Once your LinkedIn profile is set up and you have created your Company Page, the next thing you need to do is to start growing your personal network. As mentioned before, this will create countless new opportunities to promote your business, to find business partners and to gain clients – among many other things. We’re looking at this first rather than marketing because marketing on LinkedIn will be that much easier once you have built up a large network.

Degrees of Separation

When you first sign up to LinkedIn, you will be given the opportunity to add a bunch of people that you already know through Facebook, through your mobile phone contacts and through your e-mail among other things.

This might at first seem like an irritation and you’ll probably be tempted to quickly swipe through all your old school friends and work colleagues…. But don’t.

Why? Because those contacts are incredibly valuable, even if you’re not particularly interested in their actual careers. To understand this is to appreciate the full power of LinkedIn, which often comes down to essentially being a case of a game of ‘degrees of separation’.

To see this in action, take a look at your current LinkedIn profile and then search for someone influential that you want to connect with. Don’t be afraid to reach for the stars and to aim big – Richard Branson might be slightly too high up the pecking order but if you have a few hundred contacts, then you could very well find that you’re connected to someone like Tony Robbins.

That’s a hugely powerful connection and we’ll see how you can use this later.

So in other words, that kid who always used to pick their nose at the back of history class is well worth adding on LinkedIn because their Aunt might just be best friends with Tony Robbins’ hair dresser… it’s always possible! The wider the audience you connect with, the more easily you’ll be able to start reaching out to more people.

So, don’t just accept all those people you knew from school – make sure that you also actively seek out anyone you can think of and use them to build your professional network. And you never know, it might just turn out that someone you used to know is themselves now a very powerful connection for you!

Rapporteur

Rapportive is an incredibly important tool that you can use to increase your connections. Essentially, Rapportive is a plugin that you use with Gmail and which can then show you the LinkedIn profile of anyone who messages you.

This makes Rapportive a fantastic tool in many ways. Not only does Rapportive ensure that you can find out who someone is when they

propose doing business but it also gives you the significant advantage of being able to add them as a contact right then and there rather than having to remember to do it later.

If someone contacts you to suggest working with you, or even if you contact them, this puts you at the forefront of their mind and thus gives you the opportunity to reach out to them. Even if they turn down your suggestion to work together, the fact that they’ve actually communicated with you makes them far more likely to add you to their LinkedIn network out of politeness and a sense of obligation alone. But when you do this, timing is everything: you need to act quickly to take advantage of that window of opportunity while they are susceptible to your approach. If you leave it a year and then try adding them on LinkedIn, you’ll find that they are all the more likely to simply ignore their request. At this point, you might as well be messaging them cold again.

Rapportive turns every interaction into an opportunity to connect on LinkedIn and that makes it an invaluable tool. You can get it from: http://www.razorsocial.com/linkedin-tools/

Inviting Others to Connect

This doesn’t all have to one way though. In fact, you might find that you have better luck creating meaningful connections (more on that later) by inviting other people to connect with you.

How can you do this? One simple way is to use a plugin on your website that lets people easily connect. Some themes will even have this feature built in, letting you grow your network quickly.

WP LinkedIn is a basic plugin that lets you embed your profile throughout your site: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-linkedin/screenshots/.

Another way to do this via a website is by using the ‘Follow Company Plugin Generator’ which is for getting people to follow your business as opposed to your personal profile. Note that when you use the Follow Company Plugin Generator, you can do so for your business or for a Showcase Page. This is again particularly useful for promoting a website or blog that belongs to your business – this way you can treat your company and your website as separate entities.

The Follow Company Plugin Generator can be found here: https://developer.linkedin.com/plugins/follow-company.

Another option is to invite your followers and friends to connect via e-mail marketing, Twitter or Facebook. This is a good strategy because these people are already fans and have already decided to follow you: thus they will likely be more receptive to an offer to join on LinkedIn – they may even be excited to.

Finally, don’t be afraid to suggest connecting in real life. If you meet someone at a networking event or even at a social gathering and you think there’s a chance you could do business together (or that they know someone you want to do business with) then ask them to add you on LinkedIn. You can even consider adding your LinkedIn profile to your business card. If you’d like to be fancy, you can do this with a QR code so that your connections can just scan your card with their phone and then add you on LinkedIn. This is like having Rapportive in the real world!

Managing Your Network and Connections

Right now you might find yourself starting to get a little excited about the prospect of LinkedIn marketing. Perhaps you looked up David Beckham and found you had a connection in common. ‘I can talk to David Beckham??’ you’re no doubt exclaiming…

But while this is a nice thought, the reality is unfortunately somewhat different. You can’t just leap in and start talking to David Beckham

because despite that contact you have in common… you’re still not best mates! (Unless you are).

Even the contacts that are direct connections are not necessarily going to regard you as anything other than a complete stranger. Being friends on LinkedIn does not make you friends in real life – especially for a major player who is likely to get contacted by about a billion smaller-fry on a daily basis.

Likewise, that kid who used to pick their nose in history? They probably don’t want to introduce you to Obama either. Especially if you used to tease them…

The point is, to be meaningful on LinkedIn, a contact has to be meaningful in real-life – it has to be someone who owes you a favor, who genuinely likes you or who engages with your content. Likewise, you also need to think about your contacts in terms of who they are and what they mean to you. The way you approach your best mate is probably different from the way you approach Stephen Hawking. Likewise, the way you approach someone in the fitness industry is likely different from the way you approach someone in the programming industry.

So, you need to manage and organize your contacts and that means thinking carefully about who they are and how they are important to you. At the same time, you need to maintain your relationships and keep them ‘meaningful’.

Fortunately, LinkedIn has some useful tools for doing both. One example of this is the suggested contacts, where LinkedIn will alert you to birthdays, to promotions and to other meaningful events in your contact’s lives. This is a very handy way to stay in touch with someone and to stay ‘on their radar’ if you genuinely know them.

If you want to take this further, then try using the excellent FiveHundredPlus utility (https://www.linkedin.com/today/). This is a tool that allows you to easily take stay in touch with contacts by alerting you to contacts that you haven’t contacted for a while so that they

don’t forget you. At the same time, FiveHundredPlus also helps you to organize those contacts in meaningful and useful ways.

Another tool built into LinkedIn itself meanwhile is the option to add tags. Click ‘connections’ along the top of LinekdIn and you’ll be presented with a list of people you know. These are already in order of how recently you communicated and you can sort them in alternative orders and filter them in various ways too. At the same time, you can also add ‘tags’ which essentially allow you to categorize each person in terms of the way you know them, the industry they’re in or anything else that might be useful.

However you do it, the trick is to make sure that you spend time actually tending to your connections rather than just viewing them as ‘in the bag’ as soon as you’re connected.

Note: There has been a lot of talk over the years of LinkedIn improving it’s own contact management utilities. In fact, it has been implied that it could eventually become a fully-fledged CMS, which would make a lot of sense for the direction of the business. Stay tuned for that then!

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