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LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site that is the premier professional network on the Internet. What successful financial advisors are finding is that LinkedIn can be a tremendously effective place to make professional connections, as well as a place to network with potential clients.
ClientWise has assembled 15 tips that are designed to help financial advisors carve out their own social networking identity on LinkedIn. These tips will help you create a LinkedIn profile, and connect with some of the other 147 million+ Americans who have LinkedIn profiles. [The keyword is "some". You don't want to connect with every person, just the right person(s)!]
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site that enables users to connect with colleagues, look for a job or business relationships and get answers to industry questions. LinkedIn users invite people they know and trust to become "linked in" to them, and the business connections of invited users are in turn linked. However, in order to reach connections down the line, requests for introductions have to be made.
LinkedIn Groups
A major feature of LinkedIn is its groups, enabling anyone to start a group based on an association or industry topic. For example, there are tens of thousands of academic and corporate groups that enable alumni and employees to stay in touch. LinkedIn members request an invitation to the group and can receive postings by other members via e-mail.
Premium Services
Beginning in 2005, paid premium services were added for dedicated users such as recruiters and researchers that are based on monthly transactions. For example, the service level determines usage limitations such as the number of results per search, number of daily or weekly alerts and number of requests for introductions.
One purpose of LinkedIn is its feature called Connections, which allows registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people with whom they have some level of relationship. Users can invite anyone to become a connection. This list of connections can then be used in a number of ways: to gain an introduction to someone a person wishes to know through a mutual contact, to find experienced and graduate jobs, people and business opportunities recommended by someone in one's contact network, employers can list jobs and search for potential candidates, users can follow different companies and to get notified about new jobs and offers available.
How Advisors Can Get Started on LinkedIn
- Check with your compliance department to learn their guidelines on social networking in general, and LinkedIn specifically.
- Create your LinkedIn profile. Join and create a simple profile, while listing your past job titles and employers, a description of what you are doing now, your degrees, your skills, links to your firm’s website, and your interests. (Run this by your compliance department, and you’re on your way.)
- Review your address book and contact list. Find clients, potential clients, colleagues, friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and anyone else in your on-line and off-line networks. Of course, not everyone will be on LinkedIn. However, as the preferred professional network, many will be.
As veteran financial advisors know, there is no single "right way" to acquire new clients. Indeed, we have observed that there are many "right ways" to be successful at business development. However, the commonality among the top-performing financial advisors who excel at acquiring new clients is that they arrive at a business development process that they enjoy, and have confidence in. Although social media doesn't supplant the more "traditional" forms of business development, social media offers new and exciting ways for financial advisors to make personal connections with like-minded, interested individuals.
For 13 additional tips and thoughts for networking on LinkedIn, we invite you to download the following document, complimentary from ClientWise, “15 Tips for Networking on LinkedIn.”
We trust this helps.
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