Events in 17 libraries throughout the UK were held on the 20th September, celebrating Start-up Day, in collaboration with Santander, and once again proved to be a huge success.
More than 1,000 people attended across all locations, welcoming entrepreneurs for fully funded talks, workshops and advice sessions. I was delighted to be invited to present a workshop on ‘How to Network on LinkedIn – Get Connected and Grow Your Business’, and here I have compiled my top tips from the day, so that you can continue your start-up journey.
Building connections starts with people seeing all that you have to offer and those with 100% complete profiles are 40 times more likely open to opportunities through LinkedIn.
Think broadly about all your experience, including summer jobs, internships, volunteer work, and any student organisations you were involved with. You never know what might catch someone’s eye.
A recommendation from a client or customer is a great way to show that you are the expert in your field and that you’ve done a great job. I also recommend that you ask permission for these to be used in other areas of your marketing, such as website, brochures, email footers etc. – don’t just keep them on LinkedIn.
Networking on LinkedIn doesn’t mean reaching out cold to strangers. Start building your LinkedIn network and connect to those people you know, like and trust, in the first instance. The trick is to then see who they know so you can ask your trusted connection for an introduction, and guess what, they’ll be much more likely to help if you already know them.
It’s an absolute must that you tailor your LinkedIn request, let’s look at why…
“I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”
OR
“Hi XX, it was great to meet you at XX last week. It is good to see you on LinkedIn and thought we could stay in touch?”
What would you prefer to receive in your inbox? I’d certainly prefer the message where they have certainly taken their time to be interested – try it for yourself!
LinkedIn Groups can help you form new connections, start with any alumni groups, find other organisations and any associations that you belong to, or groups who are relevant to your industry sector/expertise.
Take the relationship off LinkedIn – offer to meet for a coffee or schedule a “virtual coffee” – the only way for connections to get to know, like and trust you.
Summary
If you’d like to chat about any LinkedIn training requirements, bespoke to your company either on a one to one or group basis, please contact me on 07752 539719 or 0161 826 7181 or email info@bizwizuk.co.uk.
By Ann Davies, Director
Do you feel whatever you do on LinkedIn you just can’t get the search results you need?
Using the LinkedIn search filters is a great way to narrow your search and find exactly what and who you’re looking for. However, I will stress that if you upgrade Recruiter Lite or Sales Navigator premium accounts, you can also filter searches by years of experience, functions, seniority level, interests, company size, and when they joined a company, allowing you to perform even more powerful searches. Here’s an article from Mark Williams explaining Sales Navigator VS Recruiter Lite so worth a read.
Boost your use of LinkedIn as a sales-generation machine, here’s some tips to help get better results when searching for those key decision makers.
How to Run a Search
Running a search is easy, to run a search on LinkedIn you must:
If you’ve searched for a company, the Company Page will appear in the drop-down, if there is a page created. You’ll see the following tabs at the top of the search results page:
Select any of the tabs to view search results in that category.
How to run a Boolean Search
Boolean are a little complicated however, they allow us to combine keywords with operators or modifiers such as NOT, AND and OR to produce more appropriate results. You can run a Boolean search by combining keywords with operators like AND, NOT, and OR.
Here are some ways to use Boolean to construct your search:
Quoted searches
For an exact phrase, enclose the phrase in quotation marks. For example, type “product manager”. You can also use quotation marks if you want to find someone with a multi-word title.
LinkedIn search only supports standard, straight quotation marks (“).
NOT searches
If you want to exclude a search term from your search results type the word NOT (capital letters) beforehand, which obviously limits your search results. For example, “operator NOT supervisor”.
OR searches
Type the word OR for results which include one or more items in a list which will help to. broaden your results. For example, “sales OR marketing OR advertising”.
AND searches
Type the word AND to see results which include all items in that list. For example, “accountant AND finance AND accounts”.
For a full breakdown of how to run a Boolean search head over to Brynne Tillman who explains further.
There’re no shortcuts when it comes to success other than patience and time and it all comes down to hard work, testing and measuring.
If you’d like to chat about any LinkedIn training requirements, bespoke to your company, contact me on 07752 539719 or 0161 826 7181 or email info@bizwizuk.co.uk.
By Ann Davies, Director