I have a long-standing love-hate relationship with LinkedIn.
Friendly Faceless LinkedIn Logo Guy
There are days when I think it’s the most awesome thing ever. Those days are rare, though: most often, I find it to be the 5th Beatle. An afterthought in my social media marketing time. It doesn’t have to be that way – and, for you, here are the 20 minutes you should invest to make it suck less.
Set the Egg Timer to 20 Minutes. And…
5 Minutes: Answers. Go there, now. (You will have to go where it says “More” on the navigation bar.) Look for something interesting that has been asked and answer it with your expertise. Seriously: you don’t have to be right. You just have to be there.
Be sure to “Browse” the categories on the right hand side to see if anything strikes your fancy — imagine your ideal prospect and think about what they want to know about. Niche, baby, niche.
5 Minutes: Check your contacts. Pick a couple, reach back out to them to say hi. No reason, other than checking in and saying hi.
What is currently wrong with LinkedIn? It’s not SOCIAL. It’s networking, but it’s not SOCIAL NETWORKING. And, other than craptastic “hey recommend me” lame-ohs who do this for SEO purposes, it’s not really SOCIAL MEDIA.
1 Minute: Get off your soap box.
8 Minutes: Prune. That’s right, get rid of those who you cannot see a reason for having connected with. I’m serious: if you don’t know why you connected with them, and you cannot help them, exit stage left and don’t look back.
Their name should spark a memory. “Hey, it’s that guy in Melbourne who does tech recruiting.” Or, “it’s that woman who graduated from my alma mater and was looking for a job last year.” Keep ‘em.
1 Minute: Recommend someone. Look at your list of contacts. Don’t over-recommend. But do the unsolicited recommendation.
Beep Beep. Timer’s Up.
BTW, have we connected yet?
{ 11 comments }
Excellent advise. I might disagree with who gets pruned. I would only prune those who end up spamming you or ask you for a recommendation and you don’t know them. I’d keep those who may not have a seemingly obvious connection. You never know how that connection might connect you to someone you wanting to connect with.
Cheers!
Thanks for the great article! I had the exact same love hate relationship. I thought it was just me. LinkedIn was always a afterthought for me. You helped me come up with some new ideas of using my time on their wisely.
I love it when I hit send and see that I made a spelling error. So after I saw their instead there. I went on to read your article http://area224.com/top-3-grammar-mistakes-and-how-to-avoid-them/
I think my mistake may have fallen under what you called mistaken identity.
Thanks, Wendy…appreciate the comment.
Great stuff. The harder challenge for us hasn’t been convincing our sales staff the value if they’re shown. It honestly has been getting them further along in the learning curve on … well first PC use, then search techniques. A great tool for prospecting, and building a personal community to draw upon.
Dave, A great article and I have to say that you share some great tips here for people the biggest one is set the timer, take 20 mins and DO IT!!! It may not be the cool new thing but my LinkedIn connections have been my biggest support system over the years.
LinkedIn is always the step-child to other social media platforms, yet the data you can get out of there is better than any other network.
I use LinkedIn for two reasons:
1. Prospect for new business
2. Find potential employee candidates
If you are opening a new location, have a new product or service, or are simply trying to grow your business, using LinkedIn to do that is bar none. You can use the advanced search to find your perfect demographic, target five to 10 people, see who you know in common, and ask for an introduction.
I like to use LinkedIn for checking references on candidates….you get much more accurate feedback that way than relying on the references you’re given.
http://twitter.com/ginidietrich
News Flash! – Have y’all noticed the “Follow a company” thing? It appears to have started very recently. Not sure what I think about it…what say the peanut gallery?
Thanks as always…and appreciate the Tweet efforts, too. Cheers!
I have to agree with Gary – you may never know what life brings and some of those connections could come in handy. Great article!
Gary is a smart guy…maybe what I should propose is a quick “shout out” to folks where you can’t remember why you connected.
Also, Christopher Penn (@cspenn on Twitter) does a REALLY good job of telling people up front that “hey, if you connect with me, you’ll get emails from me. don’t like it, don’t connect.”