With a user base of over 740M people, LinkedIn has proven to be a reliable social networking platform to connect with popular personalities, potential employees, and business partners. The networking feature allows you to not only connect with notable people in the field but connect with their connections as well.
Such a spider web allows you to make more valuable acquaintances and expand the reach of your business. You can increase your brand image and drive traction to your business to bolster sales and reach your company goals more efficiently.
However, you would have to make these major decisions on who to connect with, all by yourself, and that can be tricky if you are not on the right path. Here are a few tips to maximize the utility of the networking feature and add value to your business by leveraging your LinkedIn connections:
Be Appreciative of Other Businesses
Reaching out to people out of the blue on LinkedIn can be intimidating, especially if they are notable pages or personalities. The easiest way to initiate a conversation is by complimenting their work or congratulating them on their accomplishments.
Start with a suitable salutation and add a statement on how you have been following their work, and how you can learn from them. End the message on a positive note saying that you are eager to know more about them and their business.
Reach Out With Help
As business owners, professionals on LinkedIn are usually big on lending support or help. However, reaching out to them via messages with no prior contact can be strange and could potentially come off as disrespectful.
In such cases, you could communicate with them in the comments sections under their posts. You could either ask them your query or request them to write a piece/make a video on the subject. More than being authoritative or demanding, try to come off as interested and curious.
Make Use of Your Existing Connections
Networking does not always have to be a brand-new process where you have to build your connections from scratch. There might be plenty of connections that you might fail to recognize as valuable.
For this reason, try to connect with your acquaintances on LinkedIn as they come instead of trying to amass a large gathering in just one sitting.
Additionally, with the People You May Know feature on the My Network tab, you could gain connections from the users you’re acquainted with. As you are already associated with them, you could use their aid to introduce you to worthy connections they might have as well.
It might get a bit tedious but try to make note of important dates like birthdays or any professional feats that they achieve to find instances to contact them. There might be connections that you lost touch with a while ago, but these are valuable moments to initiate conversations.
Once you get to talk to these personalities, you need to maintain them by speaking to them whenever you can, striking interesting conversations, and keeping track of their professional achievements.
LinkedIn Groups
As an initiative to promote discussions, you can make groups on LinkedIn to talk to people with shared interests. It is an effortless way to network with knowledgeable people and make your connections worthwhile.
With over 2M active groups on LinkedIn, you can join any and every group that interests you. If you work, for example, in the medical field, you can still join business groups if that is of interest to you.
The bottom line is to make valuable connections that will be mutually beneficial for you as well as the other person. You can broaden your network or stick to your field if you deem it best!
Engaging Content
It is not enough to gain connections and network with people, you need to give them reasons to keep following you. To effectively do that, you can post engaging content on your page that is relevant to your target audience.
Put in the effort to the content you are posting as it could be a sound way to gain more connections. Generating good content with the proper hashtags would mean that your connections could forward it to other people, and they could follow you to see what else you could come up with.
Always put a call to action statement that subtly requests your audience to comment on your posts to bump the engagement rate.
Additionally, try to engage them by posting polls or video content related to your subject matter or as light entertainment.
Key Takeaways
To grow your LinkedIn business page or personal account, you need to network with the right personalities. As a rookie, it could be intimidating not knowing how to approach people, so here are a few tips to help you combat that:
- Keep track of your potential connections and their professional achievements, and congratulate them or send appreciative messages if you have a good opportunity to
- Contact people either through messages or through comments sections for any advice or queries but try not to go overboard by demanding answers or badgering them
- Use the People You May Know feature to make the best use of the connections you already have and analyze their network to find anyone who falls in your category
- Join LinkedIn groups to find people your wavelength and communicate with them to broaden your network
- Generate engaging content to retain the connections that you worked hard to make and interact with them wherever possible
Remember that making connections can be worthwhile as a business owner or as someone wanting to achieve great feats in their career. You do not have to do it alone!
