During the last couple days, I looked at using search — or better, social media monitoring — to help with blogger outreach, and search to help improve one’s Twitter community.
Today (yes, I know I’m very late with this post), let’s take a look at LinkedIn for building business prospects. This can be used for various objectives, but, in my example, I’m looking at it as a small agency or solo practitioner using it in business development.
LinkedIn has many great ways to find people within your community — professionally and/or geographically — that are open to business relationships. While LinkedIn offers many ways to search, you do business with people, not “companies,” right?
So, use the advanced people search: see right.
While there are many ways to filter your search, I want to point out a few key ways:
Keywords: You can search for prospects based on terms related to vertical industries you have experience in. Sure, you can filter by Industry, but using keywords allow you to refine your search around specific industry terms.
Geography: Looking to do business near you or in your favorite city? LinkedIn has a lot of flexibility to help you search by geography.
Open to potential: The bottom box highlighted is the real key: It shows you who on LinkedIn is interested in what. I have the “interested in: Consultants/contractors” option. There’s also:
- Potential employees
- Entrepreneurs
- Hiring managers
- Industry experts
- Deal-making contacts
And, the ever-there: all option.
Once you get your results, you can sort various ways, from relationship to you, recommendation, keywords and relevance.
So, what are your good LinkedIn tips?
Since business is all about relationships, be sure you are networking with local Social Media Breakfast groups, Social Media Clubs, PRSA, chamber groups, etc. And, be sure you check out LinkedIn to see who is closely connected to you — but you don’t yet know.
-Mike
If you’re interested in learning more about how you can use social media to build business — either having me talk with your group or help your social media marketing efforts — I would appreciate it if you’d contact me.
