Researching People on LinkedIn

In this weeks LinkedInformed;

How to research people effectively on LinkedIn and how to use what you find.

• Plus Finding people to tag in your posts
• Finding comment-worthy content
• LinkedIn conquer Germany
• Could the new focused inbox kill InMail?
• The story behind last weeks post of the week.
• A post of the week about branding

This article has also been recorded as a podcast which you can listen to at

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts?/?Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts

Finding people to Tag and Posts to engage with.

I saw this question this week;

If you have a post but are struggling to mention someone within the post, what do you do? Not post it until you have some relevant contacts? Or go ahead anyhow?        

It's a great question and here's my answer;

I would search for other posts about a similar/the same topic. Firstly I would comment on those posts and then look for people who are clearly interested/invested in those topics and tag them in your post.

You can tag anyone in a post, they don't have to be a connection.

On a similar theme I also received a question this week about the challenges of being able to comment on posts when virtually everything in your feed is either ads or posts that have no interest to you.

As with the first question, the answer is to use the posts search facility.

• Firstly think of some keywords allied to topics that are highly relevant to your target audience.
• Now scroll through and comment on any relevant posts.
• Follow or connect with all interesting authors and other commenters
• Unfollow anyone who reacts, comments or posts irrelevant content that appears in your feed.
• The more you do this, the better your own feed will get. It will never be perfect and you can't do anything about the ads but you can increase the amount of relevant, comment-worthy posts you see in your feed.

LinkedIn Employee celebrates 'winning' in Germany.

I saw a post from someone this week who is leaving LinkedIn and was reflecting on their time there. They described 'winning the German speaking market for LinkedIn (which was dominated by a local player before)' in this post.

LinkedIn had traditionally struggled in the DACH region where competitor Xing had dominated but this suggests they have overcome that challenge. Is this true?

This recent article suggests that might be true which Xing shutting down some parts of their site and re-focusing on some core features.

Do you have a view on this?

New 'focused' inbox

Following on from last weeks LinkedInformed, Sandra Clark sent me a video showing how the new focused inbox looks and works. This instigated this post;

Given that we land on the focused inbox, I think there is a very good chance that the 'other' inbox will get ignored and this is likely to result in poorer response rates to InMails. It's a good move for the recipient, not so good for those who pay for premium so that they can send InMails!

Researching People

Whether you are looking for a job, looking to recruit somebody, hoping to find new clients, new suppliers or just simply looking to build better relationships on LinkedIn it helps to understand how to fully research somebody.

Here are my seven things to investigate about someone on LinkedIn.

1. Mutual connections. If you have connected to people that you mostly know then you have an opportunity to approach those people and ask them about a mutual connection. This can be invaluable research when trying to understand someone that you are likely to be meeting.
2. Previous employers. Have a look who someone used to work for, do you know anyone at that organisation and can the culture of that company give you some insight into the person you are about to meet?
3. Companies and people they follow. You can often tell a lot about someone's interests by seeing which influencers and other authors that they follow. In addition you may be able to learn something from the companies that they have shown an interest in.
4. Recommendations they have given. It makes sense to read somebody's recommendations in their profile but how often have you read the recommendations they have written about other people? This can be a goldmine of information about what things they value in other people.
5. Comments. Go to the activity section in their profile and look at the comments they have made on other peoples posts this will often give you a real insight to their personality and views.
6. Posts. What topics have they written about and have they demonstrated elements of their personality, opinions and expertise in their recent content?
7. Articles. Long form content on LinkedIn may give you some real insight into the words, phrases and vocabulary used by the person you're going to meet. The more you read from them the more you can understand about somebody.

Post of the week story

This is a new feature of LinkedInformed. Each week I'm going to attempt to interview the person who won post of the week for the previous weeks LinkedInformed.

Last weeks winner was Muhammad Talha ???? from Pakistan with this excellent post.

Talha explained that this post was a spur of the moment idea, he had seen many posts in his feed from marketers using some random life event to make some sort of deep point of business advice so he though he would mimic them with this post.

This is very much the sort of person Talha is, always the joker in the room and not someone who takes himself so seriously. Clearly this joke resonated with many of his followers and many many others on LinkedIn. It is by far his most successful post to date and it really just came out of a simple humorous idea!

Sometimes I think we are guilty of overthinking content, often the best ideas are simple ones that just jump into our head!

Post Of The Week

I have Greg Cooper to thank for this one with his recent post suggesting that this could be the perfect LinkedIn post.

Greg highlighted the following points;

? Strong and simple headline

? Attention grabbing image

? Well researched

? Topical, and on trend

? Easy to read, jargon free

? Powerful core message

? Emotional appeal (indignation/anger)

? Written by a branding expert

I couldn't agree more, a brilliant example of business related content that combines topicality with an important point about branding (Louisa specialism).

Well done LOUISA MARS , I hope we get the opportunity to hear her story behind this post soon.

That's all for this week, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so that you can listen to every episode as well as read about it here.