What is LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a communication channel allowing you to reach out to your target audience:
- By a direct approach (message or Inmail)
- By posting text, video, image, survey or articles (organic or sponsored)
- By reacting to existing posts
Each of these approaches follows its own rules, dictated by Linkedin’s policy and the famous algorithms, which are regularly updated.Â
By understanding how these algorithms work, you will maximize your chances of getting results: in terms of leads, employer brand or awareness.
How to prospect on LinkedIn?
There are several scenarios:
Open Profile: You can send a message to any LinkedIn member who has set up his account in “Open Profile”.
InMail: With a premium LinkedIn account ( e.g. Sales Navigator Core), you get 50credits per month to contact any LinkedIn member. If this member answers your InMail, you get 1 credit back.
Connection level 1: You can send messages to all LinkedIn members belonging to your network. You can export your network list in .csv format: Preferences and privacy > Data privacy > Export your data.
Beware LinkedIn is less and less friendly to spammers and robots. If you exceed certain daily quotas, you might be banned from the network and have to start a new profile from beginning.
“Visiting” a profile generates a notification for the visited person “Victor looked at your profile” which will sometimes allow you to solve some problems.
How do I write my LinkedIn invitation requests?
With the rise of automation tools, people are less likely to accept invitations from strangers.
There is no magic solution except using the common sense of the 5Ps of the American marketer Larry Kim on the content of invitations: be Polite, Pertinent, Personalized, Professional, Praiseful.
If you have identified a list of top suspects, personalize each invitation by looking at the latest articles he has published on LinkedIn or elsewhere, commenting on them or referring to them in your invitation.
Invitation personalization such as “We went to the same school add me” or “I see we share a common relationship” are outdated and no longer increase acceptance rates.
The power of your LinkedIn profile
The first thing your contact will do, especially if he is interested, will be to look at your LinkedIn profile. It should therefore reflect your activity and your personal friendliness.
- Therefore choose a clear title.
Forget expressions like “Founder of company XY, manager, sales manager…” and instead use expressions that define your activity and your value proposition. For instance: “HRIS project specialist in the luxury industry”, “ERP consultant for heavy industry”,
- Smile on your profile picture
- Complete your profile (Summary, Experiences, Skills, Recommendations)
- Add a clear call to action (your phone number, your email, a link to an online appointment page)
Update your LinkedIn title by customizing it to keep track of ongoing prospecting campaigns.
