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Save time on your networking - have a daily LinkedIn routine

16th Dec 2012
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Business development eats up time. (No surprises!) Networking is often seen to be one of the biggest eaters of time. One way to reduce your reliance on face-to-face networking is to use LinkedIn effectively. In this post, we will look at what needs to go into your daily LinkedIn routine.

Before we do that, let’s do the maths to see whether we really can save time with using LinkedIn. If you go to a face-to-face networking event, which lasts say 1-2 hours (a conservative estimate). You will probably spend between 1-2 hours travelling there and back. Then, you will probably spend 1-2 hours prepping before the event and following up after the event.

Crunching the numbers, this means that one face-to-face networking event  will take up between 3 and 6 hours of your time. But, as you are always being told by the partners in your firm, or other small business owners if you want to develop your own client portfolio, that’s what you need to do – get yourself out there. (Another way of saving time with your networking is by having and working to a fully-thought out personal networking strategy, download our FREE - email required - guide to building your personal networking strategy, here)

The daily LinkedIn routine I will describe will allow you to ditch at least one networking event a month, possibly more – and if you only ditch one face-to-face networking event a month will save you between 2-5 hours every month.

LinkedIn did some research which found out that the optimum amount of time on LinkedIn per day is 9 minutes. Here is your ideal daily LinkedIn routine (which assumes you have already got a decent LinkedIn profile)

  1. set your clock – as you only want to use 9 minutes of your time 
  2. Look at your notifications and respond to any that look interesting
  3. Have a look at who has viewed your profile and send a message/connect with anyone who is interesting
  4. Go in and endorse one person in your network (they are likely to reciprocate)
  5. If you have time left, then add a status update, i.e. share an interesting bit of content for your target market or some good news story about you or your firm (new client won, etc)
  6. If you have time left, look down your LinkedIn wall and comment/like some of the updates by important people in your network
  7. If you still have time left, go into one of your LinkedIn groups and leave one comment on one discussion
  8. Job done!

Your effectiveness in using this routine on LinkedIn, will be significantly improved, if you:

1) Commit to your niche – particularly in your LinkedIn Summary and LinkedIn professional headline (for help with this how about downloading our free guides on LinkedIn?)

2) Have a well thought out and well written LinkedIn profile, which highlights your credibility in your chosen niche (for a checklist of what should go in your LinkedIn profile, see here)

3) Have carefully researched the groups that you participate in – i.e. they are engaged communities with a large proportion of your target market in the group

Do you have a daily or weekly routine on LinkedIn? I’d love to know what you include in your routine…

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