For most agents that’s where it stops, creating a profile and accepting a few connection requests. When talking about LinkedIn with them I always hear the battle cry of “What am I supposed to do now?, nothing is happening!”
The true power of tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter is one very simple concept. It’s that people are very focused on them and likely to pay attention to communications occurring through them. So with LinkedIn, if you want to take it to the next level then you have to utilize their communication tools. For most of you, you probably didn’t even know they existed.
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I go into LinkedIn, and upload in my entire “potential client email list”. Then LinkedIn manually allows you to choose to connect with whomever you feel has potential from your list. Once you send the connection requests out, over the next few days you will see a steady stream of people accepting them. Now these aren’t people I know, but that’s ok because my goal is to connect with potential clients, add them to my distribution list and then target them with targeted LinkedIn messages. You have to realize that 80% of people using social media have no idea how it works or what they are doing. So they are very likely to accept your connection requests. Advanced users realize this and use it to their advantage.
Once your connections start to grow, the next step is to organize them into “sub folders” it’s called “tagging”. When you connect with someone they go into the “Untagged” folder. First you need to create a few sub folders by clicking on “manage tags” in the Connection area. Then you need to go in and move that connection into a folder that describes them. Let’s say you connect with Bob and he is a business owner that you could target for Employee Benefits. Well then you should create a sub folder for Business Owners. When you come up with a targeted message that business owners would be interested in you can go into that folder, select it and send all the business owners that message. Now I know that may sound a lot like email, and a lot more work to send. However you have to realize when you send a LinkedIn message that it goes to the users LinkedIn inbox and it goes to their traditional email. However in their traditional email it will say they have received a message from their LinkedIn connection. This will look much different then the 100 other emails they may get that day, giving it a high probability of being opened and read!
Make sure that when you create a folder that you don’t put more then fifty connections in that folder. The reason is, LinkedIn only allows you to send a message to fifty people at once. So if you have over fifty connections of the same category you should create a second folder for that category.
This may seem like a lot of work initially, reason being you never actually put any work into LinkedIn. However once you have a very organized connection list you shouldn’t be wasting more then a few minutes a day with LinkedIn.
Once everything is organized you should get into a system of sending every new connection a LinkedIn message about your Facebook Business page and your Twitter account. Attempting to get them to become part of those distributions. Then “tagging” that connection into an organized folder.
Again, the power of LinkedIn is its new and people pay attention to it. Marketing 101 always tell us that you want to use communication tools that your potential clients are likely to pay attention to. The key with LinkedIn is to not be scared to connect with potential clients, and then put in the time to organize your distribution so you can take advantage of it.
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