The 4 types of LinkedIn connections and how to categorize your LinkedIn connections - 147 LinkedI…

I just finished a lovely run. I had so much fun going around the park. I wanna show you this automation that I created using make.com. It's a no-code platform that allows me to be able to create all types of automations. So this guy James told me he no longer wants to be in this automation, so I just removed him. And now what I'm gonna do is find his— Control F, James. Find his row. So TR is a row, and I'm going to remove him from the row. Let's see, T body table LinkedIn engagement. Thank you for being a member of the group. Let's see TD. So this row, let's see this row has James. With his LinkedIn URL right over here. And then it shows TD Style Vertical, Producing Profitable People, Producing Profitable People Refer. Let's check if this is him, 'cause he did send me a message saying, hey dude, I don't want to be in the group anymore. Oh, let me refresh over here. Let's just see what he said.

James.

For some reason LinkedIn's slowing down significantly for me here. I don't know if it's slowing down for you. Maybe I'm doing a lot of things. Let me just close this. Here's another way to be able to see this in a visual way. I'm gonna copy all this text here. I'm gonna go to dev.onlinehtmleditor. I'm gonna go to edit HTML, edit HTML code, and then switch to what you see is what you get. And then I'm going to delete this row here. And I'm gonna go back to edit, Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, and then I'm gonna Ctrl+A, Ctrl+V. So that will remove that. And then I'm going to hit save. And then I'm going to let him know that he has been removed. I'm going to go to messaging. And I'm going to say, you have been removed. All right, there you go. I removed him. He has to be removed from there. I want to talk about the 4 types of LinkedIn connections. The 4 types of LinkedIn connections and how to categorize them. So every single person that you're connected to on LinkedIn should fit into a particular category.

Of—

and what I'm going to do is I'm going to create those categories in here in Evie AI. I'm going to click on Manage Lists, and I'm going to create those categories so that you can see all the different categories that I'm talking about. Um, right now it's not loading. Let me refresh the page. Okay, so now on the right side you'll see a purple button in a second that says Create Lists. My internet's obviously really slow right now. Okay, so new lists. I'm gonna say 1, advocates. Okay, so these are my advocates. I'm gonna say 2, supporters. I'm gonna say 3, collaborators. I'm going to say 4 prospects. I'm going to say 5 clients. Let's say 5 clients. So those are the 5 types of connections that you have on LinkedIn. You have advocates, supporters, collaborators, prospects, and clients. And every one of your connections are going to fit into one of these specific categories. And when you find someone who's in that category, then what you do is you save them. So for example, I'm going to refresh John— James St. John here. I don't know what happened over here. LinkedIn has crashed. Let me save it again. Okay. I'm going to click on this little dropdown here. I'm going to click on add, and I'm going to add him as a client. You see that? This is a client of mine. He also happens to be a great collaborator and a great advocate and a great supporter. But this is a person that I want to stay top of mind with, build a relationship with, get to know a little bit deeper, but he's a client. And so that's what I'm gonna do is I'm going to save him as a client in Evy AI. I'm going to leave him a thoughtful comment on his post. And I'm going to say, great insights, James St. John. And I just tagged him here. And also looking through each one of these people's Comments over here and noticing these people here and checking out to see who they are is really helpful as well. I'm gonna say, how are things by you? Especially if they're first-degree connections. Now I was having a thought today while I was reviewing each one of these around what each one of those means. So let's create a Miro board to create a visual representation of each one of the 4 types I'm gonna go to miro.com. We'll use the LinkedIn mind map as an example. All right, and then what we're gonna do is we are going to zoom out just a little bit, and we're gonna go to some blank area here. We're gonna hit the plus sign. We are going to add, we can add a card, we can add a code block, a doc, a note, We are going to add a mind map. Mind map, just like that. And then we can decide how we want the mind map to be. So in this case, we're gonna do this type of mind map. Okay, so we're gonna do types of LinkedIn connections. And we're gonna say advocate. We're gonna say supporter. We're gonna say collaborator. And we're gonna say prospect. Okay, so these are the 4 types of LinkedIn connections. The advocate is, let's see, someone who— let's see, let me delete this here. Let me delete this here. And let me add some text here. Someone engaged on LinkedIn, posting, engaging, responding to messages, and is likely to comment On my posts on LinkedIn, especially if asked. Okay, so this is an advocate. Okay, so some examples of advocates for me would be Tina Larson. She's an advocate. Another example advocate would be, let's see, Evan Messman. Different categories. He's a health coach. She's a real estate coach in New York City. These are specific advocates. Now a supporter is someone who is active on LinkedIn but does not post. But does not post regularly. Is happy to support my content by reposting, commenting, and liking, and responds to direct— and responds to direct messages. Okay, so this is a supporter. So you find a supporter, someone who doesn't really post regularly, but they're happy to leave a comment if you ask them to leave a comment. Okay, so that would be Nadine. Sino is a supporter. Okay, that's the idea. That's what— who comes to mind. as someone who supports, who's like supporting me, but isn't necessarily active on LinkedIn. You know, they'd like to be active, but they're just, you know, they have other priorities. A collaborator is someone who has, let's see, someone who has more than 5,000 followers on LinkedIn and is active. On the platform and is willing to promote me on their posts, and I am willing to promote them on my posts. Okay, so an example of a collaborator would be Rhonda Scher. That would be an example collaborator. Someone who's willing to support me, I'm willing to support them, we're willing to support each other on our content. We have more than 5,000 followers. That's a collaborator. A prospect is an ideal client who is active on LinkedIn. They are posting, engaging, and messaging and responding to messages on the platform, but are not clients yet. Okay, so for example, this would be someone like Don Gelastino. Okay, so this would be a prospect, someone who is posting, engaging, and messaging on the platform, but is not necessarily, not necessarily a client yet. So you want to identify each one of the people that you, all your connections, and identify 10% of your connections need to fall into each one of these categories. The other 60% of your connections are going to be lurkers. Lurkers. These are LinkedIn connections who are not responsive to messages and are rarely using the platform, but you know who they are and you find value in their second-degree connections.

Connections.

That's why you keep them. You keep them because you find value in their second-degree connections, okay? So these are the lurkers. I would say an additional category would be clients. Clients, and I would say people who are currently your clients. And you want to be top of mind with them so that you get referrals and build those relationships. All right, so I would say 10% of your connections, so this would be about, you know, 60% of your connections will be here. So like 50%, half of your connections will be here. Percentage of your connections will be clients. And then, you know, the real 4 types of connections you really need to focus on building. You know, these are people that you already have. You don't need to build these. But these on the bottom here, these are the ones that you really need to be building. And if you can build these out, and for me, I would say, you know, 10% would be too much. You know, having thousands of people for each one would be too much, but deciding which one you want to focus on. I really wanna focus on building my list of advocates, like identifying, okay, who are my advocates? Who are my supporters? Who are my collaborators? Who are my prospects? Those are gonna be the people that are the most important people that you could, you can connect with, build relationships with. Collaborators can also be influencers. I would say Gary Vaynerchuk, could be a collaborator. He would be a wonderful collaborator. But I would focus on people who have 5,000 followers, not 5 million followers, you know, as a start. All right, let's get into LinkedIn and let's find some people. Let's just see if this guy engaged over here. He did not respond to me. That's okay, he might be a lurker. That's the idea. All right, Todd. Todd would be an advocate. He would be someone who, um, is active on LinkedIn, and he definitely would be an advocate. So I like commenting on the posts of my advocates on a daily basis. That's really important to do that. Um, how do I make sure I comment on people's posts? What's up, sweetie?

There's something you need to have to To be on your team.

Bread and water. Flour and water.

Okay.

So if I'm on the feed and I'm leaving comments on people's posts. I'm also identifying if these people are collaborators or they are, you know, like what is the deal? Are these people collaborators? Are these people influencers? You know, I look at people's profiles and try to identify where's the opportunity with each person. So this person is a coach. She obviously gets a lot of activity over here. Um, it's interesting to see like little groups of people that are kind of supporting each other. This guy over here is probably a supporter. Let's just see. Great. Um, great, we'll send you a video. Let's see, it would be helpful. Let's see what he says. A video would be helpful. So I sent him a video. He wanted to know how teams work. Howard Gershman. He posted an hour ago. I'm gonna put him as a collaborator, an advocate as well. He has 4,000 followers here. You see that? I'm gonna go ahead and comment on his post. And now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna send him a message and say, thanks for being my connection on LinkedIn. Thank you for being my connection on LinkedIn. Just like that. So powerful. And let's see, somebody, it looks like somebody left me a comment here. You see, you can't see the comments right from here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click on Posts and Activities. And if this ever loads, I don't even know why it's not loading. If it ever loads, let's just see. Oh, it looks like Dharma said good morning. How do I ask them to comment on my post who's not my first-degree connection? The way you can first send them a connection request with a note. You can send them a message through SalesNav. You can also send them an email. Okay, so that's what I would say. Um, how do you send people a request to comment on your post? Well, it's very simple. The way that you request to comment, for someone to comment on your post is by, if you're not connected to them, is by sending them a connection request and connecting with them and building a relationship with them that way. Howard said, it's amazing to see how connections can manifest in an expensive way. I always say there's about 10,000 people in the whole world because you keep running into the same ones. You keep running into the same ones all the time. Cheers to building those connections. All right, so I'm going to reply. Rick said, I'm always going to learn from the unexpected encounters. Here's some more serendipitous moments. I'm going to go ahead and respond to him. So true. And then I'm going to respond to Shireen. As well. And then I'm going to respond to Anki. These are all the people I'm actually responding to. What's up, sweetie? Do you know the emoji? No, I don't know. I haven't used it. Hama knows. Let's see. I'm gonna go ahead and generate right here. Boom. Oh, I don't even know what I clicked on there.

Okay.

Tony Robbins just posted. Let's check out Tony Robbins' recent post. All right, now let's check out some of my additional advocates. Eric is an advocate, just like that. I'm going to click on his profile. I'm going to click the dropdown. I'm going to save him as an advocate. Now I'm going to look at Tom Larson. Tom Larson is also an advocate. I'm going to make sure I support all my advocates. Then I'm going to save him into Evie AI as an advocate right here. And we're gonna look at Henry Ching. Henry Ching is more of a, I would say, supporter. Then we're gonna look at Rick. Rick, I just saved. I just commented on his post and saved, but let me just Double check. I'm gonna double check, make sure that he's saved. He's also a collaborator. I would just say collaborator. More than an ad, but he's also a client. So okay, I just sent him a message. Now I'm going to click on Gina. Gina is more of a supporter. I'm going to save Gina as a supporter. She's really a client, I would just say.

Client.

All right, let's see who else we have. Steve Duke. Steve Duke is also a client. I'm going to save him as a client. Rhonda is definitely a collaborator. She has 32,000 connections. So I'm gonna make sure that I also commented on her other posts. Let's see. I missed all these posts. Okay, so I'm gonna Ctrl-click on Chaya, and I'm gonna Ctrl-click on Rhonda, and then I'm gonna close a couple of these here. And then I'm gonna save these. She would be a collaborator. I'm going to edit this message because I made a typo there. Let's see. Let's look at Jessica. Let's look at Dr. Rao. Let's look at Nadine. And let's look at Greg. Yeah, Jessica is a client. We're just gonna save as client. And then we're gonna say Dr. Rao. All right, Nadine, 23 hours ago posted something here. And Greg has not posted in 2 months. Let's see if Chaya— let's see what Chaya's up to. I'm gonna save her as an advocate. I see she posted an hour ago. I'm gonna give her a light bulb. All right, let's just check out my stats real quick to see how many— wow, I went down about 1,000 followers. Okay, that's because I went down about 1,000 connections. That's just what happens. I'm going to look at my recent profile views, but I'm going to first look at my activity just to see. I have 134 comments in the past 2 days. I'm going to leave 250 this week. That's my goal, but I'm going to take off Thursday and Friday. So I need to really bake in another, um, I would say 100 or so in the next day or next 24 hours. So that'll be my goal to do another 100 in the next 24 hours. I'm also going to post a quick video about how to gain followers by commenting. The number one thing you want to do to get followers is leave comments to be even more successful on LinkedIn. Whenever I leave a comment, I get a follower from someone. Here, let me add it again. Maintain a professional network. How can you use AI to help individuals build and maintain professional networks effectively? The most important thing you need to do to build professional networks is to connect with people based on who they are. You wanna connect with Tina Larson, connect with her based on who she is. But how are you gonna connect with her based on who she is if you don't really know who she is unless you review her profile, which takes a lot of time? So AI can do the research for you. It can tell you who Eino Larsson is. So for example, if you use this tool called Evi AI, which I'm very fond—

I've never heard of Eino Larsson. Well, I mean, they're not wrong, to be honest. My husband told me he was upstairs fixing a leak in the bathroom, but then— he's peeing in the cistern. He's about to get jumped, aren't we? How do I get my father to eat broccoli? They're not wrong, to be honest. My husband told me he was upstairs fixing a leak in the bathroom, but an hour later, he's just watching the football. Nah, he truly made up that he was actually doing something. Smarter, not harder. This is what we like to hear. That's one way to get there. Whoa! What the? How did he get in there? I mean, he's got as many pipes as he wants, but I'm actually not sure how he came out of there. He's just like, "Yep, I'll take that one. I'll take that one. I'll take that one." It's like two years old. And took out the dentist as well. Oh bro, that is one way of being trapped out. You think you figured out the back end of this stuff? Holy moly, it's the most beautiful paint laying, road cleaning machine I've ever seen. Look at this, leave her alone. Hey, my baby. Whoa, just spun and spun, spun again. At this point, you may as well just give up. She's never gonna answer the phone for more than 0.1 seconds. She doesn't have to be live at all. The Cartridge Restaurant, I bought you the England sticker. Wait, what the— is it a little— aww, this goes around 50 for a sticker? Aww, I, I would actually be so happy if I just got a free sticker. That's brand new. Oh, a little basketball. What's in it? Oh my God, how did you even move your body like that? How's the mum not more impressed? You're grooming your dog with something too used to play. What the heck? Okay, this is the coolest thing ever. Look, the dog's making a ritual. Jump for a bird! The best golf ball ever! I take that one down the road! Oh, oh, oh, okay. Oh my God, bro, it's actually insane! What the— bro, you're cheating! This is cracking your head for a second. No, there's no way. Another one. What? This game's on speed!

Okay, so I just uploaded that video and that'll be showing up on my profile very soon.

Is there ever a chance to see it without a password?

Let's see. I'm going to go back to my previous content and make sure that I reply to everybody that commented. That's key. When somebody comments on your posts, you want to make sure that you reply to every single comment. So for example, if Judith commented on my post, I wanna make sure I acknowledge her with a reply. Now, if I had to sit there and write a reply, you saw how long it took me to write that post. That just takes forever to do. So instead of doing that, what I do is I have artificial intelligence help me draft a reply. And that reply is usually really solid and tight.

That's nice.

And also includes a link to my business, because this is my own post. I could put whatever I want in my reply.

This kid's a genius.

See that? I'm replying to every single one of these connections. Now, some of them are not even connections. They're like second-degree connections. or third-degree connections, people that are not connected to me at all, I'm still replying to them and that notifies them. You see, when I hit the reply button, it automatically tags them. When I hit Evvy AI and I hit generate, it generates a comment and then I put the comment in here and I hit reply. They get a notification that I replied that brings them back to the post and that makes them remember that it exists. Kemi asked a question. He said, when will you have the mobile version? I said, we currently have a VI working on mobile for Posts, ideas, and save profiles and templates. Comments and messages work on the Google Chrome extension right now. Have you used the mobile website? So it's good for you to come back and answer questions for your— because if you don't come back and answer questions, all these people are going to be like, why am I even commenting if he's not even acknowledging me? You know, but if you had to write up the answers yourself to each person, it would take a really long time. You saw how long it took me to write an actual answer to an actual question that somebody asked. I hope LinkedIn doesn't merge into a TikTok. It's a valid concern. Eric said, thanks, Joe. I always enjoy to get something from your perspective. All right. So now I finished responding to all these people. Lee says no, I haven't. What can it do?

Okay.

Um, do you see what I'm saying in terms of me being able to build relationships with people? Do you see what I'm saying in terms of responding to all these people? Like Chris, for example, right now he said, nice to hear, are your online connections turning into real-life relationships? I'm gonna reply to that and tag him.

Oh man.

Okay, let's see. My video went online. Oh, Lisa said this will help me maintain my professional networks, and I'm going to respond to her comment right away. Just like that. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and give myself a little light bulb. Oh, it looks like Renee just gave me a like. I'm going to say thanks for the like. Okay, let's see if we'll run over here.

That's cool.

So you see the way I'm, I'm engaging with people in the comments? I'm having real conversations. So I could literally spend my entire day building relationships with these people, like connecting with them, having conversations with them, categorizing them. You see that? These are real people. These are not just randos. These are first-degree connections, real people. You can see the messages. Um, you know, this guy is a client. Let's see what he said over here. He said 16 hours ago, I'm gonna say happy. I'm very happy to comment on your posts. Anytime you have something for me to comment on. I'm not sure what happened over there. I did say send. Um, I will comment shortly. Great pic. Okay, so clearly she's an advocate. This guy here is a premium user. I'm gonna put him as a premium user. Miriam said thanks for sharing. I wanna say you're welcome. I'm gonna put this here as well. All righty. I, I absolutely love doing something else. Let's say, for example, I want to see which one of my connections are currently online. I can see from these little green dots who's online and who's not online. You see that?

Yes.

So if I want to call somebody Um, you see, I could see who's actually online by the green dots. These green dots means that they're recently online. The solid dots means they're online right now. Okay, so if the if there's a green dot, that means they're currently online. For example, Nikos is online. Okay, let's see. Finding the people that are online is key because those are the people that are very likely to respond. I said, what do you think of my most recent post? Would you be open to leaving a comment? That's how you request someone to comment on your post. Oh, look at this guy here. This guy says, I'm not able to talk until 6, but after it's good.

I don't think he's trying to reply.

So you can go ahead and comment. Okay, let's see what Gary said. Gary said, sorry about that, I'm available right now. All right. Let's see how it says. I'm gonna send it to all these people here. I'm gonna try to find a couple more people that are currently online.

Oh, what's he gonna do?

Okay, let's go to my messages and see if anybody responded. Now you can see if the people Um, responded. Now the reason I'm sending a message after the video is because if they just see the video, they might not leave a comment. But if they see the message after the video, this is the last thing they'll see because the message appears like this, you see? So you want the text to appear under. So if I just send somebody a video, but I don't send them the actual message along with it, then, um, you know, that's the idea. I'm gonna go ahead and leave some comments on other people's posts as well. Like, for example, Judith, she Created this post over here. So I'm gonna go ahead and drop a comment on her post. You see that? I just left her a thoughtful comment. The other thing I like to do is I like to go to my network and search for specific people's names and leave a comment. So for example, Nat Berman said, appreciate the mention, Joe.

Don't you need my notes?

So I'm gonna go ahead and reply. I use Evie AI to leave the comments. All right, let's just see how many comments I left so far. Last time we checked was 138. Let's go to my dashboard here. 151. So I got 99 comments left. Yo, I got 99 comments left to give, but a post ain't one of them. I have 46 new newsletter subscribers to Frustration and Motivation. That's cool. Oh, look, Renee. Renee is more of a Supporter. I'm going to save her as a supporter. I'm going to comment on Tony. Carlos is awesome as well. I don't know how many connections Carlos has, but he would be a great collaborator. But he's really a prospect right now, so I'm gonna save him as a prospect. He's a prospective client who's interested in my services. Ooh, look at, look at what people want to learn. People want to, 50% of people want to learn LinkedIn hacks. Then 29% want to learn marketing and networking. And then 19% want to learn AI automation. And then 2% want to learn personal development. That's crazy. So few people are willing to learn personal development. I'm gonna go ahead and take a screenshot. I'm gonna say 1,800 people viewed this poll. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go here and I'm gonna say boom, boom. I'm gonna say poll results about learning. Now I'm gonna click on 52 results and kinda look through these just to kinda see who these people are. Oh, I love seeing who these people are here. So 26 people. Very powerful. Gary Vaynerchuk posted. I'm going to drop a comment on his post right now. I'm going to drop a comment on this guy's post here. You can tell a lot about a person only from their LinkedIn posts and comments.

A lot.

I just hired 5 people in 7 days via LinkedIn DM. I didn't need to interview them because I already know them for months. The familiarity energy are already there. Their content and comments showed me a lot. Their LinkedIn activity positioned them as folks I could trust. This isn't the first time I've hired this way. Remember this, positioning is everything. Everything is positioning. Every comment you leave, every post you write, every bit of your even smallest activity on LinkedIn positions you that people can trust or not trust. Your activity is Your brand. Your activity is for now, your brand is forever. Yes, 2,000 likes and 1,500 comments and 35 reposts. So let's see who reposted that. Let's see the quality of the people that have reposted that. Judging from The people that have been reposting this, I'm gonna control-click on some of these just to kind of show you who these people are. The quality does not seem to be there, in my opinion. Okay, so it's same, basically the same thing. Let's take a look at where. Um, oh, it's a first-degree connection. I'm gonna say, how are things going? Okay, so this person reposted, this person reposted, this person reposted. One connection. Wow. Fiverr. Interesting. I wonder if he's using Fiverr to get people to like and comment. Look at that.

Wow.

1,000, 3,000, and 2,000 reposted, reposted, reposted. Nigeria, 127,000 followers, 1,300 likes. I wonder if this person is using Fiverr. I'd be curious. I'm going to send them a message, see if the message goes through. Okay, this person's social media manager from Italy, one connection as well. Let's look at his recent posts. Oh my God, so interesting. Oh, what did Aaron say? I'll check it out soon. Sounds good.

Okay.

Let's see what people said over here. I responded to all these comments already. See that? Now let me check EANYC. So I'm going to go here. I'm going to click on EA active. These are my Executives Association connections. I'm just going to quickly check to see if they have posted, and I see they have posted. 6 days ago he posted, so I'm going to go ahead and leave a comment on their posts. Posts. Okay, so that's 3. Now we're going to look at Alexis, Derek, and John. Let's see, Alexis, done. Derek, I'm going to go ahead and leave a comment on Derek's post.

Oh, excuse me.

Okay, great. And then John— John reposted something from Daymond John, which by the way, am I even following Daymond John? I'm not. Let me add him to my influencer campaign.

Influencers.

Let's see people that messaged me here. Okay. Matt Schwartzberg, George Jensen, Jesse Berlin, Anthony DiCrescenzo. Let's take a look at their posts.

Oh yeah. Let's see.

Oh, Anthony. And let's go to the next page. Let's look at Cass and Tina. Cass. And then Tina. Tino, Tino's 2 hours ago. Looks like I missed all these posts. And then I see Magdalena here, which is also an advocate of mine. So I'm gonna save her as an advocate. Let's see. Have I not commented on all this stuff? Okay, I just caught up. Just caught. Okay, and I let her know that I caught up on all her posts. All right, let's see if Stephanie said. Stephanie says exciting times ahead. Okay, she just liked my comment. All right, well, that's what I got for you guys. Hopefully you guys enjoyed watching me be active on LinkedIn for an hour. I've done a lot of stuff in the past hour. Let me go ahead and let Dottie know. I'm going to save her as an advocate. Now I'm going to check to see my most recent Uh, connections for people that want to connect with me. I love the way people say, I came across your profile and thought we'd share some common interests. I'm from Outsource SEM. Thanks for commenting and inviting Brenda Miller to my Shabbat dinner. I'm happy to connect. Oh, I'm connecting with thought leaders and experts. I was impressed by your profile. I love EOS Worldwide is doing I'm enjoying using Heavy AI after using Taplio for a while. Oh, I love that. Oh my God, that's excellent. What feature of Evie AI do you love more than? Oh my God, I have to call this guy. This is great.