Andy Neary explains how to use LinkedIn to grow your business by treating your connections as a community you manage. He recommends prioritizing quality connections (people you could do business with) over chasing high connection counts, and creating content with two purposes: (1) let people know who you are (personality, beliefs, hobbies) and (2) demonstrate what your business does and how it helps clients — both to build familiarity, likability, and ultimately trust for selling.
Chapters
Who are you connecting with on LinkedIn? I want you to start thinking about your LinkedIn connections, whether you have 200 today, 500, a thousand, 10,000, I don't care. I want you to start thinking about your connections like a town, a community. And you are the mayor of this community. You, you run this town. And your job is to try to bring the right residents to your town, to your community. Well, what is the right resident? It's somebody you can do business with. And so when you think about it from that perspective, I own this town. I run this town. This is my community. I am the mayor. Your job is to go find connection opportunities with people you can ultimately do business with someday. So as you grow this community, your number of connections with people you could ultimately do business with.
It'S gonna start the down, start you down the path of being more effective here on LinkedIn. So that's my first recommendation. Who are you connecting with? If you are just purely driven on growing that number of connections, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Trust me, I know plenty of people who have 20, 30, 40,000 connections on this platform or followers, and it's doing nothing for their business. Go ask them how much they're actually selling, and the answer is not much. So that's number one. Number two, let's talk about content. What kind of content should you be creating? Remember I said eight years ago, all of my content was driven around getting likes and comments. Is that dopamine hit that I was seeking? Right. So when I would sit down to think about the article I was going to write or the video I was going to make, it wasn't based on what do I, what do I truly want to talk about? It was all based on what reaction I want to get. And that was the wrong way to build content. So today my content does two purposes. Number one, I want to use my content to let you get to know me a little bit. How I think, what I believe, just hobbies I have, things I do, how I live my daily life. But two, I want to create content that lets you get to know what my business is about, how I can actually help you win. You see, if I'm doing, I am controlling my community and letting the right residents in my community, the people I could ultimately do business with. And then I'm focusing my content on letting you get to know me a little bit more, but also teaching you and letting you get to know about my business. Here's what's going to happen. You're going to start to know me, you're going to start to like me, which is going to make the trusting part of selling that much easier.
