How to find influencers in your niche on LinkedIn

Hello, this is Joe Apfelbaum, CEO of Ajax Union, and somebody recently asked me, he said, Joe, how do I find influencers on LinkedIn? There are 3 ways to do this. I'm going to click on Sales Navigator on the top right here. In Sales Navigator, click on Lead Filters, and then you type in the title of the person you're looking for. So he was looking for financial advisors, so I would type in certified, certified financial planner. Okay, that's his title. And then I'm going to click on posted on LinkedIn here, posted on LinkedIn. And then on the right side over here, it's going to show you there's 1,500 people. So I would go through these 1,500 people to identify what they're up to, who they are, how many followers they have, and so on. So you can control-click on them and you can look at their profiles. So you see this guy's pretty active here on LinkedIn. I'm going to click on these 3 dots, click on view on LinkedIn. And he has over 10,000 followers here in this industry. He's a certified financial planner. And you can see there's 1,500 people like that that you can go through, find the top 10, 20, 30, 40, and then you can save them here with Evy AI. You could save their profile and you can actually add them to a list. So over here I can click on manage lists and I can click on the top right over here on Evy AI. I could just click on create a new list. And in this case, maybe I'll create a new list, call it Certified Financial Planners, and I press Save. And now I have a list of Certified Financial Planners here, and I can just add this person to Certified. Okay, it's not coming up here because I got to refresh, so I'm going to refresh it, and then I'm going to click the dropdown And I'm going to click on Certified Financial Planner. And now anytime I need to find Certified Financial Planner, I just go to that list and then I can pull up his recent activities. And then I could stay top of mind with him by clicking on comment, clicking on Evvy AI, hitting generate, and it'll generate a comment and I'll just insert it and post a comment on his post. So I'm going to build a list of, let's say, 10, 20, 30 financial advisors that are certified financial advisors that have more than, let's say, 10,000 followers on LinkedIn. The other way to do this, let's say you don't have Sales Navigator and you can't take this approach for whatever reason. Um, I would do a search on LinkedIn. So I'm going to do a search for certified financial planner. I'm just going to do a search like that on LinkedIn. And instead of searching people, I'm going to search posts. Anyone that writes the word certified financial planner as a post. Now I can sort it by a lot of different factors. So for example, if I want to see which one of my connections are certified financial planners. I would just do first-degree connections. I would do show results, and this is actually showing content of my first-degree connections. So for example, Saul Simon, I actually know who he is. I control-click on that. When you hold down the control and you click, it opens up in a new tab. Now I don't want to search stuff from 3 months ago. You see, this is not a very big active account, although he does 17,000 followers. He's missing a background banner. He doesn't really have his Hack Together. He hasn't posted in the past month. I'm actually going to send him a message. I'm going to say, I see you have not posted in a month. What's up with that? Okay, I'm going to send him a little message like that. But as you can see, Saul Simon, he has 3,600 followers. Um, he posted 8 hours ago. I'm gonna drop a comment on his post over here. He's, he's not posting correctly. So the algorithm is not really going to pick it up, which is totally fine. I'm going to educate him on that a different time. But as you can see, I just dropped a nice little comment. Fascinating post, Simon. It's incredible to see how currency has evolved over time. Really cool. Okay. So I see search for certified financial planner, but this is stuff that people posted a while ago. So what I would do is I would click on date posted here and I would do say the past week and show results. And then it's going to show me the best matches of my first-degree connections with the word certified financial planner. I'm just going to delete financial planner. Maybe I'll just search the word financial just like that and see who wrote things related to financial. So Deborah Richard, I happen to know that she's a big macher. She has 3,000 people over here. I'm going to say, um, why doesn't your photo come up for me. Okay, so I'm just starting a conversation with her. She's from UBS Wealth Management here. I'm also going to drop a post. I see she posted 2 hours ago here on LinkedIn. So I'm going to go search and just leave a comment just like that on Deborah's post. And again, because she posted in this way, that's not in line with the algorithm. it's not actually going to get any comments and I'm going to be the only one that have commented on her post, which for me, that's great. I love being the only one that leaves a comment on a post. That means I get all the exposure on her profile when anybody goes there. Let's look at Mac McDerby. I actually have to follow up with him. He's not a certified financial planner, but the word financial planner came up for him. I don't know why. Maybe he posted about a financial planner. Oh, he works with certified financial planners. He does, um, sales training for them. That's why it came up. So I'm just going to leave a comment here and then I'm also going to touch base with them and say, how have— oh, it looks like he wants to touch base. How have you been? Okay. I'm going to hit Ctrl+Enter, send him a little message like that. Um, and then just reconnect with him. All right. Well, those are the different ways to be able to do that. If you want to be able to find people that are certified financial planners that are posting on LinkedIn, That's one way to do it. Another thing that you can do is you can go on Google, type in site:linkedin.com space certified financial planner. And when you search on Google, it's going to show you the word certified financial planner, and you're going to be able to see things related to certified financial planners. So for example, people are posting Pulse articles. You know what a Pulse article is? It's an article on LinkedIn. You see that this person over here posted this. This is actually from a school. So what I would do is I would actually do it on linkedin.com/pulse. So instead of just linkedin.com, this is how you search through all of LinkedIn articles. So this is really the only way to search through LinkedIn articles. So this is showing different LinkedIn articles. I'm just going to pull up all these articles here. I'm holding down Control while I'm clicking. And it's opening up in all these new windows. And I'm going to just quickly go through this and try to find people. So for example, Jonathan Lawson, the CFP, wrote this article in 2023. I'm going to click on his profile. I see he's not really a big macher, but he did post this article and he did post 5 hours ago. So he is posting in the industry, which is great. I'm going to drop a random comment on his post here and This actually helps me be able to stay top of mind with people and build relationships. And, you know, this can turn into an opportunity. Look at this. You know, I do want to work with certified financial planners and I want to offer them Evvy AI, which is my LinkedIn AI content assistant. We literally just launched Teams. So every single certified financial planner usually works with Teams and we generate comments, write posts, help you leave recommendations. Help you be able to drop messages behind the scenes, optimize your profile, help you customize connection notes, and obviously save profiles. So if you're looking for influencers, I just showed you a few ways to be able to do it. I showed you number 1, the Sales Navigator route. Number 2, I showed you the LinkedIn search route, searching through content. And number 3 is I search— I showed you how to search through Google to be able to find people that are posting and finding articles and so on. My name is Joe Apfelbaum. I'm the CEO of Ajax Union and the founder of Evvy AI, and I just love adding value. So if you have any questions related to LinkedIn, make sure to drop it in the comments and I'll see you on the next video. Boom.