Find the Influencers

Who are the people who have influence over large groups of your target audience? When you network offline to build your business, brand, or career, there are always certain people you want to connect with who can introduce you to key individuals who can truly help you reach your goals. If you’re using LinkedIn to build your business, then you need to look for people on and off LinkedIn who have the eyes and ears of your target consumers. If you’re trying to build your career, then you need to look for people on and off LinkedIn who have the eyes and ears of employers and recruiters who work with and hire people in your line of work.

Not everyone on LinkedIn is an influencer, and influence isn’t solely about the number of connections a person has on LinkedIn. Influence is primarily about quality connections, not quantity. In other words, it’s better to have 100 connections on LinkedIn with people who value what you say, share your content, converse with you, and talk about your content with their own audiences than it is to have 500 LinkedIn connections who click the Connect button and then are never heard from again. The same theory holds true for online influencers. An online influencer who has 100 quality connections can do far more for you in terms of word-of-mouth marketing than an online influencer with 500 connections who hasn’t logged in to LinkedIn for a year.

INSIDER SECRET

By definition, influencers can affect the way their loyal audiences think and act. Influencers have earned trust among their audiences, so if you can get influencers to talk about you, share your content, and join your conversations, their audiences will see those interactions and get to know you. In time, the goal is to build strong enough relationships with online influencers that they understand the value and usefulness you add to the online conversation and they want to share your content with their own audiences. In other words, they trust that what you have to say is reliable and meets the expectations of their own audiences.

Online influencers are powerful, and you need to tap into their reach by developing real relationships with them. The first step is identifying who has the eyes and ears of your target audience. In Chapter 5, you learn specific steps to find and connect with people on LinkedIn, but before you can actively search for people on LinkedIn, you need to know what you’re looking for. Therefore, you have to spend time poking around LinkedIn to determine the keywords online influencers use in their LinkedIn profiles to identify themselves, the types of groups they belong to on LinkedIn, their titles, specific companies that influencers might work for, specific education or schools they list in their LinkedIn profiles, and so on.

Using various directory and search tools available to you in LinkedIn, you can find people who are similar to each other based on the information in their profiles and their LinkedIn activities. Just as you created a profile of your best customers to define your target audience, you can create profiles of online influencers, so you can find more of them on LinkedIn. It just takes some research and time, but those influencers are on LinkedIn waiting to connect with people like you who can offer meaningful content and conversations that they want to discuss and share with their own audiences. This is the type of word-of-mouth marketing that money can’t buy, and it’s at your fingertips through LinkedIn!