A Deep Dive Into The 7 Uses For LinkedIn™ 

(…and how useful it actually is for each one)

Profile Reference Check

People typically come to your profile to answer these questions:

• Just who is this person?
• Are they who they say they are?

What it amounts to is people are looking at your profile as a kind of reference check. They are curious about you and they want to know more.

When someone comes to your profile the implied question they have is “What can this person do to help me?”

And there you go. Those are the questions your profile needs to answer:

• What can you do for your ideal reader?
• What benefits can you provide?
• What questions are you uniquely qualified to answer?

LinkedIn™ works really well for this, but most LinkedIn™ users don’t work their profiles really well. They have skinny one line descriptions of current and past job descriptions. They don’t bother with the “About section” at all. They have no articles or featured content in their profiles. They neglect especially the Skills and Recommendations sections. A LinkedIn™  profile can be a personal showcase that is open 24/7. It takes some effort to set up, but then it just takes a little maintenance to keep it up to date.

Increased Reach

You can use LinkedIn™ for increasing your Reach, that is the number of people who are aware of you, but it is not easy. You are competing with millions of other people and companies vying for attention on LinkedIn™. A search on Sales Navigator reveals that 24 million people posted on LinkedIn™ in the past thirty days. That’s a million people every day, and that does not count any of those people posting more than twice in the past 30 days, and that does not count company page posts, of which there are something like 60 million company pages.

Using LinkedIn™ for reach gets tougher all the time. I am starting to work with some of my clients on using LinkedIn™ advertising if they want increased reach, because it is the only way of ensuring their message gets put in front of exactly who they want to get it in front of.

Increased Credibility

On the other hand, LinkedIn™ is awesome for increasing credibility. You can call it thought leadership, which is trendy, or consideration, which is what LinkedIn™ calls it in their advertising context, but regardless of the label, LinkedIn™ is really good for it.

However, some ways are better than others. I recommend writing articles or newsletters if you want credibility. There are three reasons for this:

• They can be inserted as feature articles and prominently displayed on your profile
• They are saved long term by LinkedIn™. I have articles that I posted ten years ago that are still on LinkedIn™
• They get indexed by Google. People searching Google can be directed to your article. I know this happens because it has happened to me tens of thousands of times (I had one article where my statistics told me over one hundred thousand opens had come via Google).

These days, prospective customers do a lot of research. They identify who the players are for their requirements, and they set about doing the preliminary parsing by themselves. They will often come up with a small group of finalists before they ever contact any of those finalists. LinkedIn™ is a great way of establishing your credibility and making that list of finalists. 

Finding People and Companies

LinkedIn™ is outstanding for searching and there are two reasons for this. The first is because LinkedIn™ is a database that updates itself. When someone gets promoted, they change their LinkedIn™ profile. When someone changes jobs, they change their LinkedIn™ profile. Heck, when someone loses their job, they change their LinkedIn™ profile.

So LinkedIn™ is the most up to date database of info there is.

Secondly, LinkedIn™ has the tools to search that database. You can look for specific companies, or within industries, or at different company sizes. You can search by geography. You can look for people via those parameters plus function (like purchasing for example), seniority and specific job titles. And you can search using any combination of these filters that you want.

I used to say to one client that with LinkedIn™ search you can have “total market knowledge”. You can find everyone. All it takes is a little imagination.

However, to get maximum utility out of using LinkedIn™ Search, I suggest you consider getting Sales Navigator. The additional filters, search results, and saving abilities can make it worth the money.

You Can Be Found

This is another aspect of LinkedIn™ that needs a big asterisk. Yes, you can be found on LinkedIn™. And every week LinkedIn™ sends us a notification for how many searches we appeared in that week. But there is a world of difference between being “found” in a  LinkedIn™ search and having LinkedIn™ display your name prominently in those search results.

If you are based in the USA, and I perform a LinkedIn™ search and specify the United States, LinkedIn™ comes up with “over 100 million” people in the results. You are one of them. But what are the odds of me actually “finding” you in those results?

The biggest factor in where you appear in search results is your relevance to the searcher, that is how connected to them on LinkedIn™ you are. When you get a lot of results in a search, LinkedIn™ will usually list them in rough order of how connected you are – first level connections first, second level second and so on. The bigger your LinkedIn™ network, the more likely you are a first level connection, or more likely, a second level connection to the searcher. This may change with the new AI based search, but I don’t have that yet. 

The bottom line though is that – at present – appearing in search results is a pretty hit and miss proposition.

Research For Both People And Companies

There is a wealth of information available to us on LinkedIn™. We just need to find it, and in some cases interpret it.

For example, on a LinkedIn™ profile we can find:

• Current experience section for responsibilities and accomplishments
• Previous experience to get an idea of their career path
• Their “About” section can show how they see their career progression themselves
• Recommendations given and received.
• What their skills reflect (sometimes the order someone puts their skills in can tell you a lot)
• The companies and people they are following and the groups they belong to.
• Their recent activity (if they have any) on LinkedIn™. Is he or she  posting? How often? What topics? Are they interacting with other people’s or company’s posts?

Now if I we are looking at a company:

• Examine the company insights LinkedIn™ provides very carefully (you do need a premium subscription for this). Hiring trends, headcount, and turnover by department all give clues as to how the company is doing. A company growing at 20% a year is very different from one that has had headcount go down by 20% in the past year.
• This is an opportunity to pull a list of company employees and look for active users in all parts of the company. You can often find people who are active LinkedIn™ users where you normally wouldn’t expect them (this will be important when we want to contact people at the company in question).
• Lastly I will look to see if we have any connections who might know people at this company. I look to see if there are any company employees with a “2nd” beside their name.

Using LinkedIn™ For Direct First Contact

LinkedIn™ can be the absolute best method to contact prospects in preliminary outreach. 

Sometimes.

That’s because at its core, LinkedIn™ is a database, not “the social network for professionals”. Out of a billion LinkedIn™ members, maybe ten or twenty percent of them log in to LinkedIn™ at once a week or more often. So if we send an outreach message or connection request to a prospect, odds are roughly one in five or ten that that person will have an opportunity to see it in the next week. The odds of us getting a response from users who come around less often are pretty low for two reasons:

• When they finally do show up, say three months from now, they will have a pile of messages waiting for them. Good luck with yours getting any quality time with them.
• The less often someone shows up, the less value they attach to LinkedIn™ and the less likely they are enthusiastic about – and amenable to – receiving messages from strangers.

Now there are people who tend to use LinkedIn™ a lot – salespeople, marketers, human resources people, consultants and solo practitioners of all kinds. If these people are in your target demographic, you will likely do a lot better using LinkedIn™ to send outreach messages. And you can also use LinkedIn™ to make offers on your profile and generate sales leads.

But other professions will be worse than ten percent. I ran an ad with a client where the targets were engineers  and the results suggested that only a couple percent were showing up at least once a week.

Summary

LinkedIn™ is an excellent tool for search and research. It is outstanding for establishing or improving your credibility, and for providing an avenue to establish you have the answers to your ideal target’s questions via your profile.

LinkedIn™ is more hit and miss for increasing reach, being found, and for first outreach.

Set your expectations accordingly.