1st October 2013

Aegon: Making the most of LinkedIn

We previously looked at how to get started with LinkedIn. I now want to look at how you can get the most out of LinkedIn.

Once you’ve a complete profile, the next step is to connect with people you know. In essence, the more connections you have, the more your name will appear in LinkedIn searches, and the more chances you have of being found by your target audience.

LinkedIn offers four ways to invite people to connect:

1. Manually enter the first name, last name and email address of each person you want to invite.
2. Import contacts from Outlook or your web-based email account. LinkedIn will check the email addresses and let you know which of your contacts are already on LinkedIn.
3. Colleagues search - LinkedIn will show you the names of all the people who share a common employer with you.
4. Classmates search - works in a similar way to the colleagues search.

It can be very impactful not to use the standard invite but to personalise it. This increases your chances of achieving a connection.

Getting the most out of LinkedIn

You get out of LinkedIn what you put into it. The good thing is you don’t have to invest a lot of time and money to see results. The key is starting with a good profile, and then tapping into the various ways LinkedIn lets you connect with people within and outside of your network.

• Join groups related to your areas of interest and expertise.
• Use the information LinkedIn provides. A good LinkedIn profile can give you the market intelligence you need to target good-quality prospects, as well as an insight into the solutions you might want to present to them. It lets you break the ice and start talking to people on a personal, rather than business, level. Spending time on your home page reviewing what people in your network are doing is a valuable investment.
• LinkedIn offers you an easy way to stay connected and top of mind with people in your network, as it gives you a reason to reach out to them based on something they’ve posted.
• Someone in your network might connect with someone else that you know who isn’t yet in your network.
• You may find new LinkedIn groups to join.
• You can see at a glance what’s happening in your groups and participate as appropriate.
• Depending on the applications that you’ve installed, you can see upcoming events, read blog posts of people in your network, create or participate in a poll, and more.

I’d encourage you to look at LinkedIn and give it a try as part of your client proposition. It’s fast becoming the business Facebook.

John Joe McGinley 
Head of Business Brain
Aegon

Business Development