Five Things Your Competitors Are Not Doing On LinkedIn

Posted by Ben Kniffen in Uncategorized

If you’re already using LinkedIn to add to your list of business prospects, then chances are you’re ahead of the game.

If not, now’s the time to get started.  LinkedIn is blowing up.

You tell me a company or prospect that you want to do business with, and I’ll show you how to connect with them on LinkedIn.  It’s not going anywhere.

Are you getting the most out of what LinkedIn has to offer? Here are five tactics you can add to your marketing tool belt that will put you even further ahead of your competitors.

1. Use LinkedIn Signal For Prospecting

Signal is a feature on LinkedIn that is rarely talked about but very powerful. You can access it by selecting “Updates” in the master search menu or by selecting “Signal” in the drop down menu on the “News” tab. Signal is basically an aggregated feed of all the status updates, groups posts and any other content posted on LinkedIn.

Why is this powerful? Because you can essentially see every status update from every person on LinkedIn. Not just your connections, or those within a couple degrees of you, but EVERY person on LinkedIn.

You can then use a targeted keyword search to sort through the statuses to find people talking about topics you want to engage in. You can even sort the results by company, location and many other parameters.

This is a great tactic to find prospects that you would otherwise have no idea are out there.

2. LinkedIn “Interests” and “Skills & Expertise” Sections

The “Interests” and “Skills & Expertise” sections are two areas that are commonly glossed over by people building their profile.

LinkedIn’s search algorithm is fairly basic, which means that if you have the right keywords on your profile (enough times) then there is a good chance your profile will be found when someone is searching for those keywords. The “Interests” and “Skills & Expertise” sections are a great place to load up on your keywords.

In the latter section you are allowed 50 keywords. Use all 50. Don’t just list four and move on.

In the “Interests” section you should do the same thing, take advantage of the space that LinkedIn gives you.

Some people use this area to say they like “knitting” or “eating barbeque.” While this is a fine approach, we prefer to use this area to focus on the keywords that will drive appearances in search, profile views, and conversions.

Keeping your interests and skills & expertise sections rich with keywords is a great way to improve your position in LinkedIn’s people search rankings.

3. Who Has Viewed Your Profile?

Developing business is all about being seen and staying in front of your prospects, and this is a nice little tactic to do just that.

We’ve all opened up the “Who’s Viewed Your Profile?” section to see who has been looking at our profile.

You can not resist doing this. Neither can your prospects.

Here’s how to take advantage of this in a targeted manner:

1. Make a list of all the prospects you are trying to stay in front of.

2. Once a month, open up their profile in your browser.

3. When your prospects view who has been looking at their profile, your name has a very good chance of popping up. It’s just another way to keep in front of your prospects.

Do this simple three-step process once a month, and you are guaranteed to increase name recognition.  Think this might turn a cold call into a warm call?

4. Prospecting Using LinkedIn Company Searches

Lots of people search for prospects on LinkedIn. That’s nothing new. How you search for them is another matter.

A great tactic to find prospective clients is to search through the companies listed on LinkedIn that you are targeting. In the master search tab you can pull down the “Company” option and start finding the companies on your target prospect list.

Often, people will just do a keyword search for something more position-focused like “procurement” or “purchaser.” By taking it a step further with the the company search you can find lists of employees to connect with on LinkedIn.

You can connect not only with the “purchasers” but many of the other people who work at their company as well, thus improving your sales chances.

5. Expanding Your Group Membership

If you don’t post in a lot of groups or join in on a lot of group conversations, you need to start.

If you do, you know that you can join up to 50 groups on LinkedIn…unless you use this little trick.

Many groups have smaller subgroups associated with them. Sometimes there might only be one or two subgroups belonging to the master group, but other times there might be a dozen or even more.

You are allowed to join all of them regardless of whether you have reached your limit of 50 groups or not.  In other words, you can essentially join unlimited subgroups.

It should be noted that you do not increase the amount of people you are connected to, since all subgroup members are already connected in the master group.

But you can post content to each group individually, therefore improving your chances of prospective clients seeing your posts in less crowded subgroups.

Now instead of posting to 50 groups you can post to 60, 80 or even 100.

There are many prospecting tactics you can use on LinkedIn to build your business. Spending a few minutes each day on these five are a great place to start.

Stick with these activities for a few months and you will definitely see a big spike in the number of relationships you are building and the number of real prospects you are keeping your name in front of on LinkedIn.

Rest assured, your competition won’t be.