How do you develop a strategy for LinkedIn?

Grant Leboff: Danny, many businesses are on LinkedIn. They are very random and they’re not sure how to make it work for them. How do you develop a strategy for using LinkedIn? What are the things that a business should be thinking about?

Danny Bermant: Before a business even starts on LinkedIn they need to think about who are their target customers. That means starting to think about drawing up a list of, maybe, your top 20 prospects and then thinking about exploring on LinkedIn – are those businesses there? Who is there?

So having looked at which prospects are there, it’s worth thinking about what do you want to use LinkedIn for, because there are a number of different approaches that you can take. It might be that your business relies on referrals, so you might say we are looking to meet with entrepreneurs and referrers and accountants and we are going to target those. There might be a more direct approach.

It might be that we’ve got sales teams and we are looking to sell vending machines, and so we are going to target facilities managers in and around London and speak to them directly on LinkedIn. So the first thing is; You have to think about who is going to be the public face of your business – is that the sales reps? You need to decide which people are going to be doing that because, how your profile appears, is obviously crucial. So once you’ve selected the people who are going to be doing that, you need to ensure what they are going to be saying on the profile. And once you’ve decided who they are going to connect to, it’s not enough to just connect on LinkedIn. You need to do much more, and that’s really where businesses don’t have a strategy.

There is this belief that ‘we’ve gone on to LinkedIn, we’ve connected to 100 people, where’s the business?’ And of course that’s a very simplistic approach. You need to nurture those contacts. When you connect to people who haven’t previously had contact with you, initially they’ll say; I’m intrigued by what you do but I don’t really know you, I don’t really understand…

Grant Leboff: Can I stop you there? When you talk about connecting with people who don’t really know you… You’ve identified the prospect, but how do you make that initial connection? Personally I get some really bad approaches from people, and I just think; ‘delete’! So how would you make that connection?

Danny Bermant: The first mistake that businesses make is that they don’t include any covering note. You can send a connection request to somebody, let’s say, for example, that you both went to the same university, you went to the same school or you’re members of the same linkedIn group. You can send them a connection request but, you have to give them a reason for connecting. So you’ll say we went to university together, we both worked at the same company, let’s connect. So that’s the first thing that matters.

I think the other area where people go wrong sometimes is that they sometimes could use the help of an influencer or an introducer. For example, you might be looking for a senior partner in a company. They are typically going to be very busy people, they don’t know who you are, that’s it. On the other hand if you have a good client who also does business with them – you can see that on LinkedIn – you can see that they are connected to each other and you can leverage those connections together.

Grant Leboff: Making use of the connections properly?

Danny Bermant: Yes, and I also think it’s about being quite picky. So it’s also about selecting people who you can see are more likely to connect to you because there’s synergy between what they do and what you’re doing, or there is a referrer, and not just going out willy-nilly and trying to connect to as many people as possible. It’s not a numbers game.

Grant Leboff: And as a business – if you’re taking this seriously and are using it for business development – you’ve done what you just said and you’ve got your sales rep or your head of marketing or whoever is in charge of this, maybe even the MD themselves, how do you start to measure that it’s working? Because apart from getting cold business, which is fine, what are the other measurements and things that people can be thinking about so that they can say, ‘OK, I can see what I’m doing is starting to bear some fruit here’?

Danny Bermant: With LinkedIn, where you start seeing results is when you start using content. Beyond connecting to people, there are three steps at which you need to arrive.

1) The person needs to know you.
2) They need to like you.
3) They need to trust you.

And the way for them to do that is by sharing content that is going to be relevant to them.

So, for example, if you are a solicitor and you are specialising in, for example, the movie or the television industry, you might be showing the people you are connected to, a case study of; ‘Here are some issues that a particular company has, this is how they were solved’. Or they might be issues to do with copyright or broadcasting, and you might be sharing a worksheet with some tips on issues they need to consider.

All of these are what I describe as confidence building measures. These are all little steps to ensure that firstly, the business gets a measure of your credibility and you are somebody who knows your subject very well. The other really crucial thing is that it gets you ‘top of mind’. If you think about it, sometimes, you may be looking to change accountant, or you need to find a new solicitor. There will often be somebody who comes to mind straightaway. ‘Oh yes, I need to speak to that solicitor’ – why did I think of that solicitor? Because I regularly see him on LinkedIn, he puts out status updates, he sent me a really useful case study which I thought was relevant to my business. So it’s about building credibility, it’s about staying ‘top of mind’.

And the other thing is, it’s also about knowing the person. I think that sometimes, the thing that people neglect on LinkedIn, is the off-line relationship. LinkedIn is very much an off-line / online network. Very often you will meet somebody at a trade show and you’ll connect to them on LinkedIn. You need to learn how to take that relationship off-line at some stage, because you need to get to know each other personally.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English