As you may or may not know, LinkedIn is an extremely effective and valuable social media channel for your business. LinkedIn can help your business in so many ways and it can absolutely help you to bring your business to the next level.
LinkedIn connections serve many different purposes
If you are not used to LinkedIn and how to make connections with other people on LinkedIn, it is time that you get used to it. The time and effort that you put into LinkedIn will be well worth your while and you will start to see results within a relatively short amount of time. It is important to note that it won’t happen overnight; however, patience will definitely be your friend in this situation and once you do start to see results, you will be very glad that you worked the tool properly and the connections that you have made (and those that you will make in the future) will help your business to grow and to succeed more than you might have imagined. Of course, your success on LinkedIn has everything to do with connections and the connections that you make can only start in one way. That is, they must start with an invitation to the people with whom you wish to connect. Once you have connected with those people, you can begin to build your relationships. Those relationships will hopefully last for a very long time and they will be resoundingly mutually beneficial.
The different approaches to inviting connections on LinkedIn
On your journey to building LinkedIn connections/relationships, you must identify or determine who you wish to count among your connections and go after them with invitations. As you are determining who those people are, you want to ensure that you send them an invitation that they will be inclined to answer (positively, of course). It is important to understand that not all LinkedIn invitations are appropriate (or appealing) to all people with whom you wish to connect. In fact, if you are considering sending the same invitation to everyone, please think again. You will not get what you are after. The following are the different possible invitations that you may wish to consider.
Connecting with a colleague with whom you worked in the past: For this invitation, you should (of course) mention the company where you worked together and then mention the name of your current company. You should make it clear that you feel that you have a synergy with this person and that you feel that there may be an opportunity to work together as strategic partners. Maybe you could end the invitation by saying that you would be very interested in catching up with that person and that he or she should look at his or her schedule and let you know which day and time works.
Connecting with a prospect: For this invitation, you should mention something about how you understand the person’s particular challenges and that you have the ability to help him or her solve the problems that he or she is experiencing. You can then go into a little more detail (although you should be careful to avoid any kind of “hard sell”) to let that person know that you have the ability to help in some profound manner. Your invitation should wrap up by your saying that you would love to connect with him or her, if there in an interest on the part of the other person.
Connecting with an influencer: In this invitation, you should express how much of an impact that person had on you when you were interacting. You should also express that you would love to continue to build your relationship and ask if you can contact him or her (in a way that is preferable to that person).
Connecting with a person whom you met once a relatively short time ago: In this invitation, the first thing that you should do is to remind that person how and where you met. If you don’t do that, he or she may have absolutely no clue as to how you met. Maybe you have some interesting piece of information that will jog that person’s memory (humor is a good way to go). You will then want to make some sort of plan to meet (or at least to speak on the phone).
Conclusion
It is important to keep an open mind when it comes to your LinkedIn connections and your strategy for connecting with the right people. Using the appropriate (and most fitting) template will help you to control what you want and to achieve it in a timely manner. The more precise and well thought out your strategy, the better your results will be. If you can manage to integrate an emotional element into your LinkedIn invitation, you will have an extremely good chance of getting the other person to accept. Your invitation should be genuine, transparent, and exciting. If you can do all of that, your invitation will undoubtedly appeal to the other person and they will become one of your new LinkedIn connections.
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Michael Cohn is the founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of CompuKol Communications. He has over 25 years of experience in IT and web technologies. Mr. Cohn spent a significant amount of time at a major telecommunications company, where his main focus was on initiating and leading synergy efforts across all business units by dramatically improving efficiency, online collaboration, and the company’s Intranet capabilities, which accelerated gains in business productivity. He also reduced company travel and travel costs by introducing and implementing various collaboration technologies.
His expertise includes business analysis; project management; management of global cross-matrix teams; systems engineering and analysis, architecture, prototyping and integration; technology evaluation and assessment; systems development; performance evaluation; and management of off-shore development.