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Inviting People to your LinkedIn Network

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In our previous post, Finding People to Invite to your LinkedIn Network – Search Titles, we talked about using the advanced search on LinkedIn to find contacts. In this post, we take a look at ways to invite people to your LinkedIn network.

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Inviting People: Send InMail

InMail is a way to send a message internal to LinkedIn. You can message anyone on LinkedIn, not just those in your network. Sending InMail generally means upgrading your account. You can buy InMails for $10 apiece, or get three InMails a month with the Business premium account, 10 with the Business Plus account, and 25 with the Executive account. The various LinkedIn recruiting accounts offer more InMails.

Inviting People: Fellow Group Members

A far easier way to contact random people on LinkedIn is to join LinkedIn Groups. As we discussed earlier in this chapter, there are all sorts of groups on LinkedIn — hundreds of thousands of them. You can join 50 at a time, and you can message group members publicly by replying to their posts in the group discussions, or privately. The hitch here is that the group member must first post a discussion topic or comment on one.

If your target person is shy and doesn’t post, go to the Members tab for the group, which enables you to invite any group member to connect or even send them a private message.

Search Companies

If you’re more interested in finding companies, LinkedIn has a comprehensive company search.

LI company search

Figure 28 — LinkedIn Company Search Example

A simple search for the keyword “accounting software” finds more than 3,300 organizations. You can filter the results by industry, location, country, postal code, degree of connectedness to you, company size, and whether they’re hiring.

Next up: Using LinkedIn Toolbars

Inviting People to your LinkedIn Network is the 94th 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 269. 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 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

“Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

“Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances

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