- January 14, 2018
- Posted by: Con P. Sweeney
- Categories: LinkedIn, Social Media
I’ve been blogging about content and its importance on LinkedIn for sometime.
Content is an important and necessary component of a successful social media strategy or for the optimal use of LinkedIn.
However, by itself, content is only a passive approach.
You have to attract readers to it and ideally these readers become leads who become billable clients.
Think of your content as the honeypot to attract new leads.
One way to leverage your content is actively pursue new leads on LinkedIn and bring them to your content.
Let’s discuss this!
By now, if you’ve been following my blog, you should have your LinkedIn profile complete and in good form, and normalized with your other social media channels. Your content strategy should also be in place.
(If you’re not there yet then you can either reread my blog or contact me for assistance.)
The first thing you want to do is to develop your ideal client persona or personas.
Who are the potential leads most likely to need your service or product?
You should know these by their industry, company size, location, or other data elements that help you identify the ones you want.
Next, you need a disciplined approach to identifying and then connecting with these potential leads.
Set aside time to do this and then begin to request connections with your second degree LinkedIn connections that fit these criteria?
Why second degree only?
You already have a mutual connection with these folks and won’t look like a total stranger when you approach them.
(You should have another message stream to stay in contact with your first degree connections and I’ll write an article on that topic in the future.)
Send out these connection requests regularly and don’t forget to follow up promptly with a reply when they accept!
This is just the first step in turning these new connections into leads and ideally into paying clients.
Soliciting connections and turning them into leads is a numbers game.
The more you pursue, the more likely you are to convert them into billable clients.
Starting with qualified connection requests with your ideal client personas increases your probability of success.
Keep making those LinkedIn connection requests.
Follow-up promptly once they accept and endeavor to either have a phone call or a face-to-face meeting with them.
Don’t sell your new connections!
Use social selling to bring them value that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Track your progress!
What works and what doesn’t work?
Measure the success or not of each approach.
Finally, don’t get discouraged!
This takes time!
Many people fail to take advantage of LinkedIn to its fullest potential.
If you’re a LinkedIn Premium account holder then you especially should be doing this?
If not, what are you paying all that money for? Their cute little logo?
This process works for free accounts too.
The mechanics are a bit different but not terribly so.
The Commercial Usage Limit (CUL) is a hindrance here but it’s not insurmountable.
If you want to know more about this either contact me or wait for an article that I’ll be writing on this topic shortly.
Follow this approach and you’ll find yourself with new leads for you to pursue!
That’s it for now!
Please check-out my 8 step approach for developing a social media program to get some more ideas on how to use social media.
Also, never forget to reach out to either ask questions or to ask for help from someone like myself!
In the meantime, thank you for following and reading my blog!
I look forward to any and all comments that you may have. I will reply to any comments made to this blog post as promptly as I can.