Networking Online? Five Ways To Reach Out Via LinkedIn

By Sue Ellson – Author of ‘120 Ways To Achieve Your Purpose With LinkedIn‘

1. Reach out to those who have viewed your LinkedIn Profile
2. Reach out to people mentioned in your Notifications, adjust Settings
3. Interact with items in your Newsfeed (Liking, Commenting, Sharing)
4. Review your Skills & Endorsements, say Thank You, Give more
5. Review your Recommendations, say Thank You, Give or Receive more

Video online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNOQzK0MQAc

Transcript

Hi there. My name is Sue Ellson and I’m the author of 120 Ways To Achieve Your Purpose With LinkedIn and today I’d like to discuss Networking Online and 5 ways to reach out via LinkedIn and the first one is to reach out to those who have already viewed your LinkedIn profile.

The second to reach out to people mentioned in your notifications and also adjust your settings.

The third is to interact with items in your newsfeed by liking, commenting and sharing updates.

The fourth is to review your skills and endorsements perhaps say thank you to a few people and give some more to special people that you know and fifth to review your recommendations, say thank you for those you’ve received in the past and perhaps give or receive some more.

So let’s start out with the first one of reaching out to those who viewed your LinkedIn profile. So when you visit your LinkedIn profile you’ll see on your own screen this number here which shows how many people have viewed your profile in the last 90 days so if I click on that I will see, because I’ve got the free account, the last five people who’ve looked at my profile and I can see that some of those are first level connections one of them is a second level connection and if I’d like to see the last 90 days I could upgrade to premium membership and I would then see the last 90 days.

So what I can actually do is I can look at this person reach out to them and network directly. So, say “Hi Alina. I’ve noticed you’ve popped by my LinkedIn profile recently. Is there anything I can help you with?” and you can have either standard scripts or if you know the relationship you can follow up from previous conversations that you’ve had with that person.

Now the next one is your Notifications and if you go in here, you’ll see the notifications that you’ve received most recently and you can interact with these. I try and respond to all comments and also like to turn off some of the other settings so in here you’ll see that under activity in my network I’ve turned off birthdays and work anniversaries. I simply don’t have time for for all of those notifications when I have so many Connections, but the other ones that I think are relevant and then I can respond to definitely, especially activity that involves me I’ve got all of those notifications turned on so when I get notifications I like to clear them fairly quickly and respond to those.

The third one is to interact with your newsfeed. So this is your newsfeed from when you open up LinkedIn and you can scroll through these and decide which of these that you would like to like comment or share and I usually discuss that liking is worth one brownie point, commenting is worth five brownie points and sharing is worth ten brownie points, but definitely before you share anything, please make sure you click through to any links and make sure the content is good quality.

Now back on your own LinkedIn profile, you can see who has given you some endorsements for your skills and recently, LinkedIn upgraded the platform and I lost most of my votes but I still have a few votes down here and what I could actually do is I could look at these people and follow up with them and say hi Russell thank you for endorsing me for LinkedIn or I could, if I knew something more detailed about Russell, I could visit his LinkedIn profile and endorse him for some of his skills.

So, I never believe in lying so I would only ever endorse somebody for something I knew they were competent at. But you know, I could either say thank you or I could give some more endorsements to other people and then they may get a notification and that will let them know that I’ve endorsed them. Another great way to network online.

And the last one I’m going to share with you today is to look at your Recommendations and make sure that this number of both received and given is fairly similar. So I normally suggest a minimum six of each but also when you go through some of these it’ll be a reminder of some of the people that you’ve worked with and you might like to again say thank you for that recommendation and you may also like to go back and give some more to some other people because don’t forget that when people look at these people’s Profiles, they’ll see your Recommendation there.

And just for listening and staying around, I’d like to also remind you that you can click on your network and you can see people you may know as well as all of your connections and you can go through some of these people and reconnect and network again with those people as well.

So I trust you found that information helpful. I’m the author of three books and I encourage you to also subscribe to the YouTube channel at youtube.com/120wayss. You can also buy these books at 120ways.com for the digital version or BookDepository.com for the paperback version.

Thanks very much and bye for now.