In our previous post, Finding People to Invite to your LinkedIn Network – Alumni, we talked about finding people to join your LinkedIn network. In this post, we take a look at using the advanced search on LinkedIn to find contacts.
Search Titles
Using LinkedIn’s advanced search, you can zero in on relevant members you might want to connect with. As we discussed previously, some of the most interesting and powerful search fields are reserved for use by premium members — those who pay money to belong to LinkedIn.
But take a look at the search form and we think you’ll agree; it’s still pretty powerful.
Figure 27 — LinkedIn Advanced Search Page
The various grayed-out areas are only available to premium accounts. You can still search by industry, language, location, title, company, and school. Of course, if you want to use Google as your search engine, as we demonstrated in the opening section of this chapter, you may be able to get at some of the premium attributes.
Here’s a more-advanced example of a Google search of LinkedIn:
site:www.linkedin.com -inurl:answers -inurl:jobs -inurl:companies -inurl:directory YOUR KEYWORDS HERE
Let’s take a look at this example bit by bit:
- Site: — Use this keyword to restrict Google’s search to a particular site, in this case, LinkedIn
- –inurl: — This keyword, combined with the minus sign, excludes pages with certain keywords in the URL. In this case, we don’t want to see results from the LinkedIn Answers section, the Jobs section, the company pages or company directory. If you do want to see answers in a specific section, change the minus sign to a plus sign.
- Keywords — put your keywords, using plus, minus, quotes, or AND or OR to further qualify the search
For example, this search:
site:www.linkedin.com -inurl:answers -inurl:jobs -inurl:companies -inurl:directory “project manager”
finds 17 million project managers on LinkedIn. That’s far better than the 100 search results the free LinkedIn account limits you to.
Once you find these folks, check out their profiles, and either use the connection request techniques we’ve already discussed, or use the two additional ones below.
Next up: Inviting people to your LinkedIn Network
Finding People to Invite to your LinkedIn Network – Search Titles is the 93rd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 267. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2
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