You might be wondering why I’m suddenly cranking out a ton of content on using LinkedIn as a tool for business. There’s actually a few reasons, and I’ll share:
- You seem to dig this stuff. I noticed a trend in my analytics that my posts related to LinkedIn seem to get more traffic and longer time on my site. That tells me that using LinkedIn is on your mind.
- LinkedIn picked up one of my posts last week and ReTweeted it on Twitter (thank you LinkedIn
. From that one tweet, I was able to track around 51 ReTweets in only a few hours. The result was that my blog traffic almost doubled overnight. I’m assuming that my new readers (maybe that’s you) are interested in getting good at navigating the culture and systems inside the LinkedIn network. IF not, let me know and I’ll change it up. - I’m working with a team of business developers and sales personnel at Parallel Technologies to help them get up to speed on using social media tools in their efforts, so some of the content I’m writing is coming from questions and conversations in those sessions. There good peoples, and it’s really rewarding to see the light bulbs go off when discuss ways they can leverage the social web.
We’re now working into the profile building phase, and the teams’ homework for this week is to go home and complete their profiles to 100%. LinkedIn makes that part easy with a detailed page on all the elements of your profile, complete with section descriptions and suggestions.
This is the all important first step in using LinkedIn. No exceptions. No belly-aching. Period. It will be worth the investment of your time and energy.
Next – Importing Your Email Contacts & Building Your LinkedIn Network
LinkedIn provides a very cool feature in allowing users to import webmail contacts, with whom they’ve already exchanged emails. Once those names and email addresses are uploaded, you will see a page that displays your contacts and shows you who of them are already using the network.
Your contacts who already have LinkedIn profiles are the low hanging fruit. What I mean, is that they’ve already opted into using LinkedIn as a tool, and so the have some type of understanding on how the game is played. You’ll want to invite them before you invest the time to sell LinkedIn the people who’ve yet to adopt. That takes a bit more effort on your part.
Always remember that LinkedIn, like anything else on the web, is about conversion – i.e. getting people to complete an action that you desire them to take. In the case of LinkedIn, you are converting relationships. If you want to keep your conversion rate high, please, do EVER send one of these:
Have you been on a receiving end of one of these impersonal invitations? How did it make you feel? You get the picture. In order to convert relationships, you will need to get personal with people and establish a frame of context around your invitation.
Getting Personal While Saving Time
It can be very time consuming to go through each new connection and write a personal note. And, while that’s the best way to go about social networking, let’s also be realistic. Writing one off personal invites may not be top priority in our busy day to day life.
You can achieve the same level of personalization, even when you are sending mass invites to your network using the email feature. How? Be honest, realistic and transparent, and people will appreciate your effort and extended olive branch.
Here’s an example of a letter I’ve sent in the past to catch up on mass inviting new connections into my LinkedIn network. On my last invite of more than 96 connections, more than 89 have already accepted my invitation as of last Friday. That’s a rate of about 86% relationship conversion on one single message sent.
So what do you think? Is this helpful? Are you about due to upload and invite your contacts from your email database to join your network on LinkedIn?
Join The Discussion!