of the information it provides as it is created by LinkedIn.

More annoyingly, the value it provides isn’t reflected back to you, but rather benefits the person looking or indeed the people who appear in this list. Not good! In fact, it could be just the opposite and actually be detrimental to you, giving a link away from all the great information you are providing on your profile.

Just to be clear, the section I’m talking about is the column on the right hand side of your profile page which displays a series of profile links. (more…)

Article Categories: B2B Advice for LinkedIn, LinkedIn Advice, LinkedIn Strategy, LinkedIn Tips
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The Marmite nature of LinkedIn Notifications

June 15, 2017 by ,

Well, as the phrase goes, you either love them or hate them but one thing that you’ll find it difficult to do is simply miss notifications on LinkedIn … and that’s probably a good thing, given what they are trying to achieve. 🙂

As with so many things on LinkedIn, the issue arises because people want to use the site in different ways and so something which one person finds of value, another might consider to be a waste of time or better suited to a site like Facebook. And so it is with LinkedIn Notifications. So the challenge we face is how to get the best out of them and to avoid the annoyance that people feel that they are in some way irrelevant and intrusive.

Luckily, and again like so much on LinkedIn, you can customise this section allowing you to see the ones that you are interested in and hide those that for you are simply irrelevant noise.

So what are Notifications?

Notifications do very much what they say on the tin – they simply notify you when something which is deemed of interest or importance to you happens. You’ll find them in the main menu and they appear for a number of very different reasons.

Some of the main ones are when (more…)

Article Categories: Advanced LinkedIn, LinkedIn Advice, LinkedIn Strategy, LinkedIn Tips
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Think when you search on LinkedIn …
or better still, think before you search

March 20, 2017 by ,

LinkedIn SearchNo matter why we are on LinkedIn, using the search functionality effectively is always going to be hugely important. It can save us hours by ensuring that we target those who are going to fit our criteria and near as possible and allow us to focus in on quickly and with greater clarity on whom we want to talk to.

In many ways, it really doesn’t matter whether you are prospecting for new clients and business, identifying new partners or suppliers, using LinkedIn to identify potential candidates for a role you are looking to fill or identifying potential company contacts as a job seeker … in each of these cases, the more effectively we search, the greater our chances of success are.

This is all particularly true with the search options on the new 2017 interface – most of the functionality that we need is still in there but so many people people that because the ‘advanced search’ link has disappeared that you can no longer do complex searches on the free account. Not true! All the searches below are from the free account.

Anyway, before you start to search, take a step back …

… think …

… decide whom you are really looking for …

… what position they might hold or what skills they might possess …

… how might they present these elements themselves …

… then start to search.

The greater the number of “right people” that we can establish a first pool of people who fit our search criteria the better it will be for us and allow us to apply the more targeted criteria to a better set of possible targets. (more…)

Article Categories: Advanced LinkedIn, LinkedIn Search, LinkedIn Strategy, LinkedIn Tips
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