You’ll know that I’m a big fan of using LinkedIn to develop your business, and you’ll see from my profile that I use it a lot to keep track of all the lovely people I meet and want to stay in touch with.

Because I find LinkedIn useful, and pay attention to what comes through from my network there (I even have a special folder for their emails), I find it particularly annoying when people spam me. Recently, I’ve received a rash (I think that’s the correct collective noun) of invitations from people I don’t know, inviting me to join them on LinkedIn. I click through, thinking that I must have forgotten someone’s name, but no, it’s either someone completely random, or it’s someone who is connected to other people I know, but I’ve never met this person. I’ve been trying to figure out why this is – forgive me if this is me being a bit slow, but I’ve finally figured that these are either:

• People trying to get a look at my address book. On LinkedIn, you have to have your connection accepted before you can see someone’s contacts, so these people are pretending to be my friends, so they can take a sneaky look at my real mates. This one made me say naughty words out loud. I’ve spent years building up my social capital, and I’m not going to just give it away so that these lazy people can spam everyone.
• People who have been recommended by LinkedIn’s software that they might know me, so they send me an invitation to join them. I’m not swearing so much about these people, but I do wish they’d read the instructions before pressing the button. It says, “you might know Julia”, not “this is a good way to meet Julia”. If you want to meet me, send me an email, or ring me up (especially, but certainly not exclusively if you think I might be able to help your business).

LinkedIn explicitly explains that you should only invite people you know. And if you invite too many people you don’t know, you’ll get banned.

LinkedIn is just a networking tool

LinkedIn is there to help you to network – it’s just a tool. It doesn’t do the networking for you – it doesn’t build relationships unless you already have a real relationship with that person. Otherwise, they’re just going to think “who the hell is that?” And when you’re trying to build a personal brand, that’s the last thing you want people to think.

So don’t be lazy – get out there, meet people, make friends, and stay in touch with people. That’s networking. Adding lots of people on LinkedIn that you don’t know is like stamp collecting, but less interesting.

Other articles about how to use LinkedIn for business:

A guide to using LinkedIn for business – the starter’s version

LinkedIn for business – the advanced class

I’ve already written about using LinkedIn for business and this article is great for people who are just starting out with LinkedIn. Now I want to talk about using LinkedIn as one of your essential tools to really lift your business, and help you make the most of your networking.

You can use LinkedIn as a business development tool in many different ways. Here are the three I want to concentrate on here:

• Developing your status as an expert and a lovely person
• Reach out with your brand
• More direct business development

Developing your status as an expert and a lovely person

I’m assuming that you have already given some thought to your profile, and that you’re keeping it up to date. Lovely photo, you look good there, by the way.

The next thing to do is to develop a good number of testimonials on your LinkedIn profile page. I just had a look at a handful of my LinkedIn contacts, and they averaged 3 recommendations, which is not enough to form a decision on. 3 recommendations looks a little half hearted. Potential clients will be looking at your LinkedIn profile, and trying to decide if you’re the person they should work with. So you need to make sure that other people are telling them that they should give you lots of money. LinkedIn is the perfect place to get people to write good things about you.

Remember that you want a good handful of recommendations, don’t be one of those people that have hundreds of recommendations as no one will ever read them, and it’s either going to look like complete overkill, or like you’ve spent your life asking people to recommend you. I have 20 on my page, which is more than enough to tell you that I’m one of the good guys.

Reach out with your brand

You want people in your network to remember you, understand what you do, and think well of you. That way, they will recommend you, buy from you and create opportunities. And LinkedIn can be a fantastic tool for reminding people of who you are, and getting a chance to get your brand in front of some new people.

If you’ve only really been using LinkedIn as an online cv, and a way of collecting some contacts, you’ll probably have missed some of the great new features they’ve been adding. Have a look around at some of the LinkedIn groups and work out which ones apply to you, and are relatively active. By joining up, you’ll be able to see what other people are up to, and learn what’s going on. It’s better to lurk a little first to get the hang of things, and then start joining in debates or helping out with referrals and advice.

More direct business development

One of the things I often recommend to clients is to put together a hit list of the people they want to work with – your target clients. I’ve just done this with a client who wants to sell to businesses based in Brighton who do business outside the city, for example. We’ve now got a spreadsheet of names to start contacting. Now, I wouldn’t advise using LinkedIn to contact these people – you need to be a lot more subtle than that in your hunt. However, LinkedIn is invaluable in finding the people you want, and getting lots of interesting information about them.

Maybe you know that you want to sell something to Giraffe Ltd. You know from their website that Mr Frog works there. So you look up Mr Frog on LinkedIn, and find out that he used to work for Hippo Ltd, and where your friend Ms Lioness still works. So not only do you know exactly what Mr Frog and Giraffe Ltd do, and that he is the right person to talk to, you can also ask Ms Lioness to either introduce you, or if this isn’t appropriate (maybe Ms Lioness doesn’t know him that well) she can give you some more really valuable information, such as does he like phone or email, or where does he hang out.

This approach only works well if you’re looking for high value business to business sales, but in this area LinkedIn can be a remarkable tool.