Mastering LinkedIn Advanced Search and Save Search
Most people don't realize LinkedIn is the largest database of business professionals on the internet. This week LinkedIn announced they surpassed 400 million members and still growing faster than Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
Using LinkedIn's Advanced Search feature lets you search the entire database of 400 million business professionals using very targeted search criteria. Once you find your perfect advanced search, you can save this search and the search will run 24/7/365 automatically. You need a premium LinkedIn account to save your searches but the small investment is well worth it.
Here's a short video showing you how to do advanced searches and save them.
Transcription:
Hey everybody it's Ted Prodomou. In this video I'm going to show you how to do an advanced search, and save that search so every week you get an email from LinkedIn and it gives you a list of people you can connect with that meets your search criteria. It's a really good way once you know who your ideal client is, you can set up these searches and they literally run twenty four hours a day and find people for you to connect with. You can do this manually, just go up here to the top next to the search box, click on the little advanced, and you can set this up to run one time and then go through and find those people but this way it's running literally twenty four hours a day for me.
Let's say I'm going to look for someone that does video production, or somebody that has that in their profile. What I like to do is put it in quotes, otherwise if you don't it can look for video or production. This way it's looking for a phrase, video production. I'm going to look for second level connections, I'm going to search, let's just say I want to search San Francisco area. If you know the zip code you can put it in here or you can look it up by clicking look up, and it will take you to the US postal code look up. I'm going to put in, I know this is somewhere in San Francisco, let's say I want to look one hundred miles within San Francisco. Here I can actually type in San Francisco if I wanted. If you're looking for a certain company, say I wanted to look for people to do video production at Oracle, and I could say other companies. These are maybe some tech companies that I'd want to get into.
If I'm looking for someone to help with video production, let's just start there. If I wanted to do like an industry, I could pick a specific industry. You can search by people, looking for people in schools. Those aren't really relevant. I could search specific groups for these people if I wanted, I could look for people with more experience, I'm looking for senior level people, I'd have to upgrade my account to access that. Same with function, accounting, administrative, arts, and design, those are different, more criteria I could search for. Let's say I'm looking for directors, or managers of these companies. Another thing you could do is search by company size, I've already put companies in here that I'm trying to search for, or I could search by company size, if I really don't want to target specific … using this current company, you're targeting people that are working there now, very specific companies. Here if I chose to do larger companies, then I'm doing a broader search so I could find companies that I'm not aware of that would need video production, or have video production. Let's just leave this blank for now.
What I would do is just click search, so here is sixty people that have video production here, then I could just kind of go through. He's a director of protection company there, so I might want to connect with him. These are all people that work at Google, so it's a pretty good search, it's got me pretty narrowed in. If I really like this search I can click save search here, and save it as video production. Every week I'll get a list, see I got one HP sales people, sales executives, coaches, sales managers. Every week I get this big number of leads.
Let me go back and change this search just to make it a little broader. I won't target specific companies, but I'm going to go after very large companies because I know they made need consultants, and they would have a budget. Here I search for this, so I have twelve hundred and six meeting that criteria. Managers, and directors in larger companies, and in the San Francisco Bay area, within a hundred miles. Here it actually tells you specific locations I could search for, all of the US there's 1206, most are in the bay area because that's where I searched within a hundred miles of. Here's different companies, so Apple Cisco, Academy of Art, couple of TV stations, so it's telling me exactly who's got the number of people so forty three people at apple. I could search apple then, and I could also expand my search here, go to maybe vice president.
You could of play around with the searches until it's starting to give you people that you realize these are people that I need to connect with. Interesting why Sam comes up, oh he's work for … that's funny, he works at Whole Foods which is a large company. This is an example of the searches obviously not being perfect, that's why you want to keep honing in on what's the right criteria for you. When you find that perfect search, and with my account I can do up to five saved searches, so I could save this as video production weekly, click the checkbox here, and every week it's going to send me the search results for this. What I would like say I'm looking for sales executive, so here's people that I'm connected with already that it found, so I need to modify my search.
I'll just change it to second level, and these are people I'd probably want to connect, sales learning consultant, sales manager at power sports, so I may want to connect with that person. Here I can say get introduced, send them an in mail, save this, or I can just connect. Now see it's not letting me customize the message anymore, sometimes it let's me customize the message, sometimes it doesn't. These are just the company size I'm looking to work for, and the search criteria I've set up for this. Sales coach, sales management, so these are like more sales coaches now. I have to modify this search because it looks for specific coaches, and I don't have the company size specified but you get the idea. You just want to set up these searches, and you can change them anytime. Every week I've got five searches running all the time so if this is a person I think I'd want to connect with I would connect with her. If she does accept the invitation then I can say, “You know we noticed you in a LinkedIn search, and I thought it would be good to connect”. If there's anything I'd do you send me that welcome message, that non salesy, just to get to know and start a conversation.
That's it, it's pretty easy to do, I highly recommend spending a lot of time in advanced search, get really good at it. You may want to upgrade and test all these different criteria and see if it helps you really hone in on the right people for you. Literally, even if you pay for the most expensive account, which I think is a hundred dollars a month, it's twelve hundred dollars a year. If you get one client a year from these advanced searches, it more than pays for the twelve hundred dollars.
Definitely think about upgrading to a higher level, my accounts like the lower level, let me show you that real quick. I'm in the business plan, I can do the premium search filters, adds more fields here, profiles per search, I search, I see three hundred now which is plenty for what I need. If you really need more, here, it's seventy four dollars a month billed annually for the executive, and you get up to seven hundred profiles every time you search. You can do save search ten a day, so if you're really, really aggressive in your marketing this is the way to go. Everyday I'm going to get a list of people I can connect to. Here's referenced searches, who's viewed your profile, this is all premium things that you get.
Full name visibility, this might be worth it to you. This way you can see full names of people and really reach out to people. You get more in mail messages, more introductions, and the open profiles. It lets anyone on LinkedIn see your full profile and message you for free. This let's people connect with you or reach out to you without having to use an in mail. It basically says, “I'm open to receiving emails from people”, I don't get that many solicitations, I do and I don't, but it's really nice that I can message people to that are in this open profile.
Check out the premium accounts, get really good at your advanced search, set up those save searches and I highly recommend doing the professional accounts. I may even upgrade to the executive just to try it out for a few months and then maybe drop back to one of these lower levels. There's lots of good features, and if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me, Ted@TedProdomou.com thanks a lot everybody.
