There are a myriad of earthed gems on Chrome’s web store for sales and marketing; many of which are completely free or have a free version to get you up and running. Whether you’re looking to save time, boost your efficiency, or discover new insights, we’ve got the top 5 chrome extensions all sales teams should have their hands on.
With so much time spent on prospecting, administration and research, with just 33% of a salesperson’s day spent engaging with customers, salespeople are kept from their full potential. They spend hours fulfilling admin tasks and monotonous searching. With the millions of data points, profiles, and companies available for prospecting, you could spend years finding the right persona. That’s before attempting to extract all the relevant information.
Here are our top 5, each serving a different purpose to save you time and improve efficiency.
HubSpot Sales
HubSpot’s Sales tool lets you connect your inbox directly with your CRM. Rather than switching between the two, this integration ensures you save time and retain all valuable information about your prospects when exporting contact info. There’s also the ability to monitor and be notified when your emails are delivered, opened, and clicked on. This can all be added to your CRM log.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo tells you how well content is performing and its potential for virality. When on a web page, click the extension to look at the stats on how many people have shared or backlinked to it. It’s also a great way of seeing keeping an eye on how your competitors are doing. You can also unearth insights into new untested strategies to ensure the content your sharing is relevant and engaging. This is ideal for teams where too much of their time is being spent on content research.
Nudge.AI
Nudge.ai is an artificial intelligence tool giving you important sales insights whenever and wherever. It allows you to check information and insights on prospects and their companies. Instead of manually searching for the information you need to write that perfect intro or pitch, you get all the data you need immediately. It monitors personal mentions, social media activity, company events, and blogs. Create the necessary personalisation your message needs to stand out in a crowded inbox without spending hours crafting it.
Offline editing for Docs, Sheets & Slides
One for the pre and post-Covid world, this does exactly what it says on the tin. If your commute is about to end its sabbatical you can guarantee mediocre to non-existent wi-fi along your route. This handy extension allows you to make all those edits whilst stuck between stations. You don’t even need any Office apps installed on your device for this to work either. Simply drag the file into Chrome and export it afterwards.
Lix allows you to export thousands of LinkedIn profiles, find 98% accurate validated email addresses and track company data in just one click. Perfect for sales prospecting, recruitment and business intelligence professionals, it removes the manual effort required to obtain the necessary info you need for your pipelines. Its automation also gives a handy boost to your marketing and networking efforts, allowing you to view thousands of profiles a day. This, in turn, grows your network and ensuring those relevant to your industry get eyes on your profile and business.
Lix’s email guessing feature gives you another avenue for your outreach, without the need to utilise another tool to pore over these profiles. Boasting 98% accuracy and with alternatives given where the first option proves unsuccessful, you have an optimal chance of reaching your chosen connection.
If you’ve ever wondered how to extract emails from LinkedIn, wonder no more…
With almost a billion users and over 33m companies, LinkedIn is by far the leading social professional platform. That makes it a prime target for lead generation, recruitment, market intelligence and research.
For those of you who connect, pitch or even send invites via email however, there is a piece of the puzzle missing. Finding the email address for a potential client, for example, can be a tedious manual.
If you want to save time and improve your email-finding accuracy, try a combination of our LIX email finder (with 98% accurate email validation) and the powerful LinkedIn search (we have a guide to the LinkedIn search, too!).
How does LIX work?
Lix uses clever AI to combine the target connection’s name, the name of their company and the company’s email format to initially guess, then verify email addresses.
Let’s work through an example to show you the process:
You’re on the hunt for fresh leads, and you want to go right to the top of the food chain – CEOs in London. You would start your hunt with the search function on LinkedIn. That search (and subsequent filters, if necessary) will produce a list of results.
How to extract emails from a search
Complete your search.
LinkedIn Search
Log in to your Lix account – make sure you have the Lix extension installed – then click the icon.
The Lix Extension Icon
This will bring up the Lix toolbar, allowing you to toggle your settings. Select the ‘Generate Emails’ tab and choose the volume of results to export.
There’s no need to worry about exporting too many results. Your account will never be restricted due to Lix’s in-built daily limits.
Click ‘Lix It’ and the results will come rolling in. You need to ensure that the window is left open to run – an easy way to do this is to move your search to its own window so you can carry on with other tasks while Lix works its magic. This isn’t always necessary; for most extractions the process is almost instant.
Finally, click ‘Download Results’ and open the file.
Lix Email Results
As you can see here, there’s a strong return on the amount of generated email addresses in the ‘Email – Top Guess’ tab. If you look in the tab adjacent (E-mail – Other Guesses) you’ll see there are alternates in case the top answer is incorrect. This way you have the best chance of obtaining the correct email.
Afterwards, you can export this data to your existing CRM systems to sync up with your active marketing campaigns. Remember, you can extract emails from LinkedIn multiple times a day.
Additionally, once you’ve validated the email address, you can also target other decision makers in the organisation.
Get started with Lix by signing up here and generate thousands of emails. The Lix toolbar is added as a Chrome extension so no need to download any software to get up and running.
Check out our new video series on all the other great benefits there are to using Lix and LinkedIn for lead generation and recruitment.
If you’ve spent any time looking at lead-gen tools and email finders (like LIX!) you will have come across the term ‘verified emails’. The terminology is now industry-standard, with most (if not all) providers touting their ability to provide ‘verified emails’ for their customers, but what does it mean?
Firstly, it’s important to note that while the terminology is an industry standard, email validation methods are not. Let’s take a look at some of the most common ways in which emails are ‘valid’.
Regex String Validation
At the most basic level, emails should undergo string validation – that means ensuring that the email address consists of real characters, in an email format (name@domain.com, for example).
This is particularly useful when the email address is pulled together using data from different sources, for example; when using LIX to find the email address for someone on LinkedIn. If someone in the list of potential leads you’re exporting has included an emoji in their LinkedIn display name, we will use string validation to remove the emoji as it’s an illegal character.
Emojis are a fairly simple error to spot and remove, however. Where many people run into problems are those characters that are outside of the Latin alphabet used in the US & UK. If your intended target is a Mandarin-speaker named Zhang Wei and their display name is in Hanzi: 张伟 some email services may reject this! Similarly, if you’re looking for the email address for one Jørgen Pedersen, you might encounter the same problem.
SMTP Authentication
Very few lead-gen tools talk about Regex string validation, but many of them boast that their emails are SMTP authenticated.
If you’ve ever set up email forwarding, or added an external mailbox to your smartphone, you’ve probably seen the acronym ‘SMTP’ before, which stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. TechTerms have a useful definition:
“STMP stands for “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.” This is the protocol used for sending e-mail over the Internet. Your e-mail client (such as Outlook, Eudora, or Mac OS X Mail) uses SMTP to send a message to the mail server, and the mail server uses SMTP to relay that message to the correct receiving mail server. Basically, SMTP is a set of commands that authenticate and direct the transfer of electronic mail.”
The overall definition is of course useful to understanding what SMTP is, but that final sentence is really what we’re interested in: the ability to authenticate and direct the transfer of electronic mail. Have you ever sent an email in a hurry, missed a letter from their email address and had it bounce back as ‘failed’? That’s an SMTP failure – the receiver’s SMTP server has rejected the incoming mail as invalid.
If the email address is SMTP authenticated it means it’s a real email address and it’ll definitely reach the intended target, right? Not always! Some servers will swallow the error without ever letting you know that the email was not authenticated.
Overall, SMTP is a good indication that an email is formatted correctly and that it will reach its target, but it is not totally fool proof.
Open Validation
Have you ever wondered how your email marketing tool (MailChimp, Klaviyo, etc.) knows how many people opened your newsletter? The answer is, they use open tracking.
In a nutshell, it’s a small line of HTML embedded into an email that tells the sender whether or not the email has been opened. This of course is a great way to tell if the email address is valid or not – chances are if an email has been opened, the address is correct! There are, however, exceptions to this rule. Sometimes a spam filter might ‘open’ an email to scan the content. That may mean that the email address is still correct, but perhaps the open validation is not.
There are a number of ways to validate email addresses but as we’ve shown, there is no ‘one’ infallible method. If you’re using a lead-gen tool and you’re not sure how they verify the email addresses they send you, don’t be afraid to ask!
Welcome to How to use LinkedIn – a complete walkthrough to help you master the professional social platform. This guide is split into four sections, one for each of the four pillars of LinkedIn mastery: profile building, networking & connections, content and company pages. Each section is accompanied by a video. Feel free to skip to the section you need help with most or read (and watch!) all the way through for the complete guide on how to use LinkedIn.
A strong profile is the very foundation of LinkedIn. Whether you’re using LinkedIn to look for a job, for networking or seeking potential clients you need to make sure that your profile is polished. A polished profile requires a quality avatar image, use of cover image space, tailored headlines, powerful descriptions and a focus on keywords.
In order to walk you through each section of the profile, we’re going to use my personal LinkedIn as an example (you can also watch this section’s *video* and follow along there).
When you sign into LinkedIn, you’re going to see something like this:
This is the LinkedIn feed. It’s where you see your connections (and sometimes the connections of your connections!) and their content: the information that they’ve posted, articles, video etc. This is where your content is going to show up when you post it. If you’re already au fait with LinkedIn, then you’ll know all about this. If you’re new to LinkedIn, take some time to get familiar to this view. The feed setup is very similar to other web-based social platforms such as Facebook, so it shouldn’t take too long to get used to.
Let’s jump right into my profile, which looks like this:
I’m going to take you each of the individual sections and explain how and why I’ve structured mine in the way that I have.
Profile Image
First and foremost, make sure that your photograph is professional. Not professional in the sense that a pro photographer took the snap (although that would be nice) but professional in the sense that you are projecting an image of yourself in a professional setting. No photos of you drinking, or smoking, or on the beach, or a party… This may seem obvious, but I see profile images like this fairly regularly and it is not a good look. You might think it makes you look cool and ‘out there’, but this is a professional networking platform, not a frat party.
My tip for presenting yourself professionally is to wear the clothes that you would normally wear to a networking event within your industry. If you’re in an industry that would wear black tie, or at least a tie and jacket, to a networking event then make sure you’re wearing something like that in your avatar. Remember, that’s what we’re using LinkedIn for. We are here to network in one way or another: finding a job, growing your network, looking for clients etc.
The avatar I use is a little more casual, because I work in startups and tech. I can have an open shirt with t shirt underneath, and that’s absolutely fine. Make a judgement call here. If you’re in doubt, opt for the smarter choice.
Cover Image
The cover image is something that a lot of people neglect, which is a real waste of valuable digital real estate! It doesn’t have to be an all-singing, all-dancing advertisement I’ve seen some that pack in way too much text) and you don’t need to sell something here, but don’t waste the space.
I’ve used something light-hearted and design focused for my cover image:
While it looks great, I can probably do a little bit better by making use of that space and saying something about the company that I work for, a launch we have coming up or perhaps some content we have to give away. If you’re looking for a job, you could always include something about your skills or your search here. If you feel like you have nothing to say in the cover image, don’t fret, include your company logo or a photo from a business event. Something is always better than nothing.
Here are some great examples of LinkedIn covers to give you some inspiration: https://bit.ly/LinkedIn-Cover-Examples
Another important point to consider is the recommended sizes for both the profile and the cover image; pixelated images simply will not do.
You can find a full guide to the sizes on Canva: https://www.canva.com/sizes/linkedin/
Canva is also a great tool for creating graphics easily. Follow the link, pick a size and start creating. clean and keep it looking good.
Summary & About
The summary section sits just below your images and includes your current job title, highest level of education, company and number of connections. This information is automatically populated from the details you enter in the relevant sections of your profile.
Here is my ‘About’ section:
You may have noticed a recurring theme with my about section and cover image – I’ve opted for style over substance! I’ve kept it lighthearted, but you can of course be much more serious than I have.
I’ve chosen three very simple, but I think fairly useful, points:
Firstly, an achievement: ‘Top 100 Growth Hackers’. I was voted as such in a study by Goodman Lantern. That’s an achievement, it sets me apart from my peers.
Secondly, expertise: ‘Automation expert’. Tthat’s a little bit more about me as a marketer, my skillset and background.
Lastly, on-brand humour: ‘Fantastic hair’. It’s funny and lighthearted, very on-brand for me, and I do have fantastic hair.
I have seen plenty of variations for the About section, from one-liners to rambling essays. Personally, I would shy away from writing too much here. A big block of text is going to put off any potential readers. Let your profile cover the details of your work history!
Featured
This is your chance to add media to give a little extra flavor to your profile.
Here’s my Featured section:
I’ve included an article written about me, talking about my skills and some of my achievements. This is really good: it shows that I have press coverage and that people are interested in what I do. If you have anything similar that celebrates your skills and achievement, be sure to include it!
The next along is my Goodman Lantern ‘Top 100 Growth Hackers’ nomination. The broken image on the link is a great example of why it’s important to regularly check your profile for changes. A broken image doesn’t fit with the rest of my profile, so I need to either replace it with something else or I need to speak to Goodman Lantern and get them to fix their metadata. Either way, I can’t leave a broken link on my profile!
There are other things you can do with this media space, in fact the possibilities are limitless. You can make a video CV where you talk about yourself, you can give a presentation on a project you’ve worked on, or something you’re interested in. This link space is an opportunity really show off who you are and what you’ve achieved.
Activity
The activity section is fairly important, although many people forget that it’s there. Let me explain why it’s worth bearing in mind…
Any engagements you make on the LinkedIn platform will show up here. Articles, shares, comments… everything! For content shares, that’s no problem – it’s great to have a second chance for people to find your content on your profile. Comments however can sometimes be an issue.
In the last few years, LinkedIn has become slightly more like Facebook in the sense that people will share personal and political things on the platform. That didn’t used to happen so much on LinkedIn, but it happens a lot now. Always remember, before you comment on something potentially controversial, those comments are going to show up on the activity card on your profile. You don’t want to have an argument with someone about their stance on Trump, for example, and then someone potentially offering you a job or a contract comes onto your platform, sees that you are saying things that they would find potentially unsavory and withdraws the offer. Trust me, it happens!
Experience
The most important portion of your LinkedIn profile. Here’s where you’re going to add your job titles, descriptions, the time that you worked there and any supporting media.
If you want to be found in the LinkedIn search, keep your job titles keyword friendly. Some people decide to call themselves ‘lead-gen startup guru ninja’ and while that may feel exciting, people aren’t searching for those terms. If you don’t use keyword-focused titles, you will appear in less searches, have less connections and less opportunities offered to you. If you’re not worried about those things and your primary concern is being cool and wacky, then go for it.
My most recent experience shows that my position is the Marketing Director for Lix and how long I’ve been here. In the description I talk a little bit about what the company does, but I don’t talk much about what I do in the company. That’s a personal choice and you can change that depending on what you’re hoping to get from LinkedIn. I’m not looking to be recruited (I’m in Lix for the long haul!) but if you are looking for a new job, use that experience section to talk about things that you’ve achieved and your responsibilities.
You don’t need to write too much: four or five sentences is more than enough. Think about the length of a tweet, rather than an essay. Blocks off text will put people off and they’re just not going to bother reading it.
Make sure that you are honest and accurate in these dates. If you’re looking for work, ensure that the dates here match up with the dates on your CV. It’s very important, because if a recruiter checks both and you’re telling fibs, then that’s not going to look good for you overall!
Education
Time to show off those grades and extracurricular activities!
You can also include formal professional qualifications if you have any, in addition to the standard school and university stuff. If you completed an extra course, or you went to a night school, completed a MOOC or anything along those lines, you can include it there. This information will be pulled through to the top of your profile remember – the summary section shows your most recent role, current role and your highest level of education, so don’t forget to input that info.
Also, if you did anything extra while you were studying – extracurricular activities, societies, events – include it here. For example, I ran an event while I was at my university, founded a sports team and wrote for the student newspaper. Include this extra points, it all adds up.
Skills and Endorsements
Personally, I don’t think LinkedIn skills are particularly important anymore, but it can be quite a nice thing to trade endorsements with people that you’ve worked with or people you know. I don’t think that employers, or people that you network with, look at this often. Don’t get too het up about your skill scores.
Recommendations
Recommendations, however, are important. You can get recommendations from people that you’ve worked with, or worked for, or have worked for you. It’s a really good way of building up a picture of who you are as a person when you are working.
It’s all well and good saying, “hey, I did this job and I was great at it“, but if you can get your boss, or a colleague, or someone that worked for you to say, “actually, this person was great and it was a real pleasure to work with them and they’re a nice person, they’re great achieving goals or they’re good at this or that”, that is going to stand out and mean a lot more to someone viewing your profile than just you saying it yourself. It’s social proof, it’s like a testimonial or a review on an Amazon product. We all want to see that someone else has enjoyed this product, this product today being me, or you on your profile.
The great thing about recommendations is they’re really easy to get because you can give one and then ask for one in return. You can follow the ‘ask for recommendation’ button and pick someone on your connections list. Write one for them and then message them to to say, “hey, I’ve written a recommendation for you, please write one for me“.
Accomplishments
Accomplishments are just that – accomplishments! It’s another chance to strut your stuff. Speak more than once language? Include it here. You can also link to media, qualifications and any articles and videos you didn’t include further up the page. This section is much like the extracurricular activities that you would put on your CV.
This is also a chance to show that you’re really engaged with your industry. If you work in a highly competitive field, it can be really good here to show off the things that help you stand out from the crow. If, for example, lots of people are going to apply for the law firm you want to work for and you’ve been writing a blog, or you’ve contributed to a legal magazine – talk about it!
Interests
Similarly to skills, I don’t think people look at interests too much but you can try to ensure that your interests align your personal brand.
Whenever you follow a person, or company, it will be shown here.
URL & Public Profile
Your public profile is what people see when they come across your profile, but they’re not a LinkedIn member – usually from a Google search or similar. It’s similar to a private profile on Instagram or Facebook. LinkedIn gives you the options to choose what is visible here, so if privacy is a concern for you then be sure to check it out.
You may also edit your personal URL, making it easier to find you and giving you a cleaner link to post when you share your profile. For example, mine is linkedin.com/in/alfie-lambert – if you’ve got a popular name, go and claim your ideal URL before someone else does!
That’s all for the profile. If you’d like to follow along with the video, you can do that here:
Connections and Networking
This section of the guide explains the best way to find people, how to use the LinkedIn search, connecting with people, 1st 2nd and 3rd degree connections and then personalized connection messages.
Once your profile is complete, polished and ready for action it’s time to delve into connections and networking and there has never been a better time to network on LinkedIn. In fact, LinkedIn saw a 55% increase in conversations between connections in 2020. That’s largely because of the pandemic – we can’t go out and network in the ways that we used to. In 2021 if you want to connect in a professional setting, LinkedIn is the very best place to do that.
Let me hit you with some more stats: at the time of writing there are 720m users on LinkedIn and counting. It will probably hit a billion in 2021, if not 2022. If there’s someone in business that you need to talk to, or you want to get in front of, they’re probably already on LinkedIn.
Incoming Connection Requests
The first thing you will see when clicking on ‘my network’ on the top menu, are the people who have invited you to connect. You’ll notice that many of these connection requests, especially those from people you don’t know, will come with personalized messages (something we will cover a little further along in this blog).
The number of incoming requests you will receive should increase over time and with regular use. If you’re engaging with content, networking and so on it will attract people to your profile. Job title makes a difference here too. I’m listed as a Marketing Director, which means everybody wants to sell me products, or staff, or event tickets… As you can see, I have 32 pending invites and almost all of them are trying to pitch me something!
Some people preach caution when accepting connection requests. Perhaps if you’re a decision maker at a company and you really don’t like being pitched to, then yes be selective. My policy is the more the merrier; the bigger my network, the more people that see my content in the feed and potentially engage with it.
Suggested Events
Just below your incoming connection requests are some suggested (currently online) events.
These events offer two benefits. The knowledge shared at the event itself, but also the opportunity to network. Attending events with people in your industry or with common interests can be a great chance to meet and connect with like-minded individuals.
This is true for all events, not just those suggested to you! Seek out events using the LinkedIn search function – search for your chosen topic, click the ‘events’ tab and get scrolling.
If you really want to maximise the event-based networking effect, host your own event! LinkedIn has a great onboarding guide to help you get started.
People you may know
Again, this is a really easy way to find people to connect with, people who might be working in the same industry as you. The LinkedIn algorithm is going to be piecing this together and they’re normally pretty good.
Connecting with other like-minded people in your field can be really useful for a variety of reasons. It’s particularly good for staying on top of industry news – if your connections are predominately people in your field, the content they share should be mostly relevant. This gives you even more opportunity to engage and build your network.
Networking
The easiest way to network with people within your industry is either following the suggested connections, but it can be a little bit impersonal. What is the icebreaker for people on this list? I like to give a little bit more than the standard “I’d like to connect”, especially if it’s a relationship that I want to nurture. A great way to offer more when connecting is to reference a shared interest, engagement or something the person has posted.
This is where LinkedIn groups can provide some great leverage. Head up into your search bar and search for relevant terms, for example I want to search for ‘marketing’, because that is the industry that I am in and want to network within. With your search term in place, head to the ‘groups’ tab.
LinkedIn will suggest the largest groups related to my search term ‘marketing’. If the suggested groups are too general, use a longer search and some filters to find the group that fits your goals.
Once you’re in a group you can leave comments, engage with people’s topics or you can connect with them, using their comments and engagements as an icebreaker.
If I’m in the Connect social media group and I stumble across this post:
Perhaps I could connect with Josh Turner and say something like, “Hey Josh, I saw your post in the social media marketing group about the trust equation framework. I think that was really interesting. I’d love to connect“. This is going to give you a much better chance of getting that connection than just the generic, “hey, I’d like to connect” or even “hey, we’re in the same industry. I’d like to connect.”
Targeted Search
Sometimes stumbling across connections in groups and at events doesn’t cut it. Perhaps you want to meet CEOs because you’re a salesperson, or maybe you want to network with investors because you’re a startup and you want to get investment. When you have a specific target in mind, you can use the powerful LinkedIn search.
As an example, for us to follow along, let’s say I want to find someone to teach me more about marketing; someone who’s perhaps at a higher level than I am, I might search for the job title CMO (Chief Marketing Officer).
LinkedIn returns 1,250,000 results, wow! Obviously, that’s a few too many to sift through, so how can I filter them out? I can head to the connections tab and choose which degree of connections to show (more on this below). I’ll opt for 2nd degree connections – the connections of my connections – so that I have some kind of link to the people it displays.
I have 138,000 possible results. Perhaps that’s a little too broad. From here I could filter by location, current company or a host of other filters in the ‘all filters’ tab. Location isn’t so important to me, as everyone is working remotely these days anyway.
Let’s filter by current company. The top suggestion is Google – perfect.
That brings my number down to 216 results. Of course, not all of them are the CMO for Google (the CMO of Google is Lorraine Twohill) but they are people who are or have been CMOs, that currently or previously worked for Google.
The top hit from the results is Len Markidan, CMO for the online course provider Podia. He seems like the kind of person I’d like to network with and have in my feed. Let’s use Len as an example for the next section.
Personalized Connection Requests
As mentioned earlier, ideally you will have some kind of icebreaker when connecting with someone you don’t know. Let’s see if I can find an icebreaker for Len.
I have a few mutual connections with Len, but not any that I know well enough to use as an intro to a conversation. I’m not in any common groups with Len, so I’m going to take a look at Len’s activity to see if there’s any common ground I can find there.
My search of Len’s activity shows two things – firstly, he hasn’t posted on LinkedIn since 2018. If I was really interested in networking, I probably wouldn’t connect with Len knowing this, I’d prefer someone more active.
For the sake of this example though, let’s take a look at the content Len posted:
This post from Len’s company, Podia, is a perfect icebreaker for my connection request. I can reference the post in my personalized message; hopefully cutting through all the generic connection requests and sales pitches.
I advise keeping the messages short and sweet, firstly because there is a character limit and secondly because the preview only shows a few words along with your request, so you need to hook them in early on. For Len, I could say something like:
“Hi Len, I read your post about creating online courses and found it really interesting, would love to connect”
Even with the cut-off, Len will see “Hi Len, I read your post…” and that might be all I need to stand out from the sea of generic requests.
Looking for more tips on connection request messages? Sumo have a great guide here.
1st 2nd and 3rd Degree Connections
You may have noticed while browsing of LinkedIn that you have 1st degree connections, 2nd degree connections and 3rd degree connections.
Your 1st degree connections are people that you are already connected with. Your 2nd degree connections are people who are connected to your connections. Your 3rd degree connections are people who are connected to your 2nd degree connections. Anyone outside of that is outside of your network, in which case you may not be able to connect with them, depending on their privacy settings. If you land on someone’s profile and they are outside your network and their profiles displays a single name (first name or surname), that usually means that they are not open to connections from people outside of their network.
By now, you’ve got a great profile and you’re starting to make some connections, that network is really going to serve you well in the future. To take it to the next level, we need to throw some content into the mix.
Content
The amount of LinkedIn native content produced increased by 60% in 2020 – for the same reasons that conversations did. With lockdowns, closed offices and home working on the rise, people are absorbing more content on LinkedIn than they ever were before. There has never been a better time to start producing content native to the LinkedIn platform.
You can use content to build a reputation as an expert in your field, looking for jobs or land clients; whatever it is that you’re on LinkedIn to do. This section will talk you through some best practices for content creation, plus how to work with the LinkedIn algorithm to get the most engagement so that you can become a content creating master.
LinkedIn Posts
The most common type of content on LinkedIn is the humble post, here’s a recent one I shared:
As you can see, I’ve added hashtags here to help get my post in front of the right audience. These are especially useful if your post begins to get engagement, because LinkedIn will show well-engaged posts to people that follow those hashtags.
There a few things I could have done to boost this post further, however. LinkedIn stats show that posts that contain images get twice as much engagement. So, if you can include an image to support your post then do so!
From the ‘start a post box’ you can choose where your post will be seen. If you have a company page, which (our next guide section!) you can share from the company page. You can decide whether your post is going to be public, connections only or specific group members. You can share straight to your Twitter, too.
Simple posts are the tip of the iceberg. From this view, there are a number of options:
You can link to a document, create a poll, share that you’re hiring, celebrate an occasion, find an expert, offer help… there is so much that you can do just within this framework.
Articles
The most common type of long form content on LinkedIn is the written article. You can access this screen from the same section as posts, just click on ‘write an article’:
First thing you will notice is the huge space for an image at the top. Some people are still posting articles without header images which to me, is crazy. Once again, it’s valuable real digital real estate – it’s also something readers expect to see. As any UX expert will tell you, delivering what someone expects is key to a smooth experience. People want an image here; the blank space is jarring.
For a great guide to header sizes, design and the tool to create your own amazing images, head to Canva: https://www.canva.com/linkedin-banners/templates/
Let’s take a look at one of my blogs as an example:
The last article I published was back in July 2020 (I need to get writing!) and it is about marketers ‘fishing in the same pond’. Here you see, I have made an attractive and relevant cover, using the same background color that I have in the cover image on my profile, to give me a little bit of brand uniformity. Make sure that you also include line breaks and spacing within the blog, with a peppering of images to break up large blocks of text.
B2B blog writing guidelines: https://altitudemarketing.com/blog/how-to-write-b2b-blog-post/
Video
In the past I have been known to publish and write articles on LinkedIn, however in 2021 I would probably opt for video, rather than written content. The reason for that is, if you delve into LinkedIn stats, you will see that users are 20 times more likely to share a video than a written post. That 20x boost in shares is will make a huge difference to your engagement!
Now, I know some people aren’t comfortable with producing videos. I would say if you are nervous, just start making practice videos! The more you make, the more comfortable you get. I used to hate being in a video and now I’ve produced a 40-minute video guide to using LinkedIn. It just takes practice.
A great thing you can do with video to increase its reach is use a transcription service, something like trint, that allows you to add subtitles to your footage. People use LinkedIn primarily at work and perhaps they can’t use speakers or headphones, so if you can include some subtitles, you’re going to get many more engagements. I don’t have official figures to give you, but I normally find I can add about 50% to my engagement just by using subtitles alone.
LinkedIn Live
There are some new forms of content production available on LinkedIn that people aren’t really maximizing at the moment – LinkedIn live being one of them! Despite the slow uptake, live streams on LinkedIn have increased bt 437% in the last year. It’s slowly becoming a big part of the platform and as with almost any social media, even professional social media platforms, they will promote their newest baby to its fullest extent.
For instance, Instagram has recently launched reels to compete with TikTok. An Instagram reel is going to get more engagement than a standard Instagram post, because Instagram wants people to use reels, so they will encourage it and promote it. They had the same boost with IGTV about a year or two ago. IGTV videos were getting much more engagement because Instagram was showing them more in the feed, because it wants more people to use IGTV. It is the same thing with LinkedIn. They want people to be using the live video and just video in general.
Algorithm & Engagement
LinkedIn’s feed runs on an engagement-based algorithm. The more people who engage with your posts, the more people who will be shown your posts… and then the more people who will engage with your posts… It’s a self-fulfilling cycle! This is another reason to have a good and lots of connections, because the more people that see your posts in the feed, the more likely is that they’re going to engage with it – especially if they’re relevant. If they work in the same industry, maybe they’re interested in the same topics and then when they engage and comment on your posts, people in their network will see in their feed that’s happened and then they will come into contact with your with your content. This is a really important point to consider if you want to post content on LinkedIn.
Also think about the time of day that people are on LinkedIn and engaging with content. If you post something at 11am, perhaps everybody’s busy working. Maybe 8am / 8.30am just before people start, when they’re on the way in, or lunchtime, or maybe just after work when people have the time to be browsing. Post content when more of your audience is engaged with the platform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKi78ASfPpo
Company Pages
Now have a great profile, loads of connections and you’ve started putting out some content on LinkedIn: the next step is a company page. LinkedIn company pages aren’t just for big businesses. If you’re a small business or even a freelancer, you could set up a LinkedIn company page to showcase your work in a more professional setting. If you’re an employee and your company has a LinkedIn company page, make sure that you’re connected to it. If they don’t, maybe you can earn some brownie points with your boss by creating one..
I’m going to show you two examples of company pages, one that is better than the other. The better page is for Teleperformance. They were the number one LinkedIn company page in 2019 as voted by LinkedIn members. The other that isn’t so good is my company page for Lix, because I need spend a bit more time on it! I’m going to jump right in with Lix and I will show you some of the things that I’m missing and then we’re going to look at Teleperformance to show you why they are so good and why they are the example that you should be following for your company page.
We only have 91 followers at the moment, but that’s something that we can work on by sharing a bit more content. In the content section we looked at the share box in the feed, and you can use it the same way here: start a post, share a photo, share a video, documents, polls and all that good stuff. Creating good content as a business, especially stuff that gets re-shared, can bring in lots of good followers.
We have a fairly good tag line “Connecting every organization with accurate, actionable Real-Time B2B data”. That’s what we do! I have a longer description in the ‘about us’ section, which is a must. We have our logo on there, which is another absolute must.
The big glaring mistake is this cover image. We are not using this space at all. Now, I do have a good excuse for that – we’re in the middle of a massive rebrand and we’re going to be producing lots of great new graphics etc. that branding is going to be added as soon as it is there, but for now, it’s just a big white space, which is not ideal.
Let’s take a look at the Teleperformance page and explore why they do it so well and how you can use these tactics for your company page.
Teleperformance are a worldwide leader in outsourced omni channel customer experience management… If that doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry too much! That’s not the point of why we’re here. We’re here to see what components make up this great page.
One thing we notice right off the bat is this cover image with a member of their staff. Within this image, they’ve spoken quite a lot about the ethos of their company. Their member of staff quite visibly has quite a big tattoo on his neck: he’s quite a cool-looking, well groomed and presented. This isn’t by accident, this image is there to make you think “Hey, these are a young, cool, exciting organization” that speaks to their ethos, to their brand. If that’s not your brand then this isn’t the way for you to go, but something along those lines could really work well, something that shows in a nutshell what you are all about. Their tagline is, “each interaction matters” which I quite like. Short, sweet, to the point and again, it speaks to that brand.
Teleperformance have nearly a million followers and 108,000 employees – there are a big company with lots of followers. What’s quite interesting to note is that they have 10 times the number of followers to employees, which means that the people following them aren’t just their employees. It shows there are lots of people out there who are really interested in what Teleperformance have to say.
Their ‘about’ section has plenty of detail, which explains who they are and what they do:
It gives you an overview of the company, their website, what industry they’re in, how many employees they have, where they are, when they were founded and what their specialties are. Now, all of this information you can add to your own company page quite easily, just by hitting the edit button (the little pencil icon) when you’re signed into your own company page as an admin.
They have a link to their location, showing that they are right in the middle of Paris – a lovely place to work! You can go through and look at their ‘posts’, which you can filter images, documents, videos or ads.
The ‘jobs’ tab allows you to look at any jobs posted by Teleperformance. ‘Life’ is an interesting one and not a lot of people use this tab, but this is about the lifestyle of Teleperformance and their staff:
As Teleperformance are a large company, they’re showing off the company culture and other lures around hiring, because they’re committed to attracting the best talent. This is adding a bit more flavor to Teleperformance, who they are and what they do – this isn’t just a dry description of a company and a business. It’s important to note that this is a paid feature, acquired via LinkedIn’s Career Pages – get in touch with them for pricing.
This section demonstrates their commitment to an ethos and a way of living. You can look at the pictures and say, “hey, what a great place to work”. They’ve got bean bags and hammocks and ping pong tables… Maybe this is the kind of company that you would like to be part of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlcoJQj7lz0
Congratulations, you have completed the How to use LinkedIn complete guide – you’re an allstar, with a ton of connections, high-flying content and a polished company page. Now get out there and achieve your LinkedIn goals!
If you’re looking to browse LinkedIn profiles to look at competitors, inspiration for your own profile, or potential talent; one problem you might come across is that LinkedIn sends an automatic notification to the person whose profile you’ve viewed. There are however, ways in which you can use LinkedIn search anonymously and browse profiles privately. The fastest method (and the easiest to switch on and off!) is via the Lix extension. When installed to your browser, you can simply right-click and select ‘Anonymous Profile Viewing’. Click for a short video on how it works.
You can also change your privacy settings within LinkedIn, by doing the following:
Click the ‘Me’ tab at the top of the page and select ‘Settings and Privacy’
Click ‘Privacy’ and then ‘Profile Viewing Options’
Select ‘Anonymous LinkedIn member’.
However, there are issues to be aware of when opting for this method. For instance, you won’t be able to see who views your profile in return. You will also need to alter these settings each time you want to become visible again. It’s give and take – if they can’t see you, you can’t seem them. LinkedIn will still show the person you visited that someone viewed their profile, but it will display you as an anonymous user. If you are using LinkedIn as a networking tool, for example, this likely will not be the best method for you.
There is a third method, that also allows you to collect data from the user’s profile, without alerting them to your visit – Lix’s Profile Enrichment. Profile Enrichment is a Lix tool that works in conjunction with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, allowing you to export LinkedIn profile data. This includes previous roles, education, listed personal contact details and much more.
Lix’s in-built limiting ensures your account will stay within LinkedIn’s fair usage threshold, too. You can export data as an Excel or CSV file, or save an ongoing project within Lix projects, which you can add additional exports to for de-duplication. By automating this process, you can boost your productivity and carry on with your other tasks.
Get More Data
By using our enhanced features, you can use LinkedIn search anonymously and export all the information you need. Our email-finder feature will allow you to even get data not provided by LinkedIn:
You asked. We listened. Introducing LIX LinkedIn Company Info Accounts Export.
You can now extract company info from Sales Navigator with our Accounts Extraction feature. Enrich your strategy and improve your databases with info such as revenue, industry, and company size.
Cross-reference IDs with your Leads extractions to enrich your leads data and find the right company for your campaign.
This works similarly to how our Companies Extraction feature in Sales Navigator does and supports the Deep Profile option. You can watch our tutorial video on how to use this feature and extract LinkedIn company info to your project.
This was our most requested feature on our Roadmap. By voting for your favourite idea, you can see the features you want to see prioritised and released. We’re continually adding new ideas to our roadmap from the feedback we receive.
Do you have an idea for a new LIX feature? Go to our Product Roadmap to vote for your favourite, and we’ll add the top one to our feature pipeline. You can check out all the features we’ve launched and the exciting features we have planned for the near future. You can even clap and comment on ideas. Check it out here.
Changes This Month
LinkedIn has updated its design. We’ve been hard at work to updating LIX to ensure it works with the latest version so you don’t have to worry about your data exports.
We now remove Emojis from emails – We know that generate emails is the killer feature in LIX for many of you, now you have much more valid, useable emails from a generate emails export.
We also remove emojis from first name and last name. Many users have put an emoji in their profile to reflect their industry. LIX removes this to ensure your name fields are valid for importing data and sending messages.
Reading Time: 4minutesWhere the hell did they hide that menu?
LinkedIn is the first place you should be looking to when you’re hunting for your a job. Whether through your network, or through the Jobs search feature, if you master LinkedIn you’ll be tripping over opportunities.
LinkedIn have made your job search much more efficient by adding a ‘Save’ feature and you can find it on every job post on the platform. Unfortunately, the button to find your saved posts is not easy to find.
Never fear, we’ve made a quick how-to guide on how to get to that hidden menu, and bring you one step closer to your dream job.
The Saved Jobs feature is not just useful for job hunters. You may be researching the jobs market for an internal project, or for your next venture.
You can boost your productivity by using a tool like LIX to extract the list to a spreadsheet for organisation and further analysis. You can even extract the data and import into your favourite CRM to beef up your marketing efforts.
Market Analysis
You may want to analyse the market, or get ahead of it. Perhaps to understand your competitors, or your clients. With Saved Jobs your analysts can treat LinkedIn like a repository of valuable primary source data. You can:
Monitor in which department companies are hiring
Understand salary expectations across your industry
Find key offices for a company
Find where the concentration of employees with a certain job title is highest.
Recruitment
You may want to see who is advertising for what job. This could be helpful to pitch your candidates to a company. You can even use a tool like LIX to extract those links and get email addresses. This can save you on the expensive LinkedIn Recruiter InMail cost.
How to view your Saved Jobs on LinkedIn
Web
From anywhere you can click ‘Jobs’ in the main menu
Click ‘My Jobs’ in the jobs sub-menu.
Boom. There are your saved jobs.
iOS & IPadOS
In the footer menu, select ‘Jobs’
Next to the search bar, tap the three dots (I call this the kebab menu)
In the popover menu, tap ‘See my Jobs’
This one is easy to miss! It should probably say ‘See my Saved Jobs’, right, LinkedIn?
And there you are, you can see your saved jobs. You can even see the ones you have already applied for separately. Neat.
In the footer menu, select ‘Jobs’
Next to the search bar, tap the ellipsis dots
In the popover menu, tap ‘See my Jobs’
This one is easy to miss! It should probably say ‘See my Saved Jobs’, right, LinkedIn?
And there you are, you can see your saved jobs. You can even see the ones you have already applied for separately. Neat.
Conclusion
And that’s it, all your platforms are covered. We at lix wish you every success in your job hunt!
The first thing you must know before you embark upon any LinkedIn sales campaign, is exactly what you hope to achieve from it. Are you trying to drive sales in the short term, or is an extension of a long-term strategy to boost both sales and exposure in a busy marketplace?
If you know your aims it is much easier to develop a coherent, and successful sales campaign.
Short term campaigns are designed to take advantage of temporary situations, such as Christmas, summertime, or even to push sales for a limited period to hit those all-important end of quarter, or end of year targets. They could also coincide with your business’s trends. For example, launching a new product, re-branding an existing line, or moving into a new area within your own niche.
Longer term plans also work well within the B2B market, as you want to nurture long term contacts with your clients, as well as developing repeat business, month on month, year on year.
So with all that in mind, developing your successful campaign requires a bit of thought and planning. Here are three absolute must-dos before you start.
Know Your Customer
This is absolutely vital to the success of your campaign. If you do not know who are targeting you will never reach your sales potential. This is all about Research Research Research.
There are many tools out there to assist you in this, one of which is LinkedIn. A quick search for companies you are targeting on LinkedIn will bring up a host of potential clients. It will also allow you to search for key people within those companies so you can further narrow down your focus.
Once you have identified your target, and established contact, don’t be afraid to ask questions and really listen to the answers. This will allow you pinpoint areas of need and you can therefore tailor your sales campaign to hit these requirements.
Show Your Expertise
By tailoring your campaign to areas of need you have identified you automatically show your expertise in this given area. However, if this cannot be backed up upon further scrutiny it is all for naught.
Again, this is all about research, research, research!. Your LinkedIn sales campaign, if successful, will generate a lot of interest. You should be prepared for question after question before any sale is confirmed. And you should know the answers better than anyone.
Why should someone choose your product or service over a competitor? Because yours is the best, and you are the most knowledgeable. This is the aim. Make you and your product absolutely unmissable. If you are the best, your Sales campaign will reflect this, and businesses will want to buy from the best.
Call-To-Action
On any successful sales campaigns the potential customer can act on the information presented. If you have done all the hard work, all the Research Research Research and tailored your campaign to the right companies, and you have proved your product, your service, and yourself to the absolute must-have commodity, you need to tell people how to get it.
A Call-To-Action is an order. Call this number to book your slot, click this link to order your copy, visit our website to buy while stocks last. This gives the customer an opportunity to take immediate action.
The most successful campaigns include more than one Call-To-Action. If it’s a leaflet you plan on using, include it on both side so it can’t be missed. If you’re going with a radio or television ad, make sure its prominently used so people know how to get in touch.
If potential customers cannot reach you, they cannot buy your products, they cannot refer you to their contacts, and you lose potential business. A sales campaign without an effective Call-To-Action is a waste of all your efforts, and money.
You need your LinkedIn sales campaign to take charge. Tell potential customers you know who they are, and that you know they need you and your product. And here is how to get it. Successful Sales Campaigns do all these things and do them well, so if you can replicate this formula you will realise your investment was a shrewd one.
Looking to make more business connections in a time where socialising is sparse? Look no further than LinkedIn and its incredible networking potential.
As it stands, many people across the world are working remotely. The pandemic has eased somewhat, but realistically, the flexibility remote working affords has to be maintained in order for businesses to remain future-proofed against further lockdown scenarios.
Even without the impact of the virus, there has been a 159% rise in remote work over the last 12 years with 80% of remote workers saying they experience less job stress. Remote working is also beneficial for overall worker morale, for the environment (lower commutes and office use) and for enterprises looking to make the most of a global pool of talent.
Despite the many benefits of remote working and the likelihood we will all be working in this way for the foreseeable future, it doesn’t come free from downsides.
Remote working can be problematic in many ways, causing loneliness, difficulty with work/ life balance, and of course, a bit of a block with networking.
Networking is so beneficial for many companies and freelancers providing a great chance to make connections and build business. Does that mean that networking is over until the pandemic is well and truly squashed? Not necessarily…
LinkedIn Networking: All Your Needs Met In One Place
LinkedIn has 690 million active users and was voted the most trusted platform of 2019. With LinkedIn you no longer have to miss out on networking. Instead, you can network anywhere with an internet connection, anytime you feel like boosting your business connections.
Are you currently making the most of LinkedIn and its networking potential?
If you are already an active LinkedIn member, it’s likely you may not be developing career relationships on this platform that could truly enhance your prospects. LinkedIn holds 30 million companies and sees 2 new users sign up every single second: it’s time to tap into this incredible networking tool. Here’s how:
Create An Incredible Profile
It is so important to make a great first impression online, especially when you are networking. To create a great LinkedIn profile you’ll want to make sure:
There are no gaps or areas left blank
It reads as a professional profile, not like a personal profile
You contain keywords in your summary, headline and experience
You’re showcasing a professional headshot
Make Targeted Connections
There are nearly 700 million potential connections on LinkedIn yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to start adding any connection wherever you can. Instead, target connections where you can get high-quality insights into your industry or career path, or where you can see a working relationship forming in the future.
By targeting your connections you’re focusing on quality over quantity, in the same way you wouldn’t try to speak to everyone at a networking event. You would use your time connecting with those who are most beneficial to your career, or vice versa.
Personalise Your Requests
In order to make a good impression on potential connections it is important to send a message along with your request.
The message should explain why you want to connect, and why you’re looking to form a professional relationship. This avoids you looking like you’re just boosting your numbers. Instead, it strengthens those new connections straight away, paving the way for high-quality communications and exchanges moving forward.
Be An Industry Leader
If you want your connections to see your expertise in the industry you work in, you have to post phenomenal content on LinkedIn. This will boost your relationship with connections you have made, and help new ones find you on the platform too. It’s also a great way to encourage engagement with potential clients or investors, because a great article is a fantastic conversation starter.
If you can, include some video content when you share, as online users are wanting more and more video content. It is expected that the average person will spend 100 minutes a day watching videos online by next year, and many additional trends support the video focus. To future-proof your content, it is definitely worth including some video as well as text.
Lastly, do make sure that any content you do share is not a constant promotion of your services as that will turn off your audience and may weaken your connections.
Join Groups On The Platform
There are various LinkedIn groups within certain professional interests, industries and topics that can be useful to join. They can give you access to lots of people you can network with, but it’s not a guarantee they will pay attention.
If you want others in your groups to pay attention to you, you’ll need to get actively participating in the group discussions. Show your insight, share interesting content, and give value to those you are interacting with.
Show Interest In Your New Connections
If you do want to make a true professional connection with somebody on LinkedIn, you must build that relationship. A great first note and initial chats are great, but as with any great relationship, it takes sustained effort to truly make it last. Make sure you show interest in what the person is sharing and doing regularly, and don’t be afraid to leave a comment showing your interest.
Nurturing these new connections will hopefully lead to great things in the future, adding true value to your networking efforts online.
“If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.” – Germany Kent
LinkedIn makes life so much easier for business professionals looking to be creative about how they network. And at a time when person-to-person meetups are so limited, and will continue to be that way for the foreseeable future, we all have to be creative about how we make business connections. Why not try LinkedIn today for instant access to a global bank of professionals just like you?
Sales Navigator Deep Profiles for LinkedIn Data Export
We’ve introduced our new Deep Profiles feature for Sales Navigator. As a result, you can export more information than ever before. You can now find leads by university, previous experience, time at company, and more. In addition, we have an explainer video below to see explain how you can use it to support your LinkedIn data export. Also, we now send all the most likely emails as a comma-separated list so you can use it in a mail merge.
2x Faster Exports
Firstly, Sales Navigator exports are now 2x faster. Secondly, we’ve also managed to squeeze 5x the number of emails out of the average search result. Most importantly, these emails are now exported as a comma-separated list, allowing you to use them in a Mail Merge.
Product Roadmap
We’ve released our Product Roadmap, because we want to give all our users the opportunity to influence the future of LIX. You can check out all the features we’ve launched and the exciting features we have planned. You can even clap and comment on ideas. Check it out here.
“With our Transparent Product Roadmap, it will be easier than ever to give your input into product development at LIX. You can see what we’re working on, what we having coming up, and the ideas that are coming in to our product development process.
We hope this level of transparency will give you an insight into how we work, and give you the opportunity to influence the future of LIX. Our vision is to give you the tools to supercharge your projects and help you hit your targets, with your feedback we can do that faster and more effectively. Above all, we look forward to hearing from you!”
