Recently, I had the opportunity to implement a LinkedIn follower campaign for one of our clients. Rather than growing their platform by adding anyone and everyone with whom we had not yet connected, I conducted a more specialized and funneled approach. When your goal is to grow a LinkedIn profile, it is important to focus on the “why” behind your connection. Through this project, there are four key takeaways I believe everyone should implement and know when desiring to grow their company page.
Filtering
When initially looking for who to send connection requests to, you want to identify who is relevant and interested in what your company does. For example, if you are a desk manufacturing company, sending requests to universities and schools makes more sense than adding people who work at fast-food restaurants. Relevance is key, which is why the first aspect of this campaign showed me how crucial it is to filter when searching for new connections. From geography down to specific companies, the filtering system helps bring only the most relevant results to searches. As you continue to filter and find new connections, it is okay to broaden your search as you run out of new finds.
The Message
One great aspect of LinkedIn is the ability to send short notes or messages to users when asking to connect with them. Although this tool is great, it can be easy to send generic messages which come across as unauthentic. In life, everyone is trying to find commonalities with people they meet so there is some level of relatability. The messages I sent out incorporated this idea as well. Before I sent a connection request, I would look through the profile of the user I wanted to connect with and discover what we had in common. There were three aspects I focused on when doing so. First, I would look to determine if we had any mutual connections or were part of any of the same groups. Next, I looked to see if we graduated from the same university, building instant comradery. The last aspect was finding commonalities in the work industry by looking at job titles – i.e., both work in sales at a tech company. Building on these similarities changed the invite from a random request to someone my client could connect with in real life.
Invite Limit
As I moved through this project and saw great success, I was empowered to continue to send out more and more invites. Things were moving smoothly until my search results stopped showing up. I knew there were invite limits on LinkedIn, but I was unaware of the search limit they had in place as well. If you are a free LinkedIn user, this limit is defined by “viewing lots of profiles that are not 1st-degree connections” and resets the first day of each month. Reaching this undefined limit was frustrating at first because I was unsure how to continue my search. This brings me to my last takeaway.
Google Search
The invite limit felt like a dead end. I was unsure how to continue to build out my client’s social platform without the use of LinkedIn’s filtering options. This setback prompted intense brainstorming before I thought to use everyone’s favorite search engine – Google. As Google has grown to become more business friendly, they have made it easier to find and filter out companies, much like LinkedIn. You can search by industry, location, even down to a specific zip-code. This helped me locate users who were not showing up on LinkedIn and brought in a new plethora of connections.
My LinkedIn follower campaign project helped open doors for growing my client’s network, but also increased my own understanding of how to grow a platform. It takes much more than clicking connect 100+ times and hoping it sticks. Researching and writing the right messages to send and finding the most relevant people to connect with will help grow your platform in the right way. By utilizing these tips and finetuning them to your specific company, you can see your connections grow with users who are interested and want to interact with your content.
This post is courtesy of MMC Spring 2022 Intern Nicole Fegans