What Is the Right Way to Leverage LinkedIn Connections for Your Business?
You might be from any profession, LinkedIn would prove itself beneficial.
If you are a student, it will help you gain offers for internships and land an amazing job offer. If you are an entrepreneur, this place is your gold mine.
There are many students, entrepreneurs and freelancers sceptical about LinkedIn.
While there are tons of success stories about people finding their perfect dream job or landing all their clients through LinkedIn. There are people who struggle to find results (Like I used to).
I have been in that place where I was frustrated about LinkedIn not working for me.
Finally, I realized what was wrong.
Most of us (when we opened our LinkedIn account) have approached LinkedIn just as with any other Social Media. With any other Social Media. The more followers and friends the better — kind of mindset.
When I started on LinkedIn I had the mindset of increasing the number of connections.
I added whoever sent me a request, and I sent a lot of invites too.
There is nothing wrong with sending invites, but the process of doing it matters.
I learnt this the hard way.
Sending invites to anyone, and accepting invites from anyone backfired in two ways:
1. It ruined my LinkedIn feed. I started to have content which has nothing to do with me or my profession.
My content was reaching the wrong audience. Most of the people who saw my posts were students, thanks to LinkedIn Insights to let me know such details.
Here is what I understood about using connections as a strategy to leverage LinkedIn.
There are two things you need to do before you start connecting on LinkedIn.
#1 Make your purpose clear
This is the first rule if you want to achieve anything, in life or LinkedIn.
Clarity with your objectives for being on this platform.
You have to be clear with what you want from LinkedIn, is it a job opportunity, is it a community of people working in the same profession as you do, is it mentorship, is it sales leads for your business, or even if it is browsing through the feed as you eat lunch.
#2 Defining your Audience
Now that you know why you are on LinkedIn, get narrow with your audience.
If you are a student, make a list of your dream companies, if you want to grow more business, make a list of your target audience.
Even flawed marketing with the right audience could get you results but perfect marketing to the wrong audience is a waste of time, energy and efforts.
Once you have done these two things. You connect with your desired audience.
How to connect with your desired Audience?
Send Personalized Invites
Now it’s time to send invites.
The easiest way to connect with anyone is to send them a personalized note.
Go though their profile, find something interesting to talk about. Let them know if you learned something from their recent posts.
Screen though the invites you receive
If you are active on LinkedIn, you will get invites. Instead of accepting any invite you get, take time to skim through the profile, it could be a lead or someone who’s trying to increase the number of connections. Check if they are relevant to your objective.
Final Thoughts
It is not late for you, if you have been using LinkedIn for a while now and want to revamp your strategy for growth, job opportunities, and more leads for your business.
The number of connections do increase if we connect with random people, but following this basic strategy you get connections worth your time.
LinkedIn promotes your organic reach, get you leads and helps you achieve goals faster. For this to be right, you should connect with right people.