Week 14: Monitoring Your Network
Is your network growth in alignment with your goals? As we discussed in Chapter 1, it’s important to monitor your network. Measuring your network growth allows you to see if you are in alignment with your goals. This week we’re going to take a look at ways you can monitor your network on LinkedIn.
Monday: Use Network Statistics
Under Connections in the home page menu bar, you’ll see the Network Statistics link. When you click that link, you’ll see all the levels of your network.
Network Statistics show you the number of people who are first-, second-, and third-level connections. As you know, your first-level connections are the people who invited you or who you have invited to connect. These are the people you can easily contact and communicate with. Your second-level connections are friends of friends, as they’re called on Facebook. Each one of these individuals is connected to you through one of your connections. To reach your third-level connections, you have to go through a friend and then one of their friends. Finally, you have the total number of users you can contact through an introduction, including people you share a group with.
You will also see the regional access of your network, as shown in Figure 5-18.
Figure 5-18: Accessing your network
LinkedIn will show you, by percentage, where your network resides. Taking a quick glance at this will tell you if you’re focusing your efforts on connecting in the right place. Obviously if you are a location-based business and the greatest part of your network is outside of your particular area or state, you might want to take some time to find and connect with some locals. To do that, use the Advanced People search.
If you’re not a geographically based business, make sure that you’re growing your network in the regions that you do work. Similarly, LinkedIn will show you your fastest-growing areas. Are they the areas you want to be growing?
LinkedIn also gives you industry access. Those are the top industries in your network by percentage. Are they the ones you work within and want to be growing? If your network is not weighted toward the industries with which you work, you may want to do an Advanced People search using industry keywords in the keyword field.
Tuesday: Use Your Home Page
There are also a lot of very useful LinkedIn statistics on your home page. On the right side of your profile you’ll see the link Who’s Viewed Your Profile. This will show you who has viewed your profile this month and how many times you’ve shown up in search results.
The first thing you’re going to want to do is click Who’s Viewed Your Profile, which will take you to a new page, as shown in Figure 5-19.
On the left you can see who those individuals are. People will often look at your profile in an anonymous mode so you can’t see who they are. Sometimes, though, you will get an individual’s name. All you have to do is click on their name and it will take you to their profile. If they are a first-level connection or they have a paid account, it’s easy to reach out to them and thank them for viewing your profile.
You might say something like “I noticed that you were viewing my profile and I just wanted to say hi. Please let me know if I can answer any questions for you or be of service in any way.” Of course if it’s someone you know, pick up the phone or send them an email. You don’t even have to tell them that you know they were looking at your profile—let them think its synchronicity at work!
Figure 5-19: Who’s Viewed Your Profile
If you have a paid account, you can see the full list of who’s viewed your profile. If you don’t have a paid account, you can see the last five people who viewed your profile. So it’s not a bad idea to keep an eye on this page every day.
The other thing I like about having the paid account is that you can see the top search by keyword. Make sure you have the keywords that are searched most often several places in your profile.
And while you can see the percentage of individuals by industry or by geography with the free account, with the paid account you can see how many views you have from those particular industries and geographies.
With both accounts you can also see, by the day, how many times your profile has been viewed. If you see a distinct increase in numbers on a particular day, consider what you did that day to get people to look at your profile. See if you can focus on the actions you took and replicate them if you can.
You can also see how many times you appeared in a LinkedIn search (but no one clicked on your profile). Is there a huge discrepancy? If you showed up in 100 searches and only five people clicked on your profile, what is it about your headline and photo (or lack thereof) that is failing to grab people’s attention?
Wednesday: Monitor Your Connections
Let’s take a closer look at your connections under Contacts in your menu. To the left of the screen you’ll see the tags, which we just covered. Below Tags you can also see how your network is sorted by Company, Location, Industry, and Recent Activity, as shown in Figure 5-20.
Figure 5-20: Connections page
I recommend keeping an eye on the companies of individuals that you’re connected to. You might have been trying in vain for weeks to get in touch with someone at a company that you want to be doing business with, not even realizing you already know someone who works there. So make it a weekly practice to glance at the Companies link in Connections. Just click the link and LinkedIn will pull up your first-level connections with an affiliation at that company. And because these are all your first-level connections (as opposed to the folks in your network who show up on the Company page), they will be easy to send a message to.
We’ve already looked at locations and industries on your Network Statistics page, but this section goes a bit more in depth and shows you all the locations and industries that your first-level connections are associated with. And if you click the link LinkedIn will pull up your first-level connections in that location or industry.
Make sure your network is located where you want them to be located and working in the industry you want them to be working in. If any of these are a little light, get searching for strategic connections.
Finally, you can see the recent activity of your network—your new connections, as well as their connections. Why do you want to look at the connections of your new connections? Because they might be people to whom you want to be connected. And your new connections may be able to introduce you to them. To see the connections of your new connections, just click on the number next to your first connection’s name. It will be anywhere from 1 to 500+.
When you click on that number, a snapshot of the member’s profile will come up, including their new connections and the connections you share.
Why is it important to keep an eye on your connections? It’s because you want to see the growth of your network and perhaps send them a quick message. Is your target geographic location stale? Invite more people in the cities you are targeting. No new growth at a company you want to target? Do a company search and invite a few folks. (This is a good task for an assistant.) LinkedIn doesn’t have to be time-consuming, but your communications should be consistent.
Thursday: Getting Reports on LinkedIn
LinkedIn will email you certain reports about your network, as shown in Figure 5-21.
To set up these reports, you will need to head back into your Settings. Under Email Preferences, choose the frequency of emails you want to receive from LinkedIn with regard to:
- InMails, introductions, and OpenLink
- Invitations
- Profile forwards
- Job notifications
- Questions from your connections
- Replies or messages from your connections
- Invitations to join groups
- Network updates
- Activity notifications
- Referral suggestions
- Actionable emails
- Connection suggestions
- LinkedIn Today
Figure 5-21: Email notifications
I choose to get emails from LinkedIn for InMails, introductions, and OpenLink because these messages usually come from users outside my network. Since these communications usually result in connections—if not business—these messages usually result in network growth. That means growing my network. Are some of these communications spammy in nature? Sometimes. But I’ll put up with a few sales-y letters for the consultation and connection requests I receive.
Personally I don’t choose to receive invitations in my email because being a TopLinked open networker I simply receive too many. So I know I have to go into LinkedIn and accept them every few days or so. If you are new to LinkedIn, or a strategic networker, I recommend getting the daily email. And don’t just accept the invitation—send them a thank-you letter!
I also let LinkedIn send me emails regarding questions from my connections, replies/messages from my connections, connection suggestions, referral suggestions, activity notifications, and LinkedIn Today. This lets me keep in better touch with my existing connections and allows me to receive the information that I need in order to build relationships.
I no longer choose to receive email regarding invitations to join groups or network updates because it makes my email inbox too noisy. I can (and do) still receive these messages in my LinkedIn inbox. If you are starting with LinkedIn, you may choose to receive individual emails. When it gets too noisy, revert to weekly or no emails.
Another individual email notification I choose to receive is not in this list but is very important, and that is the searches I save as shown in Figure 5-22.
Figure 5-22: Saved Searches
Every time you save a search on LinkedIn (three for the free accounts, five for a basic paid account), LinkedIn will send you an email with new members who fall into that search category. Your first step should always be to look through these new search results and reach out to those individuals who will make strategic connections for you.
What I love about this function is that there are rarely more than 5–10 names in the email LinkedIn sends me, which means a small time commitment with huge results. Some of my best connections have come from reaching out to these folks.
Friday: Monitor Your Competition
Some of this information might get a little repetitive, but it is so important that I thought keeping an eye on your competition should have its own section!
Here are a few ways to keep an eye on your competition on LinkedIn (and a few more that I would be remiss in not mentioning):
- Company Searches
- Saved Searches
- Signal Searches
- Google Alerts
I mentioned in the previous chapter that you can follow a company and LinkedIn will send you a report on any new updates, promotions, and career opportunities posted by that company profile. It goes without saying that a job seeker needs to follow companies they are interested in working for, but how about keeping an eye on your competition? Your name will show up as a follower, so if you are Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi (PepsiCo) you might choose not to follow The Coca Cola Company (although you might have one of your employees do so!).
LinkedIn recently released targeted company updates, which means you are getting more specific statistics about your company followers. Nonetheless, I think you are probably safe in following your competition. You can’t follow anonymously, but the company you follow can’t block you either. It’s a personal choice, but I recommend following your competition (and clients, partners, vendors, and employers) on company profiles.
I just mentioned Saved Searches in the previous section. You are fairly limited in the searches you can save, so rather than saving a search on only one company (say, everyone who is currently or has worked at PepsiCo), you can create a keyword list in the Keyword search field of the Advanced search that would cover not only PepsiCo but Coca-Cola and any other soda company. Your Boolean search string (mentioned earlier in this chapter) might look like this:
Soda OR coke OR pop AND manufacturing (NOT Hansen's) Coca Cola OR PepsiCo As you receive your search results you can refine this keyword string even more by adding more ANDs, ORs, and NOTs. I have a whole section on LinkedIn Signal in Chapter 8, “Week 23: Putting It All Together,” but just know that by going to LinkedIn Signal at www.LinkedIn.com/Signal you can search on any keyword, including the company names, individual names, products, or services of your competitors. Not only that, but you can save the searches. As of this writing, LinkedIn was not sending you an email of your saved Signal search results, but we can always hope, right? So you have to go into Signal to see your saved searches, and I recommend doing this a few times a week. (This is also something an assistant could do for you.)
I would be remiss in not mentioning Google Alerts. Google Alerts, found at www.google.com/alerts, will send you an email alert of the latest relevant Google search results based on keywords you give it. You simply enter a keyword (Google calls it a query) that you wish to monitor. Google Alerts is free and you can create as many keyword or keyword search phrases as you like.