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Developing your LinkedIn network seems like a no-brainer. In the sense that LinkedIn, if you have a digital audience, is still the only network where you can gain exposure and generate awareness for whatever activity you’re involved in.
This is always done with the aim of either:
- Creating a personal identity: This would be personal branding. Say maybe you’re a freelancer or you have an activity that’s, let’s say, unique to you.
- Or as a business: You would be developing your brand awareness, visibility, customer acquisition, whatever the objective may be.
Whatever the case, developing one’s network always involves two central questions: Why one does it, and how to do it?
So, in this article, we’ll answer each of those questions and more! As well as provide you with actionable tips on how to effectively develop your LinkedIn network.
Why develop your LinkedIn Network?
Before you start looking for ways to develop your LinkedIn Network, mind that it’s always going to come down to why you’re doing it, and what your ultimate objective is.
Is it just to be visible, is it to generate genuinely qualified leads, etc.? As a result, it’s going to unfold different strategies depending on what you want to do.
Maybe you just want to be “popular” and gain visibility… This strategy is less about developing your network than it is about posting things on LinkedIn. It’s more so about increasing the number of followers or the number of LinkedIn connections you have.
Expert Tip 🧠
In reality, if you stop there, there’s no point, because there’s no business impact behind it.
Other than being able to say you’ve got 200,000 views, 20,000 people following you and 10,000 people in your network, what’s the point?
So you always need to define a basic, business-driven objective:
- At the very least, have more customers to increase your sales.
- Or, the simplest thing, to be able to quickly measure the number of opportunities your LinkedIn network development activity brings you.
This has to be the basis of what you need to define.
So in a nutshell, why do it, why develop your network? It has to follow a clear business objective. That is to say: “I want to generate leads for myself on a daily or weekly basis.”
Why develop your network on LinkedIn specifically?
Some people also ask “Why LinkedIn? Why not Twitter for instance?“.
It’s the only professional network out there, in principle. You could do it on Twitter, but we highly suggest that you use the latter in a complementary way.
It’s actually a good idea to do so since you’d be able to repurpose the content between the two platforms.
Nevertheless, LinkedIn remains the most developed medium.
And above all, what’s even more interesting is that you can have a little more control over the audience you’re going to address on LinkedIn.
Example 🔍
For instance, as an SEO specialist, you would strategically build your network by connecting not only with people who are interested in SEO, but also with well-known thought leaders and influencers in that field.
In a field that’s literally evolving every single day, that’s an approach that could prove to be quite useful.
This is particularly relevant in terms of the network-expanding strategies you can adopt afterwards and how you want to approach them.
Moreover, personal branding is something that’s very much developed on LinkedIn!
Example 🔍
Say you’re a freelancer and you want to make a name for yourself in your chosen field.
Not only can LinkedIn’s social selling help you today in getting noticed by clients, partners, etc.
But also in your future when you want to say, open your own training academy, or something of that nature.
People will say “Oh, I know them from LinkedIn, their posts are really good, really valuable…” when they see your ad.
And bam, you’ve established yourself as an authority in the field.
Even further, developing your network on LinkedIn can be more than just achieving a personal goal.
It’s also very useful for the company to have its own employees doing it because it contributes to the brand’s reputation.
This is what’s called Employee Advocacy, whereby all employees become direct brand ambassadors.
Lastly, notably when attempting to leverage the platform’s algorithm, the human touch holds greater significance. LinkedIn tends to prioritize posts from individuals rather than companies.
This is precisely the vision we try to embody at LaGrowthMachine; human-driven content. We believe that taking the time to develop relationships with the people in your network is key to a successful LinkedIn strategy. In fact we have a full article about it:
Eager to supercharge your LinkedIn networking? 🚀
Discover how a strategic campaign with LaGrowthMachine can propel your network expansion. Dive into our guide for authentic connection-building insights and uncover techniques to foster meaningful interactions:
- Master the Art of Effortless Network Expansion
- Unlock Rapid LinkedIn Growth with LaGrowthMachine
So even from a business point of view, for a company to do this, it works better coming from the network and the visibility of its people on LinkedIn.
Essential steps before starting to develop your LinkedIn Network:
In order to properly develop your LinkedIn Network, we suggest that you go through the following steps:
Step 1: Define your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
When it comes to expanding your network, there are 2 main KPIs you need to look at:
- The number of followers: Not necessarily your network, but it’s people who follow you because, in particular, of your posts. And this always stems from a content strategy.
- And the number of connections in your network: This is more so the number of people you’ve connected with, or who have accepted your connection requests.
Expert Tip 🧠
Careful though, do not fall in the trap of vanity metrics though.
If you’re just growing your network with LaGrowthMachine, without an activation objective behind it, then don’t bother.
- Whether it’s the fact that you post a lot of good content. Meaning you’ve created an authority and people from your network will eventually reach out to you.
- Or it could be because you send out individual messages, but in that case, it’s not a network development strategy, it’s an individual prospecting strategy (and that’s a different topic).
Whatever it is, make sure you don’t just randomly add hundreds of people without activating them in any way, shape, or form.
We have one more KPI to share with you and it summarizes all that we’ve said so far about the topic: Make sure you have a business objective that drives your efforts.
Meaning among all these opportunities, how many are brought in, daily or weekly, thanks to my network-developing actions? This can be:
- Number of qualified calls.
- Number of demos booked.
- etc.
Example 🔍
In its early stages, LaGrowthMachine had to expand their network. But they didn’t do it just for the sake of having more connections.
They were measuring how many demos they were able to generate thanks to the development of their LinkedIn networks.
Nowadays, the objective has shifted. The focus now lies in tracking individuals who engage with our posts, leave comments, and share our content, with the intention of identifying potential sign-ups.
Consequently, it becomes evident that the brand’s success can be attributed to LinkedIn rather than SEO for instance.
The latter is something that’s quite hard to measure when talking about people who don’t interact with you or your LinkedIn posts but still see it (number of impressions).
The most common solution to this problem is the “How did you hear about us?” question in every webinar, demo, form, etc. you see whenever you get newly exposed to a brand.
Step 2: Optimize your whole LinkedIn
More than optimizing your LinkedIn profile, when it comes to prospecting, the whole customer journey must be taken into account.
When you launch a multi-channel sequence with LaGrowthMachine, no matter what channels you use, the first action is always to “Visit Profile” (you start by visiting your lead’s LinkedIn profile, and yes, even if you’re doing email-only campaigns).
Why? Simple, it’s to ease the lead into getting to know you. Because we all know, once you get that notification that someone viewed your profile, you can’t help but click on it and get to that page we all know and love:
And what’s the first thing they see once they click there? It’s your face (photo), your title, and your bio (also potentially your LinkedIn note).
If you did your sales segmentation correctly and they’re a hot lead, that means the’yre interested, which, in turn, means that it’s not just your profile they will check.
Once they click on you, they’ll want to know where you’re working or have worked. They’ll want to check your company page, which means you also have to optimize that!
Quick Tip 💡
As a side note, when it comes to your LinkedIn company page, make sure to set up:
- Your overview section to entice leads. So add some social proof, some big name companies, etc.
- A UTM link that sends the lead to your website. Remember the tracking methods we mentioned earlier.
- A LinkedIn Lead Gen form. Pretty self-explanatory, it’s a form that helps leads sign up in exchange for their email.
LinkedIn has been working on the company page part of their site quite a lot actually.
You can showcase your product and/or your work culture through videos etc.
Check out the “Workplace” feature from your Company Page settings for more information.
For instance, if you’re in a recruitment phase, you can have a video to show what life is like at work!
Instead of me tediously explaining the process in dull text, why not let our resident sales and LinkedIn expert demonstrate it to you instead?
How to develop your LinkedIn Network?
Ah we’re finally here! Now that we talked about everything we possibly can but the how, let’s finally dive into it.
There are two possible approaches when it comes to building your network:
- You can either increase the number of connections
- Or increase the number of followers
Quick Tip 💡
Know that if you go with the former, someone who is a connection of yours will automatically be in your followers list. And conversely, people can simply just follow you and not add you as a connection.
Increasing the number of LinkedIn connections:
This is quite simple and self-explanatory. We literally have a full guide to getting more LinkedIn connections, so make sure to check that out.
With that said, here’s a simple way to do it using LaGrowthMachine:
Here’s what you do:
- You first visit their profile: It’s what we mentioned before, you ease your way into this. That’s your way of saying “Hello” without saying anything.
- Then you add them: That’s the point of this campaign
- Then you wait a bit and you visit their profile again: A quick reminder, it’s like saying “Hey, remember me?”
- Later, you send your first LinkedIn message: After all this soft “nurturing”, you send your cold message.
- If they don’t reply you either:
- Wait for a reply: Then you visit then you wait a bit more and if they still didn’t reply, you send an email mentioning your LinkedIn actions.
- You send the email directly: If you feel like you target isn’t really on LinkedIn, then maybe try email. That’s the beauty of multichannel prospecting. 😉
This gets me to my next point, the question that comes up before launching this campaign is: Who are you going to target with it?
Are you going to target everyone because you simply want to have more connections? If you came all the way to this point for that, in that case, focus on students, they’ll accept anybody.
On the other hand, if you’ve listened to what we’ve been saying throughout this guide, then this network-developing action is part of a business objective that you defined.
In this case, a simple Sales Navigator search with your sales target in mind should do the job nicely. If you want, you can also check out our article about LinkedIn account-based marketing strategies which will help you with finding the right accounts.
We dive much deeper into this topic in our article about how to increase the number of connections on LinkedIn using LaGrowthMachine.
Increasing the number of followers:
The second strategy is not as straightforward as increasing the number of connections.
The key here and everything you do should revolve around developing good, value-adding content that people will be interested in!
When we say content, we usually mean LinkedIn posts. It is no longer just about posting; it has evolved into a popular trend that implies a specific content typology.
Quick Tip 💡
One interesting thing a lot of LinkedIn influencers do is they’ll add a “Make sure to hit that Save button and Follow me for more content” at the end of their documents posts.
Think of this as the LinkedIn version of “Like & Subscribe” from YouTube. Give it a try if you want and let us know in the comments if it worked for you!
Take for instance our own company page:
These are three different posts that talk about three different things, from left to right:
- Company Update: The first post is about an open position that we’re recruiting for.
- Article publicity: The second is to promote a full guide about lead generation ideas (in French).
- Celebratory post: And the third is an informal post about our offsite.
Expert Tip 🧠
Now each of these posts serves a different purpose, but the idea behind this strategy is twofold; one, keep your posts varied.
Do not just focus on one single topic and harrass your followers with it. If you’re a one-trick pony, then make sure your one topic is large enough that you can tackle it from different points of view.
And two, as a company, do not be scared of showing a little personality, that only makes you more relatable to your audience. And as the employees, every time your company is mentioned or shared, make sure to comment and like.
You can also even either echo the post or downright repost it if you think it’ll bring value to your audience.
The key thing to remember when you’re developing a strategy to expand your LinkedIn Network is the following:
Increasing your connections by adding more people on LinkedIn and posting more to increase your reach and the number of followers go together. You have to do both at the same time, there’s no two ways about it
You can’t have one without the other. There’s no point in adding people to LinkedIn as part of a strategy to increase your network if you’re not going to someway or another attract them through posts.
Final Thoughts
This article covered a lot in terms of developing your LinkedIn network. However, if there’s one thing you should remember, it’s this:
As part of your strategy for developing your LinkedIn network, LaGrowthMachine can help you get your audience of followers off the ground.
Because it will give you the first hundreds or even thousands of people who follow you (since you’ll be adding them). On top of that, these are the most qualified people, the ones you want to see your content.
But after that, if you want to take it to the next level, you’ll need to use posts.
The reach you can achieve with posts, once you’ve got a well-developed network (and therefore a large following), is exponential.
And this exponential growth simply cannot be achieved by just adding people on LinkedIn.
So make sure to use LaGM to get your network off the ground and then take it from there!
Eager to supercharge your LinkedIn networking? 🚀
Discover how a strategic campaign with LaGrowthMachine can propel your network expansion. Dive into our guide for authentic connection-building insights and uncover techniques to foster meaningful interactions:
- Master the Art of Effortless Network Expansion
- Unlock Rapid LinkedIn Growth with LaGrowthMachine
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