CHAPTER 11

LINKEDIN

Turning Connections into Sales

As a sales professional, how big is your most extensive network of contacts? You may be used to having a rolodex (digital or otherwise) filled with many dozens of customers, vendors, prospects, and other contacts. But what if you could expand that network into the hundreds—or beyond? Social networking allows you to grow your network bigger and faster than any traditional method, and LinkedIn is leading the way for professionals worldwide.

Unlike other social media sites, LinkedIn came out of the gate targeting professionals, and establishing itself as a site for furthering your career as opposed to sharing personal updates with friends and family. Once you are signed up as a member, LinkedIn gives you the ability to create a professional profile largely centered on your career. Similar to a resume, your work history, skills, education, and other credentials are all prominent components of your online profile, making it a rich database for job hunters and human resources (HR) recruiters alike. This helped create its reputation as a job search site early on. But it quickly became clear that this professional networking site was much more than a digital resume repository, and was equally valuable to sales and marketing professionals as it was to HR recruiters.

EXPANDING BEYOND A DIGITAL RESUME

The growth in LinkedIn's extensive membership base is undeniably helping fuel its role in the social selling process. Since its official launch in 2003, LinkedIn has expanded to more than 200 million members globally. Seventy-four million of those members are in the United States, while nearly 64 percent of its total member base is from other countries. The expansion rate doesn't show any signs of slowing down. According to usage statistics from LinkedIn, approximately two members join every second—that's nearly 173,000 new member profiles created each day.¹ The seemingly endless stream of new, active members helps make it an appealing lead source.

LinkedIn's layers of easily accessible data about its members, such as where they work, who they know, and how to reach them, also supports the social selling process. And just for good measure, it provides you with tools (both free and paid) to help you search for, connect to, and interact with both customers and potential prospects, even those that are the most difficult to reach using other traditional methods—such as phone calls and emails. It shouldn't be a surprise that so many adept salespersons quickly realized its potential; and to LinkedIn's credit, the site has been fast to respond, moving the site well beyond a place to manage your digital resume. According to Koka Sexton, the global senior social marketing manager for LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is already being used by a very large number of sales people and that number is going to grow a lot over the rest of the (upcoming) years. We know that when sales people think “social” they think about LinkedIn and we want to create an environment so that sales professionals can leverage our social network to be more productive.²

You may have even heard LinkedIn referred to as the replacement for cold calling, but it's so much more than that. If used to its fullest capabilities, it could possibly become your number one prospecting tool, particularly for B2B sales. Unlike Facebook and other social networking sites that lend themselves to B2C marketing, LinkedIn has always been known for its emphasis on professional networking versus social networking. Businesses have seemingly upheld this view, reinforcing it as a valid social media site for professional purposes. It is this recognition of LinkedIn's value as a sales tool that separates the social selling pros from the amateurs and the dabblers. According to Sexton, social selling high achievers use LinkedIn as their primary sales tool. “High achievers always use LinkedIn to identify potential contacts,” he says. “They are connected to over 50 percent of their customers and they leverage those connections to get introductions into new accounts.”³

How do you become a high achiever and turn connections into sales? It starts with a few basic rules, a handful of LinkedIn tools and strategies, and a serious commitment of your time.

SOCIAL MEDIA FIRST IMPRESSIONS START WITH YOUR PROFILE

The foundation of a successful LinkedIn experience starts with the profile, or public LinkedIn page, that you create on the site. Although your profile is more than just an online version of your professional vitae, there are many shared attributes when it comes to leveraging it to reach prospective customers. Showing your job history, especially your current position, is actually helpful in the social selling process. First, it provides an immediate association with the company you represent, and second, your experience (if described properly) reinforces your expertise in a particular area. Remember, a great deal of the social selling process is about establishing your credibility and building a relationship so that you can guide prospects through the buying decision. If you are connecting with prospects and customers via LinkedIn, you want to demonstrate why you are the best person to help them find a solution in the industry you represent.

But your job history is only the beginning. There are five key areas, as shown in Figure 11–1, that are critical to complete as you begin constructing a LinkedIn profile. These core areas, along with several other sections (which I describe below), come together to form an influential profile that allows you to connect with and sell into your targeted audience. In addition, LinkedIn allows you to include images, video, presentations, and other documents that add visual interest to certain areas of your profile. This is a good opportunity to include company brochures, product videos, or sales presentations that not only make your profile stand out, but immediately provide visual representations of your work—or your company's products and services. You also have the flexibility to rearrange the order in which some information appears in your profile sections. But let's start by taking a closer look at the five key profile components (including those that allow you to attach images and documents):

1. Photo: Your professional picture appears at the very top of your profile page and is used as the visual icon that shows up next to each and every action you take on the site. For example, if you post a comment anywhere on the site, your photo shows up next to it. One of the most common mistakes inexperienced LinkedIn users make is not including a photo, and that mistake could mean fewer people see your profile. According to data from LinkedIn career expert, Nicole Williams, people are more likely (up to seven times more likely!, believe it or not) to look at your profile if a photo is included with it.⁴

   FIGURE 11-1

   

   Your LinkedIn profile has five key areas.

   When choosing a photo, select one that looks professional and preferably is a head shot, or a photo that clearly shows your face. I also think it's preferable to smile in your photo so that your picture is more inviting or likeable. Using pictures that are off-putting, blurry, or unprofessional are almost as bad as having no picture at all! Keep in mind that LinkedIn is a social network geared toward professionals, and your picture serves as your first impression. While that photo of you at the beach may be a fun shot for your personal Facebook page, it does not belong on LinkedIn. Your photo should help reinforce or build confidence in you as an expert, not distract from your professional qualifications.

2. Overview: This section appears at the top of your profile page, next to your photo, and it includes your Name; a Headline (which can be as simple as your job title or position, or it can be a short sentence or list of keywords that highlight your responsibilities or areas of expertise); your Location (where you are geographically based), and the Industry in which you work. Think of this section as being similar to your business card. Along with your photo, it is the information that is most visible to others and is usually seen first by other LinkedIn members.

   It is also one of the sections of your profile that has the least flexibility. You can change your picture, of course, but it must always reside at the top of the page—and there's no option to add images or documents to the overview. This information, however, is searchable both within LinkedIn as well as in search engines such as Google. It's possible to change the privacy settings to control what information is public and whether it is viewable by search engines—but when it comes to using LinkedIn for professional purposes, especially as part of the social selling process, you should always make your profile visible to the public and to search engines.

3. Contact information: This information is also visible in the top section of your page (and you do not have the option to move it around). It includes your email address and up to three websites related to you or your company. When adding your website, instead of showing only the URL or address (such as www.mycompanyname.com) and linking to the company's home page, use a descriptive sentence or call to action in its place (such as “Get a Free Guide to Social Selling”) and link to a specific page that provides an offer for those coming from LinkedIn. The call to action makes it more likely that someone viewing your profile will click the link, helping transition a potential lead from LinkedIn to your company website.
4. Activity: Almost anytime you do something in LinkedIn—whether it's making a new connection, endorsing one of your existing connections, or sharing an article—it becomes immediately visible to others who are connected to you. These actions are documented as activities and appear toward the top part of your profile page (so it is seen by anyone who views your profile); they also show up in weekly activity summaries that are sent from LinkedIn to all of your connections. Like the overview section, you cannot reorder where the activity section shows up on your page. It always remains toward the top of your profile. Because this information is readily visible, it's yet another reason to stay active, so that both your connections and other people viewing your profile see that you are involved and active. This is a great reason to share industry or company-specific articles or presentations as well, since they appear on your profile.
5. Background: There are several important pieces of information that make up this section, including a Summary, or short description of your capabilities; an outline of your career Experience that shows current and past positions (this part most closely resembles a paper resume); and a Skills and Expertise list that allows you to include specific keywords associated with your professional capabilities, such as “lead generation” or “online marketing.” This is an ideal spot to incorporate phrases that are important within your industry, or keywords that your prospects might use to search for information related to your products or services.

   The background section is your chance to shine! It provides you the opportunity to rearrange the order that your information appears and allows you to add lots of eye-catching visuals and engaging presentations and videos in the Summary and Skills and Expertise areas. You don't even have to list your work experience in any type of chronological order, if you prefer. It's up to you to choose what information is highlighted—and where it appears.

Now that you understand the basic information that's included in your LinkedIn profile, there are several other helpful areas or descriptions that can be added to your profile. Using these optional sections, you are able to provide a more complete picture of who you are. Not only does this provide more reasons for people to connect with you, but it also reinforces your knowledge and expertise in a particular field. Some of the more important profile add-ons, as I refer to them, include the following:

• Recommendations: Any time a customer, vendor, coworker, or boss (past or present) provides a public testimonial on your behalf, it's called a “recommendation.” These testimonials are visible on your public profile page. As you might expect, having glowing recommendations show up to those viewing your profile is a great boost for your credibility as a salesperson. Even better, you don't have to wait for people to recommend you. Instead, you are able (and encouraged!) to send requests for recommendations to those in your network. Figure 11–2 shows how easy it is to send a request for a recommendation to one of your LinkedIn connections. Even if it's been a while since you've worked with someone, it's worthwhile to revisit past employers and customers and suggest that they write a brief recommendation for you
• Endorsements: This is a relatively new feature for LinkedIn. As the name implies, it provides a way for your connections to “endorse” you for a particular skill set—usually, these skills are pulled directly from your Skills and Expertise section, but people may choose to endorse you for a skill not even included in your profile. While recommendations require a more extensive process and provide detailed descriptions of the work you did, endorsements can be completed with one simple click on a link. You may even receive endorsements from people you have never worked with directly. For those reasons, the validity and value of endorsements are still being debated, particularly by HR recruiters.

  For now, I think endorsements can still be valuable in the social selling process because they do provide a quick overview of how people categorize your capabilities. Plus, LinkedIn keeps a public tally, visible next to each skill, of how many times you are endorsed for a particular skill. If you have been endorsed 118 times for being a Public Speaker, people viewing your profile for the first time are more likely to believe you must be pretty good at that skill! Why not use this public validation of your skills to your advantage?

  Additionally, when people endorse you for a skill, it's a good excuse to reach out to them and potentially renew an old connection. You can also thank the person for the endorsement, and if it's someone you have worked with, ask him or her to expand upon the endorsement and write a recommendation for you. On the flip side, if you are looking for a subtle way to get on the radar of one of your connections, you may want to endorse that person! (But only do so if you truly have reason to know that she or he is good at the skill for which you are endorsing her or him.)

  FIGURE 11–2

  

  LinkedIn profile is designed to make it easy to request a LinkedIn Recommendation.

• Education: Showing any degrees you have earned, or making visible the time you spent at a college or university, is often less about your knowledge in a particular area (unless your degree ties closely to the product or service you are selling) and more about a shared experience that provides another reason for someone to connect with you or trust you. The fact that you spent time on a particular college campus is also a great nugget to start a conversation online or on the phone. “I see you and I both attended the University of Kansas…” Even if you didn't graduate, it's still worthwhile including the time you spent at the school because it places you in the general network for that university so you have access to connect with anyone else who attended. This is a powerful connecting tool!
• Projects: Particularly if you are in some type of service-based sales, such as an IT consultant, describing current projects is a good way to demonstrate the type of work you or your company is doing (or can do) for customers. Any type of project or research is helpful to include in this section. For instance, if you are putting together a webinar or writing a white paper on a topic of interest to your prospects, mentioning it as a project is a good way to promote that information to interested prospects and get inquiries about it before it is even ready to launch!
• Interests: Similar to “projects,” this section falls under the Additional Information section of your profile. Most people treat interests the same on LinkedIn as you would on your resume—the spot where you provide additional color to your activities and hobbies outside of work (cycling, rock climbing, etc.). But in your LinkedIn profile, Interests is the place to reinforce the professional skills or expertise you have in two or three short sentences. It's the opportunity to once again use strategic keywords that are searchable in and outside of LinkedIn, which makes it a valuable component to helping you get found online for what you do best!
• Other profile sections: While this is not an all-inclusive list of additional sections that LinkedIn lets you include in your profile, these are some of the more helpful to the social selling process. All of these are self-explanatory, but I want to point out that each one provides you with another opportunity to describe or note something that could be potentially interesting or helpful to prospects or customers viewing your profile.

• Certifications
• Patents
• Organizations
• Honors and awards
• Languages

Whether it is an optional section or one of the five core sections that make up your profile, as you complete each one, keep the following in mind. It may be tempting to use descriptions similar to what you would use on a resume—short, bullet-point style phrases that focus on key accomplishments or goals. Instead, think of your profile in terms of how you want your customers to see you rather than how you might want employers to see you. Use descriptions and keywords that matter most to prospects in your industry. Write sentences that illustrate how you have helped customers, as opposed to how you helped the company for which you work. Use your profile to make a good first impression—and to sell yourself as an expert who can help people identify and solve their problems as a consumer (B2C) or a business (B2B) as they relate to the types of solutions or services your company provides.

EXPANDING YOUR CONNECTIONS

Once your LinkedIn profile is completed and fine-tuned, you are ready to start building your online network. You may already have started this process and know that it's not difficult to ask for a connection, which is how LinkedIn describes the relationship between its members. Instead of followers or fans, you make connections on LinkedIn. There are, however, some basic guidelines to consider when attempting to make connections; and there is a strategy you can use to more effectively and efficiently grow your network.

First, exactly how many connections do you need? That depends on how you are using the networking site. Consider the conclusions from Steve W. Martin, who interviewed top IT salespeople about how they used LinkedIn in the sales process.⁵ He labeled the most active users “enthusiasts” and noted that, on average, each enthusiast had over 700 connections—and more than 85 percent used it to “engage prospective customers during the sales process.” Not surprising, nearly half (40 percent) of the enthusiasts confirmed they had generated revenue as a result of their connections and activities on LinkedIn. It's difficult to say with certainty that more connections lead to more social selling success, or that 700 is the magic number for connections that generate revenue. But other research and informal data I have seen in the last few years seems to show similar patterns, namely that the more active LinkedIn users tend to have more connections.

One reason that a greater number of connections may equate to more success is due to the way LinkedIn connections are structured. Using a degree-of-separation theory about the power of your extended social network, not only do you have first-degree connections, but also second- and third-degree connections that are based on association. First-degree connections represent the people you actually know and to whom you have the most direct connection. As LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman explains: “Your friends know people you don't know. These friends of friends are your second-degree connections. And those friends of friends have friends of their own—those friends of friends of friends are your third-degree connections.”⁶

The takeaway is that there should always be one person in the middle, or someone who knows both you and the person in that second or third degree, and who can make the introduction to the person to whom you want to connect.

Technically, everyone and anyone on LinkedIn is a potential connection, but there are many reasons to be strategic when growing your online network. For starters, LinkedIn imposes some restrictions and guidelines for connecting. When you send an invitation to connect with someone, LinkedIn wants to understand how you know the person and asks you to select whether or not you have an existing relationship (such as a coworker, friend, classmate, or someone you've done business with). If you don't know the person in one of these ways, then you'll be asked to provide an email address of the person before LinkedIn lets you continue. What happens if you send requests to people you don't really know? If the person responds to a request saying they don't know you, then LinkedIn may penalize you. According to a LinkedIn policy, they could require you to provide an email address for some or all of your future connection requests. And, if you send too many invitations to connect with people who don't respond to your requests at all, or who mark your connection invites as spam because they don't know you, then it could raise a red flag in LinkedIn's system. This may result in having your account temporarily restricted or suspended, making it inaccessible to you for a certain period of time.

Similarly, if you search through too many profile pages in a single day, LinkedIn may label it as excessive activity and associate it with a robot or a spammer. As a result, you may receive a restricted action message that temporarily limits your page views within LinkedIn. Because you can be penalized for being too active on LinkedIn or for being too aggressive in connecting to people, it's important to think of building your connections in phases, and over a period of days and weeks, making connections in small batches at a time. Don't worry—your patience and methodical approach will pay off! I suggest building your contacts in the following layers:

• Friends and professional associates: Start with people who know you best and are most likely to respond to your requests to connect without hesitation. Connecting with professional associates as you are just starting to build your network is a good way to quickly broaden the reach of your small but growing list of connections.
• Past and current coworkers and bosses: Adding people you work with is a great way to ensure your connection requests are accepted. It's also helpful in gaining access to second- and third-degree connections that may come in handy to you later.
• Vendors or strategic partners: Similar to coworkers, connecting with those who do business with you can open doors to new connections that you may not know personally but will become part of your extended network. This is mutually beneficial to you and your vendors, so it's very likely that they will respond to your invitations to connect.
• Customers or clients: Connecting with customers may seem odd at first, but it is beneficial for both of you. Customers are able to receive updates in your feed that may be helpful to their business or the use of your products or services. Inviting customers into your network is especially important for you because it allows you to ask for a recommendation on LinkedIn. It also lets you see their updates and provides insight into changes in their business or employment (which can impact your current and future sales relationship). And, of course, it exposes you to others in their network—connections that could become prospective customers.
• Influencers: There are people you will interact with online, or through social media, or during conferences—people who are high achievers or who have lots of influence. Think in terms of speakers at events or on webinars, authors, sales leaders, and other influencers in your industry. These are people you may not know well or may not ever meet in person but for some reason your paths have crossed. Many of these influencers actively encourage people to connect with them. Take them up on that offer, as it's a good way to quickly broaden your connections (particularly those second- and third-degree connections) and get exposure to a very large network.
• Prospective customers: This type of connection can be a bit trickier and is why I suggest saving it for last, after you've already begun building a strong, extensive network. Once you have a broad network of first-, second-, and third-degree connections, it makes it easier to find people and activities you have in common so that you can reach out to prospects and start building a mutually beneficial relationship.

As you are expanding your list of connections and sending out invitations to connect, there are a few best practices that are considered musts if you are going to find success on LinkedIn. These include:

• Always customize the standard LinkedIn invitation to connect message: LinkedIn does an amazing job automating processes and making it as simple and frictionless as possible for you to make the most from your time on LinkedIn. One of these efficiency shortcuts it offers is an automated message that shows up when you choose to send someone an invitation to connect. The message says: “I would like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.” While this message is rather innocuous, it's almost considered sinful to use the message as-is. Instead, craft a concise message that explains how you know the person or why it's important for her to connect with you.
• Include a call to action in your message: The ultimate goal of a LinkedIn invitation is to connect with the person, of course. But don't stop there. Give that person one more memorable nugget of information about you or provide an incentive for him or her to take action. For example, suggest a group that you belong to that may be of interest to them, too. Or, provide a link to an article you found on LinkedIn that might be helpful or interesting.
• Send invitations to connect sooner rather than later: When you first meet someone, particularly if it's at an industry tradeshow, networking event, or business meeting, send an invitation to connect on LinkedIn as soon as possible. It helps make sure your invite is accepted, since they are more likely to still remember you. After hours or days have gone by, it's easy to forget how you know someone.

With the need to be so strategic in the way you connect and given the limitations and penalties LinkedIn puts on you, it may seem that LinkedIn is making it hard to expand your horizons. In actuality, they are trying to preserve the value of the overall network and ultimately the quality of the relationships being built. To do this, they have to minimize low-quality connections and keep what might be considered spam at a minimum. Not to worry! LinkedIn even provides you with tools to make it possible to meet people outside your network and expand your connections, using the following two tools:

• Introductions: The idea of introductions is a fantastic, free tool for opening doors to new prospects, even at the highest executive level, or to someone you may not otherwise have been able to reach. LinkedIn provides the introduction feature as a way for you to grow your network using people you already know. As long as your intended connection is either a second- or third-degree connection, you can be introduced by one of your first-degree connections. In essence, it occurs the same way you use introductions offline. You want to meet with the CEO of Company X, but you don't know her. However, your old college roommate plays golf with her on occasion, so you ask for an introduction. The same thing happens within LinkedIn, but the introduction happens virtually.
• InMail: Should someone be completely outside your network or you don't have the right person to help make an introduction, LinkedIn offers InMail. Similar to email, these are private messages that you send directly to the person via LinkedIn, but you don't have access to all of their profile information. InMail isn't free, either. As a basic member with a free account, you can purchase a certain number of InMails. If you have a Pro or upgraded account, then you receive a certain number of InMails as part of your Pro membership. Since you have no common connection with the person, it puts a lot of pressure on you to create a message that will elicit a response. The best approach for InMail messages is to be quick and to the point of why you are getting in touch with the person and be clear about why it's beneficial for them to connect with you or respond to your message.

PAID VERSUS “ORGANIC” OPPORTUNITIES FOR SOCIAL SELLING

Most social networking sites offer a multitude of ways to interact with people you know, and increasingly the sites are trying to help you engage with people you don't know—or expand your reach to a larger audience. In part, this is to help you get more value from networks like LinkedIn, especially when using it as a medium to reach potential customers. Of course, social networks are also trying to support their own business model by monetizing some features and services. LinkedIn, a public company, is no exception and offers a couple of paid engagement opportunities of which you can take advantage.

Ads and sponsorships are two of the biggest components of paid opportunities, but I also include any prospecting tools and upgraded memberships that incur additional charges as part of the non-organic (paid) category. LinkedIn offers all of these and I view the paid components as being equally important to the social selling process as organic opportunities; the two often go hand in hand in order for a salesperson to be most effective. Not only do fee-based options typically provide a more direct route for lead generation through social media channels, but they help create brand awareness. The awareness, or having your company visible in LinkedIn through ads, for example, can make it easier for you to then connect and engage with a prospect if she or he already has an idea of who the company is. This is especially true if your company isn't a well-known brand. Here are the paid opportunities that may be helpful to you when prospecting within LinkedIn:

• Ads: Just like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn lets you buy ads that are displayed on the personal profile pages. The ads are similar to those you would find on any website. Placing LinkedIn ads is a great way for you as a salesperson or for your brand to target your prospects using such barometers as industry, company size, geographic location, position type, and more—and have your ad shown to persons meeting those criteria. LinkedIn ads are also very affordable—you can spend less than $100 for an effective ad on LinkedIn compared to having to spend many thousands of dollars for a similar ad on other websites. (Of course, there are larger advertising opportunities available if you have a really big budget; otherwise you can use the basic ad program to build and manage your own ads.) Because you can easily target specific subsets of LinkedIn members, I typically use ads on LinkedIn to promote webinars or special events, or to promote offers for white papers and other content used for lead generation. Using LinkedIn ads not only allows you to generate direct leads in this way, but it helps raise the visibility of your brand to support your organic (non-paid) efforts. In other words, someone may be more willing to connect with you if they have recently seen an ad for your company and recognize the name.
• Premium Memberships: As an individual user, you can upgrade your profile to a premium account, which gives you access to more features and functionality. Depending on which account upgrade you choose, you get more search results, can use additional InMail messages and introductions, can see who has viewed your profile and the complete profiles of others, and gain access to tools like Profile Organizer, which lets you store and organize important member profiles (very helpful when maintaining lists of prospects and customers, for instance). Premium accounts are also nice because you can pay monthly fees and cancel or downgrade at anytime. Suppose you are getting ready for a trade show or special event and want to have greater access to reach prospective customers and research and follow up those attendees afterward? You can upgrade your personal account for the months surrounding the event and then downgrade to a free or less expensive premium account later. Saved Alerts is another benefit of having a premium account. It allows you to save searches for types of profiles and then notifies you when any new profiles are created that fit your criteria. This is a smart way to track prospects new to LinkedIn who match your target criteria.
• Sales Navigator: This tool was designed specifically with social selling in mind—it's the premium of the premium accounts! Sales Navigator gives you greater access and insight into people and companies that you are trying to sell into or make a connection, including sending you sales alerts, building your pipeline, and managing your leads by creating and saving lists of your prospects. Once you have Sales Navigator, you can also connect directly in Salesforce (the CRM tool) and use TeamLink, a function that lets you see who your coworkers are connected to (and vice versa) so that you can find common connections. Sales Navigator is a more expensive commitment than other lower-level, premium accounts, but you get a great deal of access to prospects in return.

Of course, you don't have to spend a lot of money on LinkedIn upgrades to find social selling success. There are other ways to reach and engage with prospects through organic (no-cost) activities. Again, paid opportunities often support the organic opportunities, but you can achieve success in LinkedIn with minimal or no expenditures. Growing your network with connections and asking for recommendations is at the root of organic activity, but here are some other ways you can take advantage of LinkedIn—for free!

• Group participation: LinkedIn provides you the opportunity to interact with people outside of your profile page and in what are referred to as groups. These are conversation threads, similar to forums or mini-communities, based on a shared interest or topic, or even based on an event or product. You can join up to fifty groups on LinkedIn at any given time and interact as often as you like. You can also start your own group, but I wouldn't recommend this until you've familiarized yourself with other groups and what's expected from them—and only if you have plenty of time to keep up with managing the group. Personally, I think a better use of your time is to join and actively participate in other groups that already have a large or very engaged group of members who fit your target audience.

  Since you are limited to how many groups you can join, and because you want to select ones that are most active, get to know more about a group before you join. LinkedIn includes information about the group that is accessible from the public view of the group's main page. The information, called Group Statistics, located in a box toward the bottom of the page, as shown in Figure 11–3, allows you to see such facts as how many participants a group has, how active the group is (the number of recent discussions), where the majority of the group's members are located, and what seniority most members have. Staying active in multiple groups is a tactic top sales professionals use to find and engage with leads. In fact, the “high achievers,” as referenced by LinkedIn's Koka Sexton, are members in thirty or more groups and contribute to them at least two times a week. Examples of some types of “contributions” you can make include:

  FIGURE 11–3

  

  Before joining a group, check out its statistics to see how active it is.

• Posting your own content to the group.
• Sharing links to other people's comments.
• Asking a question or starting a conversation by asking for feedback on a news item.
• Posting a poll to elicit easy participation and feedback from group members.

An extra benefit of participating in groups is that it provides you with another legitimate reason to extend an invitation to connect when building your network. Even though you may not know the person well, you can still send an invite to connect because you share membership in one or more groups.

• Follow LinkedIn Today's influencers: LinkedIn has expanded the amount and types of news and articles that are shared and promoted within the networking site. LinkedIn Today is the name of the company's social news page that consists of “channels” of content segmented by topic. It includes articles written by top “influencers,” or contributors, who are experts in certain subjects. You can determine which channels are most important to you and have the most recent articles show up in the updates section of your profile page. You can also follow any of the top influencers as a way to stay informed of the latest trends. Commenting on and sharing these influencer articles is a simple way to not only keep up with industry news but to also provide value to your connections by sharing the information.
• Follow companies: Even if you cannot connect with certain prospects or you're having a difficult time identifying certain contacts within a company you have on your prospect list, you can still follow the company's page on LinkedIn. This simple action helps you keep in touch with what's happening within the company, learn more about the company's needs and how you may be able to assist them, and could even give you a reason to contact them outside of LinkedIn if you see an update that could be used as a conversation starter.

You don't have to participate in or utilize all of these organic activities within LinkedIn. These are examples of the various ways you can remain visible in LinkedIn, reach prospective customers, and expand your network of connections. If you can't consistently keep up with all of these areas, don't stress about it. Pick one or two of the easiest or least time-consuming activities and start there. But remember, as with networking offline, the more time and effort you put into smart, strategic networking on LinkedIn, the more of a return you are likely to see—especially for B2B prospecting.

In the next chapter, we will look at Twitter, another social networking platform that lets you connect with potentially thousands of friends, prospects, and influencers—in less than 140 characters!