3 Tips How to Deepen Relationships on LinkedIn

Amidst all the chaos and turmoil related to the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses have stopped or slowed operations down. Now more than ever is a time to focus on support and deepening relationships with colleagues. Whether it is with a vendor, client, past coworker, employee, etc.

So, when I saw our Senior New Business Strategist, Krystina Gillenwater, outline 3 recommendations specifically for LinkedIn. I wanted partner up and consolidate her How-to videos into a single resource.

Each one of these tips can be quickly incorporated into your routine to better leverage LinkedIn and deepen relationships:

Tip 1: Using the LinkedIn Recommendations Tool

One of the simplest ways to leverage LinkedIn is through the use of LinkedIn’s recommendation tool. This tool has a number of benefits for both the sender and recipient of the recommendation.

Benefits of the Recommendation Tool Benefits:

• It allows you to stay connected with colleagues
• It delights the recipient
• It is a great positioning tool for the recipient in their future career
• Often times, the recipient will want to reciprocate and write a recommendation for you

If you are interested in taking advantage of this feature but aren't sure how to start a recommendation. Check out this valuable resource from HubSpot, "How to Write a LinkedIn Recommendation in 2020," with examples.

Tip 2: Engage with Other People’s Content

This tip may seem simple, but it's truly one of the most effective ways to further develop a relationship with someone on LinkedIn. This can be done by liking, commenting on, or sharing someone’s content to your profile.

Benefits of engaging with other people’s content:

• Ingratiate yourself to them
• You will gain exposure to their audience, who likely are people within your industry or area of business

To utilize this tip, try out this simple, yet effective challenge Krystina created. The following are the rules of the challenge:

1. Pick 5-10 people within your network that are thought-leaders or subject matter experts
2. Check-in every day to see if they have posted new content to LinkedIn
3. If they have, dive in and engage with their content by liking it, commenting on it, and/or sharing the post

To do this challenge correctly, it is important to maintain consistency, but avoid being spammy. To avoid this, your comments should provide feedback, add value to the conversation, or encourage further discussion.

Tip 3: Utilize ‘Contact Out’ Through LinkedIn

Contact Out is a Google Chrome extension tool that will allow you to find just about anyone’s email, phone number, and social media accounts through their LinkedIn profile. If leveraged correctly, Contact Out can help you generate much higher response rates than typical LinkedIn messaging or InMail.

According to ContactOut.com:

• Emails receive 2x the response rate of InMail on LinkedIn.
• Recipients respond 5x faster to personal email than InMail.

If you are working in a sales/recruiting role, or simply just need to find someone’s contact information, this tool can save you TONS of time and effort. You can either bookmark this post or download the video on how to use Contact Out through LinkedIn directly.

So now you are asking, “How will this help me deepen relationships?”

By reaching out to new people, you are sparking new relationships with them. It is up to you to generate a mutually beneficial relationship by bringing value to the table and maintaining consistent contact. 

If you found this resource helpful and would like more LinkedIn tips, I would encourage you to jump over to our 3 part LinkedIn webinar series. The series will show you how to conduct targeted outreach, build authority and utilize LinkedIn's advertising features to drive traffic to your website, build awareness for your brand, and fill your pipeline with sales opportunities.