LinkedIn is great for their intended use case of documenting and presenting your professional relationships for potential job offers. But LinkedIn doesn't connect you with potential customers.
Recently, I've started receiving many invitations to connect with people on LinkedIn. As a matter of habit, I don't accept those requests.
However, I've seen people in Sales, Recruitment etc. usually connect with such people on LinkedIn.
What are the positives and negatives of such connections?
Great post! Have already forwarded it to one of our sales guys.
One thing I would like to add from personal experience: It's really easy these days to connect to a lot of people on LinkedIn that you have never met or even heard of before. I am tempted to say the acceptance quote of a "cold connection" is about 50%.
Once your network has a decent size, you can connect to almost anyone from your industry (in our case gaming and mobile) even if you only have a free LinkedIn account (like I do) because you have a least a couple of people from their company already within your 2nd/3rd degree connections, and then you can literally add the entire board. Believe me, more C-level guys than you might think will accept you if your profile looks like you are a decent person.
The reason I writing all this is that I have been much more successful getting meetings through LinkedIn than through cold email. I feel that if I send a LinkedIn message to somebody I am connected to (but that I do not know whatsoever), that person is much more likely to a) open the message in the first place because the sender is not anonymous but rather has a name, face, and a job, and therefore b) also much more likely to read/digest what I am actually writing. And from here it is only really about what you have to say and sell anyways....
The bottom line is that while LinkedIn is a tool intended for connecting people that know each other, it actually works best for connecting (and selling something) to people you do not know at all.
Yes, exactly caw - thanks. I view LinkedIn as one huge convention center, and the worst that can happen is people decline you connection request. If you present an honest and positive tone, people will be more receptive. Then it is possible to PM select connections to review your idea or beta, etc.
Personally I've never met anyone through LinkedIn, just added them after meeting them through some other means. I'm not sure if it is especially geared towards "provoking" people to meet.
As an independent consultant, Linked-In has worked well for me. I've been contacted there for more opportunities that I can count - real customers. I have very few recruiter contacts and weed them from my list every once in a while. In fact, I received a referral a couple weeks ago that's a paying customer today.
One of the things I do that I don't see much is to reach out and stay in contact with people occasionally. Sometimes I'll make a referral too. Networking works many ways and you have to give to get. (#givefirst) Sometimes just replying to the anniversary, new job, or giving a technology kudo means something to some people (maybe more so in a pandemic world).
I also like the points that a few other folks made that customers almost always look at the Linked-In profile.
I recently had a interested party connect with me via LinkedIn specifically because I has just left the company and he wanted to know why. Our professions didn't overlap too much but he was very interested in what I was doing now and what I had to say about the company. Struck me as a very smart tactic.
I also upgraded to LinkedIn Premium and started reaching out to engineers in my 2nd degree network. These people were complete strangers, and I had no reason to think they might be interested in Kapwing. This tactic definitely didn’t work. Not only did I not get a single response to my messages, I got one angry response from a Recruiting Director asking me to buzz off and stop pinging people at her company.
Does anyone find LinkedIn useful? The importance some people put on having an updated LinkedIn profile with updated contact lists seems outrageously disproportional to the actual value the site provides. It seems odd, too. Social media site around making business contact, keeping your cv online, yadda yadda... but the promise of the platform never seems to have materialized.
I'll connect with someone in my field and location, because those are the connections I hope to foster with LinkedIn.
One of the weirder things I've experience is people "endorsing" my skills. Many of which are skills they've certainly never seen me use. I assume they were doing it for some sort of reciprocal endorsement, but I don't want my name attached to someone's skills that I know nothing about.
>> "LinkedIn is great if you just want to endlessly socialize with recruiters"
Why do you socialise with them? Every few days I check in and accept all connection requests (almost all recruiters). I have email notifications turned off so their messages to me just get ignored. Then when it came time to find a job I replied to three or four of them with my requirements, picked a few companies I liked from each, and had interviews setup. Much more efficient than me having to find these companies myself.
I've used LinkedIn Questions before and was impressed with the numbers of answers I received. So in that sense, the OP has a point--even if it's not elaborated on heavily.
Yesterday I received a message from a local businessman who sent me a list of local networking events. I don't know this guy but I looked at his profile and I was impressed by his technique for getting a foot in the door with me. Seeing that really got me thinking about other ways one could use LinkedIn to create rapport with other folks in their field.
I've gotten one or two leads through Linkedin, though from contacts who knew me fairly well (well enough to vouch for my skills), and who had my email address as well. So the fact they used LinkedIn to make the connection was just for convenience.
That said, what I like about Linkedin is it widens your "social surface area" - my referrals have come from unexpected places (a university professor, a classmate, a guy I met at a hackathon, etc), and Linkedin is a good service for maintaining those type of contacts.
I'm not so good at maintaing contact with old connections (any tips? I read Never Eat Alone but as an introvert, I find it hard to get motivated to put it into practice). I think one thing the platform we're building should do, though, is encourage and support freelance devs to build their professional networks.
A bit off topic but - how meaningful & do they just contact people on LinkedIn and that's it? I'm connecting good people with good jobs on the side, so fresh market info would be quite useful.
I was brand new to the market, so had nearly zero connections. I followed the "Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters" system.
A couple replies:
- Who viewed your profile was helpful. I'd send out a "cold call" email to someone, and if they clicked through to my linkedin profile then I knew they were interested. I'd then try to phone them as soon as they saw my profile. It's surprisingly effective.
- The InMails were helpful. I preferred to actually call or email over inmail, but in some cases there was _no_ contact info for the person. In that case, InMail really was the only way to contact someone, and I did get 2 nice contacts out of it.
I have actually had good experiences with LinkedIn. I use it to keep in touch with co-workers and there’s more to it than recruiter-prospect communication:
• Using LinkedIn to contact old co-workers when I need a reference.
• An old boss of mine at one point needed someone for a contract he just got, with gave me the perfect short-term gig.
Do people actually interact with each other over LinkedIn? The only people I've every talked to are recruiters. I thought it was just a directory of potential employees for recruiters. If people actually do social things on LinkedIn then that's news for me.
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