With LinkedIn, perhaps more so than any of the other major social networks whose scope are after all global in nature, we have the chance to tap directly into our local marketplace, so it’s important to make sure we know how to use the tools at our disposal to do just that. Making ourselves visible and easy to refer is one half of the equation, the other is to use the facilities on LinkedIn to proactively identify, approach and market to this key group of people.

Here are 10 ways in which we can use LinkedIn to do just that:

1. Find new prospects and clients

If you are looking to identify new opportunities or clients in your local area, and let’s face it who isn’t, then LinkedIn’s search facility is a perfect way to achieve that. Using the advanced search, you can focus in on the geographic area you are interested in and then drill down to find individuals working for a specific company or in a certain role or within a certain industry. Having identified them, then it’s up to you how you wish to make contact and start to talk to them – perhaps directly is most appropriate or alternatively using a more gradual “getting to know” approach that LinkedIn can help so perfectly with.

2. See who’s talking about what locally

LinkedIn Signal – you’ll find it in the News menu item – gives you the ability to tap into what people are talking about within your local area, giving you an insight into both the personalities and subjects. By using an initial search, you can focus specifically on the topics that are of most interest to you and filter them by location, giving a very clear idea of who might be interested in the products, skills or services that you can offer.

3. Approach local businesses through Groups

There are over a million groups now on LinkedIn and there will almost certainly be a number which represent the local marketplace you want to get into, whether that’s a town or a region. Use the Groups Directory to find them and join the ones that look most relevant and active. Check who the main contributors are and then start to participate in the discussions to get your name seen and known – try to avoid selling yourself too strongly though, particularly at the start. Instead, use the messaging facility that is available to contact people directly as well as connecting with them and take a more softly softly approach.

4. Get found by people searching for your skills

More and more people are turning to LinkedIn when they are looking for local suppliers – this “Social Search” is the next natural step in the ever changing ‘business search’ habits which previously has seen Yellow pages type paper directories give way to online search through Google and the like. Make sure that your Personal Profile includes local elements (such as the towns and cities that you cover) so you can be found by people searching for local suppliers using these words rather than using the ‘location’ facility. It’s important to pander to all of the potential search options and in any case, these will be terms that people will spot as they scan your profile.

5. Get yourself in front of the local market place

Using your profile, you need to make sure you appear prominently in the search results for your local market when people have selected a geographic area. The location field is only relevant to the advanced search function on the site but it will ensure that if companies are looking for suppliers or specialists such as yourself who are local to them then you will be up there on the 1st page of results. Just make sure that the postcode (or zip code) you add is in the heart of your target market’s location.

6. Find key local networkers

Find and connect with people who are potential ‘hubs’ within the local area/community you are looking to deal with. The more closely connected you are to the people looking for you and your services / products, the better placed in the results and the more easily referable you will be. How to find these highly connected local ‘hubs’? Well do an advanced search and specify the postcode you are targeting, choosing the 10 or 25 miles radius – when you get the results, order them by ‘Connections’ instead of ‘Relevance’ and this will give you a list, starting with the most highly connected people in your area.

7. Putting out updates for local marketplace

Along with discussions in Groups, posting Updates which go out to your direct 1st level connections is a very powerful way of getting your message in front of the right people. The key element is the news that you share – make it appropriate and it will also encourage others to share it in turn, thus ”spreading the word”. By using the “attach a link” to highlight a news item on your own site, you can also get your logo in front of them and a link back to your website into the bargain!

8. Events going on locally

The Events section on LinkedIn is a growing resource with local, national and international events listed. Whether it is you who is arranging the local event or not, make sure that it appears in the events section and, using the Events application, have them appear on your profile as well. If you also promote them on LinkedIn (perhaps in Groups or via Updates), you should soon become synonymous with events happening locally and be the person to go to for that information.

9. LinkedIn Adverts

You can place adverts on LinkedIn which can be very targeted towards people from a certain geographic area. While it’s true that not all areas are currently covered in the system, you have the ability to focus in on most postal areas and, beyond that, you can segment further according to company size, job title and industry to make sure that your specific message appears in front of the right people.

10. Get your Company Pages working

For most people, the logical next step after finding you via your personal profile page is to then check out your Company Pages, and perhaps your Products and Services section in particular. They are also searchable in their own right, both on LinkedIn and on the internet in general, so getting them set up properly is a real boost all round. And remember to get recommendations for the products from the local market that you are looking to appeal to – social proof at its best!

So, with those elements in place, you will be well placed to use LinkedIn to help further develop your key local market.

Whatever our reasons, we almost certainly have one which we particularly want to be known for and which should appear at the top and then a preferred order for the others to appear. Previously on LinkedIn, we could only change that order by ‘playing’ with the start dates, as the roles were ordered purely on the basis of the start date for each role.

That is no longer the case.

Making your “Current Roles” work for you

I’ve often been asked in the LinkedIn Workshops I run, how we can change the order of our current roles to be able to display them as I want. Up until now you were only able to achieve this by changing the start date on the roles – this had a couple of obvious issues. Firstly, it is cumbersome as well as inaccurate and, secondly, it sends the wrong message about the validity of the rest of the information on the profile. While it should never be considered as an alternative online CV / Curriculum, it should still reflect reality while it promotes us and our skills or services.

However, we can now do this without any of those concerns. How? Well, visit your ‘Edit Profile’ page via the ‘Profile’ tab in the main menu and the scroll down to the Experience section on that page. If you’ve added additional sections then you may have to go a little way down the page.

Once there, hover over one of your current roles and then ‘left click’ and hold – you should now be able to drag that particular role to where you would like it to be in the sequence and place it there. There’s no ‘Save’ required so if you now refresh the screen, you should see the new order displayed in your overview section at the top. Easy.

Change the order of Recommendations too

As an added bonus, LinkedIn hasn’t stopped there – for the past few months, the recommendations displayed on our profile have been in chronological order, fine under most circumstances, but not giving us the chance to use them to best effect.

Well, now you can help the ones that you consider most relevant or useful or most recent to the top. You can do this is the same way as your “Current Roles” by scrolling down to the ‘Recommendations’ section and then dragging and dropping them into the order required, still by role though.

This may only seem like a small change on LinkedIn’s part but it has been long awaited and is one which, used properly, will really help you to make the most of both your recommendations and the current roles on your LinkedIn profile.

How you use the keyword phrases is important but finding the right ones is critical or else all the time that you spend using them after that point will be time wasted. If you are focusing your attention on being found for one phrase but your prospective clients are using a totally different one as they search for potential suppliers then we have a mismatch – and unfortunately you are going to be the loser in this.

Why bother with LinkedIn?

When we search for people to connect with on LinkedIn, we tend to do so for a variety of different reasons. Two of the main ones are that we are looking for a particular person, in which case we type in their name and then filter from there, or we are looking for a particular skill or service in which case that’s what we type in.

And those words are exactly the keywords or keyword phrases that we want to identify and be found for.

If you work in the legal sector, for example, then you will probably want to consider terms such as ‘lawyer’, ‘law firm’, ‘legal services’ or ‘solicitor’ as a general start point, but then also focus in on the areas of specialism such as ‘employment law’, ‘company law’, ‘family law’ etc as well as a geographic element if you work and want to be found for your town or county.

All of these keywords and their variations can and should be woven into your Personal Profile so that they make it easier for you to be found and then contacted for the services you can provide.

How to carry out Keyword Research

When we look at researching the right keywords to include then it is all too easy to get sucked into our own little world and just look at it from our own perspective – let’s face it, all of our industries have their own internal vocabulary which we use on a daily basis but may mean little to those outside of it who we want to talk to.

Some ways of identifying the best keyword phrases that you can then look at building into your LinkedIn profile or indeed your LinkedIn Company pages as well should include:

• think about what your product or service does or more importantly what benefits it offers, and also consider different ways to express that;
• talk to clients and partner organisations and ask them what words they feel best describes what you do – getting as wide a range as possible gives you the best possible start point;
• use some of the tools available to help find what words are commonly searched on and what other words and phrases are similar to them – Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a good start point – I also look at the good old thesaurus to help as well!;
• examine your direct competitors sites and their online campaigns and see what words they are focusing on.

We can also use LinkedIn itself to do the same:

• check the profiles of people who work in the same areas as you or offer similar services: see which words show up the most frequently on their profile;
• ideally, filter your search results on LinkedIn by “keywords” rather than the default of “Relevance” and you should find more hits with regard to the keywords you want to find;
• take a look at their ‘Specialties’ section which ideally would be used to highlight keyword phrases.

Remember: it is how you are perceived by others that is the important point to remember and not necessarily how you believe that you are perceived. Work from that standpoint and you are much more likely to achieve success!

Therefore, for me, an important first step in developing our online network on LinkedIn is to link up with these people, the ideal people that you want to connect with – the people who are in your network already! While it does many things, one key element is that it immediately makes their network more visible to us – not to then dive in and ‘pillage’ but to identify where personal introductions might be possible through people we know well. There’s no stronger approach to a company than through a personal introduction and this opens up that opportunity.

So how to bring our networks online

In most cases, we keep in touch with them by phone or, more often than not, by email. And there’s lies an opportunity and one that LinkedIn offers us some tools to help us tap into. It gives us the option of importing our contacts from our preferred email systems, it then automatically checks who is already on LinkedIn before then allowing us to send a generic message to them all inviting them to connect with us on the site.

Nothing could be simpler. The trouble is that nothing could be less personal either.

If you really want to use that key information that sits in Outlook – or rather in the people you communicate with via Outlook – then may I suggest a different course of action. Have a look at the Outlook Social Connector, a toolbar that LinkedIn provides us with – you’ll find a link to it via the “Tools” link at the bottom of every page.

Although it does lots of other things, the one element that I find most useful is that when an email arrives, it creates a small icon next to the sender’s address. If you hover over this, it tells you if the sender is on LinkedIn and gives you their key details and, importantly, lets you send them a personalised message inviting them to connect with you.

Now that’s much more the way to connect with people that you are already know and talk to, isn’t it?

So, in summary, using the Outlook Social Connector, you can invite people individually using a personalised message, exactly how it should be with anyone, but certainly with people you already know!

In the red corner: there are advocates of a quality based approach where you only connect with people you either know well or who are directly relevant to you and what you do;

In the blue corner: over here, the watchword is ‘quantity’ and so the aim is to connect with all and sundry and rely on the idea of serendipity, that’s to say that these people are bound to know someone (who knows someone) who will be interested in what you do or offer.

LinkedIn of course supports both approaches and seemingly takes no sides in this.

However, there is a caveat to this because of the way that LinkedIn structures and displays its search results, which may influence your thoughts on this. This is particularly relevant if you are looking at this as a (new) business development tool for you or your business and so rely on appearing prominently in LinkedIn’s search results for the services and/or products you offer.

As I talk to more and more people – in my role of someone who helps companies match their business goals with what LinkedIn can offer – I find that the quality approach is the one that most people seem to align with. And I admit that it is also the one that I have most affinity for.

However, with LinkedIn, having a larger network will have a positive effect on some of the elements that will help deliver the success that most are looking for on LinkedIn in 2 key areas:

i) your position in the LinkedIn search results for phrases that you are interested in being found for; and,

ii) your visibility when people search for the type of expertise, products or services that you offer.

Both key elements in determining your success in goal of developing more business opportunities.

1. Appearing higher up the Search results

When we search on LinkedIn, we do in fact have a number of options as to how we wish to display those results. However, most people leave the search order in its default position which means that it displays them in terms of “Relevance”.

“Relevance” is based on two factors: the first is the one that most people focus in on, which is the use of keyword phrases throughout the personal profile page. Here, having the right phrases in the right places will help you to appear more prominently (ie. higher up) in the search results list.

However, there is a second factor which is taken into account and is how closely you are connected to the person. This also has a key bearing and hence the fact that in most cases, you will find that the people at the top of the results are in fact 1st and 2nd level connections to you rather than a whole host of people ‘further away’ who might well match your search more closely in terms of their profile information.

Essentially, the closer connected you are to the person doing the searching, the better your chance of ranking highly in their search … presuming the keywords are in place of course!

2. Visibility in LinkedIn

LinkedIn works on the basis of 3 levels of connection. That’s to say you have those people that you are directly connected to (your 1st level connections), and then the people that they are connected to (your 2nd level connections) and then finally those people that they in turn are connected to (your 3rd level connections).

Beyond that, people are termed as “Out of Network” and that has an impact both in terms of what details you can see about them and, in return, what they can see about you. For example, anyone outside of your network will only be able to see your professional headline but not your name or company and, with the ‘free’ account, only your first name if you are a 3rd level connection.

What’s the solution?

So, what’s the upshot of all this? Well, essentially being ‘closer’ to the person conducting the search will result in a better position within the searches for you with the keyword terms you are interested in and make you more ‘visible’ or ‘findable’ (whichever term you prefer) to them once you are in the search results.

Your mission therefore, without abandoning the principles of maintaining a ‘quality’ based network – if that’s your preference – is to make sure that you are as closely connected to the people you wish to find you as possible ie. a 2nd level connection, given that if you are a 1st level connection then they have already found you!

Increasing the number of connections you have is probably the simplest solution to this, although connecting to key individuals who are ‘hubs’ within the sectors or geographic areas where you want to be visible is perhaps more effective – how to find them is, however, something we’ll have to leave for another post.