With the platform now topping half a billion users in more than 200 countries, it’s the clear leader among social media for connecting with B2B prospects, potential hires, and business partners.
Although there is less traffic on LinkedIn, it is often a better choice for businesses. Besides providing you with an opportunity to connect with professionals and engage with them on a personal level, LinkedIn users are much more open to learning about products than Facebook users are. A recent set of studies have even shown LinkedIn to produce more leads than even a company’s blog.
As such, it makes sense to focus on widening your reach on the platform. Below are just a few strategies to help in building more connections on LinkedIn.
Determine your Desired Connections
First, determine who you intend to connect with. Will you purely be seeking to keep your network exclusive to people in industries relevant to your work, or will you try to connect with as many people as possible?
The latter is usually preferred as 1) LinkedIn doesn’t penalise users for having a large network, 2) just because someone isn’t currently in your industry, they may be in the future, 3) their connections may be in a relevant industry, and 4) having more connections will lead to a more visible profile.
Personalising Your Requests
Once you determine your intended crowd, you should focus on personalising your connection requests. Usually, selecting the “connect” button from the “people you may know” list sends an automatic generic request. While convenient, this may not be ideal when attempting to make unfamiliar connections. For these situations, go to the person’s profile and click the “connect” button there, as this will bring up an option to personalise your request with a message. Adding a personal touch will increase the likelihood of making a successful and higher quality connection.
Post Often
Besides manually sending requests, another strategy to build more connections is by posting often. When a connection likes, comments, or shares one of your posts, their connections will be able to see the interactions, making your profile visible to a larger audience. These “connections of connections” may take the initiative to send you a request if they see relevant content that you’ve posted.
Don’t be too worried about annoying people with too many posts. LinkedIn’s algorithms make it so that your network likely won’t see every single post unless you publish an article natively on LinkedIn, which notifies your network.
Utilise Groups
Finally, there’s one useful feature of LinkedIn that’s often overlooked: Groups. Groups are the best way to meet like-minded individuals and lots of them. When you join a group, especially one related to your industry, you’re instantly connected with hundreds of people with interests and experiences that are relevant to your work. To utilise this function, you can either create a group and start from scratch, or the simpler option, join an already established group.
These are just a few ways to expand your network, and hopefully, these tips can help you build more meaningful connections.