Stay Connected While Disconnected

It’s summer during a pandemic. You have vacation days planned, your target clients do too. It’s so important to disconnect from work! Yet, we professionals worry about keeping revenue opportunities moving while easing back on email, zoom and phone calls. The answer to this challenge is to use LinkedIn on a regular basis.

With its news feature and automated message text suggestions, LinkedIn affords the opportunity to expand and cultivate your network without putting in much time or effort. Spend five minutes daily, when not on vacation, to read and engage with your LinkedIn feed, request new connections and to send quick notes to connections. LinkedIn’s default news feed setting presents activity and posts in the order of popularity rather than displaying by recent timeframe. While you can change this option to view new activity, this default setting is often overlooked by users. If you are regularly active, and you go on vacation, your activities will keep you top of mind at times when you may be sitting on the beach or enjoying family time. Here’s a strategy to keep you connected while you are disconnected:

1. Download LinkedIn’s mobile application on your phone. Turn off notifications when you go on vacation. The platform’s dashboard will inform you of any messages that may need responses when you next log in and it will even populate suggested language to click on.

2. Follow industries, companies and their leaders that you wish to have as a client.

3. Daily, when not on vacation, read your activity feed just as you would any other news source, and engage by liking or commenting on others’ posts. The more interactions that you have, the greater likelihood that your name will appear in your target clients’ feed in coming days.

4. Request new connections. It’s easy, just click on the connection request and personalize the reason why you wish to connect with this person. For example, “Nancy, I work with life sciences companies and would enjoy connecting with you to learn more about your firm and role.”

5. Send messages to your existing connections like “George, I thought of you/your firm today because of XYZ (news item that appeared in my feed). I’m on vacation but would like to catch up, how does your calendar look next Tuesday or Wednesday for me to call you?”. Using the vacation verbiage is a great conversation starter and displays a 360-degree view of you which is now so important in advisor evaluation.

LinkedIn, like other social platforms, uses artificial intelligence. The more that you use it then the more relevant content, news and people that it will present to you. Further, the more active that you are, the more it will schedule your posts in your connections’ feeds so that you can stay top of mind even when you are physically offline. Take well-deserved time off and let LinkedIn do the work for you!

We are maniacal about using LinkedIn to build and nurture clients and referrals. Please email info@bizdevgals.com if you wish to improve your online persona, leverage LinkedIn to meet clients and referrals, and to stay top of mind.