A few years ago when I started my business, I knew absolutely nothing about marketing. I was a freshly-minted entrepreneur, having quit my paralegal job to go out on my own. I knew a lot about being a worker bee but nothing about finding business.
I started attending a lot of networking events in person and soon knew a lot of people. I would go to a networking event, get their business card, and send them a LinkedIn connection the following day. This expanded my online network rapidly.
I also started noticing a lot of people with the letters “LION” or the word “TopLinked” in their headlines. I started looking into the meanings of these words and what I discovered was really cool – a very fast way of expanding my business reach online using a tool designed for that specific purpose.
I joined the TopLinked group on LinkedIn and paid the fee to on the “Invite Me List.” The Invite Me List (“IML”) comes out every Tuesday and included a password to login and download the list. The IML is basically an Excel spreadsheet with a list of e-mail addresses of people who want more connections on LinkedIn.
Once I joined the list, the following Tuesday, the e-mails flooded my inbox from LinkedIn announcing the name of the newest person who had connected with me. I literally gained 1500 new connections overnight.
For awhile, it was really cool to get all those new connections, but after awhile it seemed like it was pointless to connect with all those people if they knew nothing about my business.
Also, some criticisms I heard from friends at networking events was that there was no way they would ever get to know all those people and it was therefore a waste of time. In person networking events were certainly better from that perspective, but in retrospect, I met a lot of people at those events that I never did any business with.
I started thinking about how I could really leverage all these new connections I was making on LinkedIn.
When I looked at how the TopLinked model worked, it was really brilliant. Because I had paid to be on the list, other people invited me. If you join the group for free, they send the list to you and you have to upload the list, which requires you to make the effort and use your invitations.
It’s basically inbound vs. outbound. When you’re in a position where others are asking you to do something for them, in this case, connect with them, you’re adding value (I’ll explain more about that value later), this creates an unspoken arrangement whereby you can ask for something in return.
I see this principle at work in social media. We have to add value by creating content that makes people return to engage with us on various social media platforms.
I decided that if others were going to ask me for a connection, I wanted them to know about my business so that they could tell right away if they needed my service or if they knew someone who needed my services.
So, I created what I called a “personalized response” which wasn’t really personalized, but it was as close as I could get to personalized without being obnoxious or making the other person spend a lot of time reading it.
So, every time I received a connection request, I would accept the request, and using LinkedIn’s “Send a Message” feature, I’d paste the personalized message in the window and sent it to the new connection.
This proved to be an excellent strategy. I got such a positive response from this that I continued to use it, only changing the response if I wanted to direct traffic to another website or tell others about something new I was doing.
I’ll talk more about using this strategy in later posts, because there is a lot more to my strategy that you need to know about to avoid getting into trouble with LinkedIn and your future connections.
For now, consider that there’s a way to use LinkedIn to expand your reach easily, especially if you aren’t comfortable using other social media platforms yet.
Got questions? Send me an e-mail: Christine@linkforsuccess.com
Tags: jump start social media strategy with linkedin; social media strategy; using linkedin to make money
0