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Social Selling Step Four : Using LinkedIn As a Network Event

Social Selling

In our Social Selling Black Belt Certification Course we teach a simple principal I had come up with about 4 years ago to break people out of that pattern of treating LinkedIn like it was different from being with humans.

We would be at network events and when I talked to our audience they basically thought of LinkedIn as this strange technology where they needed to press certain magic buttons for business to happen. So I thought back to our days of training teams for trade shows and events. With that in mind, I discussed it with the team and came up with the event training concept.

“Business Networking is a socioeconomic business activity by which groups of like-minded business people recognize, create, or act upon business opportunities.”  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_networking 

Let’s break our common fear barrier and just treat LinkedIn like a networking event, after all it’s a social place where people are hanging out with the intent to conduct business.  So in our Social Jack™ courses we identity some simple principals, see if you can follow.

Your News Feed = The Main Networking Event

In LinkedIn and other online social networks, they have a convenient news feed which contains “Your” social network, the one that you picked, your connections. They are having conversations, are you speaking back to them? You have some pretty basic options, you can ignore, event hide folks, you can like what they say, you can comment back and even share their conversations with the rest of your network.

Social Selling

Now just like a real network, the whole combined network can see this interaction in both networks, their network sees the two of you talking and your social network sees the relationship as well.

You have a choice, just like at a live event, in fact it’s easier, to decide who to speak to and who to ignore or hide. Your call, make your selections wisely and you will win!

Your Time = Targeted Appointments

When you go to a live event you have a limited time to network, meet the best people and leave. In fact, we used to have drills for live events and now have them for online networking. We have you set your clock, we work in time blocks of 2 minutes and determine quickly if you are talking to the best person and will it lead to a productive relationship, then you quickly make the choice to follow on or not! We allow a total time of networking for 20 minutes with the net effect of 4 solid targeted appointments, trained and done right this become so easy.

Profile Snapshot = The Ultimate Name Tag

When you hover over people in LinkedIn you get a pop up box with their picture, headline and current position. You can event quickly jump to their profile, take what we call a 60 second scan and either make a move on them (we call power move) or move on!

Social Selling

Groups = One Amazing Breakout Event

LinkedIn, like other networks has groups, targeted to everything from personal preferences, alumni, charities, organizations, clubs, organizations, you name it. We say join 50 to allow connections, but you can only really effectively have relationships with about 6 without penetrating into your productive work week. So pick the best 6, test out conversations and conversions and when the group does not pan out, there are about 2 million to chose from!

Direct Message = The Close

This is the hook, right your at a network event, when you like the conversation you then say something like “would you want to have coffee next week and discuss this more?”  So why not do it on LinkedIn? We always say 2 and out, once you have two exchanges, then take it to an appointment. Don’t forget what we said about being targeted and you will surely success at these networking events.

Have fun at your next LinkedIn networking event, when you log on!