Expand Your LinkedIn Network Quickly with LaGrowthMachine

How to expand your LinkedIn network easily?

Beyond being THE B2B reference, LinkedIn is considered to be the social network that’s still accessible for easily developing your personal branding, gaining visibility, and sourcing new strategic partnerships. Here are a few tips on how to expand your network and become a must-know in the shortest possible time.

1. Be active on LinkedIn

LinkedIn users seek to learn from the experience of their peers. They come to find out about:

• Market news,
• Best practices in their field,
• Work methodologies,
• Sharing ideas on day-to-day issues,
• New tools to adopt.

If you get into the habit of publishing high–value-adding content on these themes, you’ll see your network grow naturally.

It’s also important to comment on the publications of your peers, sharing your own point of view. This good practice allows you to position yourself as a true expert and increase your visibility.

2. Keep your LinkedIn profile up-to-date and attractive

Think of your LinkedIn profile as your CV. To be effective, your LinkedIn profile must be up-to-date and attractive:

• Make sure your profile photo is recent, cheerful, and professional. This is the image that defines you to your audience. It should give a glimpse of your personality and make people want to get in touch.
• Choose an explicit cover image. A visitor to your profile should be able to identify your field of expertise at a glance.
• Update your professional experience. As time goes by, add to your profile any new projects you’ve worked on and any new skills you’ve acquired.
• Ask for recommendations. They lend credence to your skills and are an excellent way of enhancing your credentials through the support of your peers.

3. Use personalized invitation notes

When you send a connection request on LinkedIn, you have the option of adding an invitation note. This note is a short descriptive text that lets you explain why you want to get in touch with the person.

We’re often asked whether you should add a LinkedIn note to your connection request. Whatever the underlying purpose of your invitation request, we recommend that you always add an invitation note. It will help your contact to understand the importance of accepting you.

4. Use an automation tool to launch invitation campaigns

You can also automate your connection requests. This is an excellent way of expanding your LinkedIn network quickly and effortlessly .

An automation tool enables you to automate connection requests to specific targets while respecting the limits imposed by LinkedIn. So there’s no risk of your account being banned.

How it works is simple:

• You choose your contact sequence,
• Define your target audience,
• You write your personalized messages using attributes.
• You launch your campaign and wait for connection acceptances.

It’s a real asset for saving time while maintaining a human approach. Here’s how to launch your campaign with LaGrowthMachine.

How a LaGrowthMachine campaign can expand your LinkedIn network quickly?

1. Choose your sequence

The first step in creating an automation campaign is to choose your sequence. The sequence defines the order in which actions are carried out.

Unlike prospecting campaigns, where multi-channel campaigns are preferred, here we’ll limit ourselves to LinkedIn Only campaigns.

LaGrowthMachine provides you with pre-built templates to make your task easier.

Since we’re looking to expand your LinkedIn network, we recommend a LinkedIn Only + 1 follow-up campaign.

The campaign will :

1. Visit the profile you wish to connect to.
2. Send a connection request.
3. If accepted within the allotted time, visit the profile again.
4. Send an initial message thanking you for your acceptance, explaining how you can bring value to the profile, and inviting exchange.

The idea is to reproduce human behavior as closely as possible.

2. Define your target

As with any automation campaign, proper segmentation is the key to success. To know which profiles to target with your connection requests, ask yourself: “To whom can my publications bring added value?”.

Depending on your objectives, you’ll almost certainly be inviting very different profiles. That’s why we advise you to create very specific audiences dedicated to a particular type of profile.

With LaGrowthMachine, you can import:

• A list in CSV format.
• A list that’s been created in Sales Navigator.

Sales Navigator is the ideal tool for refining your segmentation. Once you’ve defined your target as precisely as possible, play with the filters to create your list of contacts. In particular, you need to define :

• Current job title. Which job title is closest to my target? The job title may differ depending on the company, the sector, the market, etc. Suggest different alternatives to make sure you cover all the relevant profiles.
• Function. What department does our target work in?
• Level of seniority. What level of seniority am I looking for? Your message needs to adapt to the seniority level of a profile. Make sure you separate junior and senior profiles so you can address them on specific issues.
• Industry. Which industry should I focus on? The choice of industry defines a different level of technicality, for example.
• Geographical location. In which city does my target profile work? Geographical location is an excellent criterion for limiting the number of contacts per list. For example, you can use the same criteria but create a different list for each city.
• Company size. Do I prefer to target small, medium, or large companies?

3. Working on your copywriting

The success of your campaign will also depend on the content of your messages. They need to be adapted to the target audience, to make them understand the benefits of accepting your invitation request, and to get the relationship off on the right foot.

The invitation note

We recommend always adding a personalized invitation note. In this note, explain why you think this person could benefit from a LinkedIn connection.

This reason differs from one target to another, hence the importance of segmentation.

The thank-you message

The message that follows the acceptance request should be one of thanks. Take the opportunity to remind him/her of the benefits you’re going to derive from this relationship and try to open a discussion.

Generally speaking, keep your approach brief and positive. And above all, use personalization attributes to address your contact and attract his attention. For example:

• Call them by their first name,
• Mention their job title,
• Mention the name of the company they work for.

Here are all the personalization attributes available in LaGrowthMachine:

4. Set a number of daily actions

One thing to keep in mind when using an automation tool to expand your LinkedIn network is to make sure you respect the maximum number of daily actions imposed by LinkedIn. If you don’t take these limits into consideration, you could be banned from your account. All your efforts would be in vain, and you’d have to start from scratch.

By using LaGrowthMachine, you can define the maximum number of actions to be carried out each day. This means you can create and launch several campaigns at the same time without the risk of being penalized by LinkedIn.

To set your number of daily actions :

• Go to the “Identities” tab
• Click on “Limits and hours”
• Move the slider to match the desired number of actions.

You’ll see that the bar changes color as you advance it. These are our suggestions for staying within LinkedIn’s limits.

In general, we advise you to respect the following limitations:

• Visits on LinkedIn: 100 per day. You can exceed this limit for a few days in case of urgent need, but never more than 250 to 300 per week.
• Invitations to connect on LinkedIn: 100 to 150 per week.
• Messages on LinkedIn: 120 per day.

5. Launch the campaign

Once all the above steps have been validated, all that’s left to do is launch your campaign.

Once launched, all that’s left to do is monitor. Find out :

• Results in the “Reports” tab,
• LinkedIn responses in the “Inbox” tab (or directly in LinkedIn if you prefer to manage responses from your account).

As you can see, automation campaigns are a highly effective, time-saving way of expanding your LinkedIn network quickly. With LaGrowthMachine, you can customize your campaigns to maximize the acceptance rate, while ensuring that you respect the limits imposed by LinkedIn. Now it’s your turn to create as many campaigns as you want and become the next LinkedIn reference.