How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Connections for High Engagement

How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Connections for High Engagement

written by Houston Golden
May 29th, 2018
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When I started connecting with prospects on LinkedIn, I ran into a problem.

I had no idea whether they were even active on the platform.

I guessed.

I still got in touch with prospects and kept high engagement on my content, but I knew the results could be better if I connected with only active members.

I took a look at my connections’ activity level which cemented that belief. Notice how only 40 percent or 6,500 people of my entire audience was active in the last thirty days. That means I need to rid of, at least, 1,000 connections. Rough.

, How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Connections for High Engagement

The question –

How could I rid of my inactive, low-quality connections at scale?

After playing around with automation, I figured it out.

Here’s the process for the first time:

Step 1: Filter Down

If you have a lot of connections like I do, you want to filter down so you don’t have more than 1,100 people/search. I like to split my search between cities and industries to make it easier.

How it works is at the end of every thirty days, you want to get the profile URLs of everyone who was active. In the search query below that’s 309 people. Now you want to pull the inactive list as well.

, How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Connections for High Engagement

How do you pull these lists?

Download the Chrome extension Dux-Soup. Go to your relevant Sales Navigator search query and click Dux-Soup’s option “Scan Profiles.” This will give you their name, company name, city, and Sales Navigator URL.

, How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Connections for High Engagement

Once you’re done scanning a particular search, click “Download Data.”

Upload the list of active LinkedIn connections from your search query into a Google Sheet.

Now you want to do the same except with your total list of 1st connections from that search query (not just the people who are active).

, How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Connections for High Engagement

Next, combine the first and last name of each data set by using the “=concatenate” formula in cell D2. Double-click the bottom right-hand corner of that cell to have it apply the same formula to all the cells in the column.

, How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Connections for High Engagement

Step 2: Discover LinkedIn Profile URLs

Plug the editable version of your Google Sheet URL into the LinkedIn Profile Finder API from Phantombuster, then fill in the appropriate column and CSV title.

, How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Connections for High Engagement

Hit Launch.

, How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Connections for High Engagement

After it finishes processing the data, you’ll receive a list of LinkedIn URLs to download.

, How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Connections for High Engagement

Copy these URLs into the Google Sheet next to your original data set. Don’t worry about missing URLs for active members because we simply need to match up who’s active vs. who’s not. Now we want to upload the list of all the people from the search result (e.g. “all austin founders”) in a new tab on the same Google Sheet.

, How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Connections for High Engagement

Step 3: Let’s Clean the Data

We’re almost done.

The final step is to use an index-match formula to apply a “Yes” next to all the active founders in your “all austin founders” tab. The formula looks like this:

=IF(ISNA(INDEX(‘active austin founders.csv’!$A$2:$F$80,MATCH($B2,‘active austin founders.csv’!$B$2:$B$80,0),MATCH(F$1,‘active austin founders.csv’!$A$1:$F$1,0))),“No”,“Yes”)

Here’s the result:

, How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Connections for High Engagement

You want to check whether everyone on the “no” list is worth having as a connection. This part takes manual effort, but you can always outsource this process to an assistant.

This is the active list you want to engage with on a regular basis (e.g. LinkedIn messaging, endorsing) because they’re more likely to respond to your content. Now that you have their LinkedIn URL, you can do that, too. Both Phantombuster and Linked Helper have the option to auto-endorse and auto-visit people at scale based on their LinkedIn URLs.

Step 4: Connect with the Right People at Scale

To prevent having to clean up, you can select the active tab in your Sales Navigator Search to only connect with active members at scale using the tool, Linked Helper. If you’ve already gone ahead and connected with LinkedIn members who weren’t on the active tab, then you’ll need to clean up your network first.

, How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Connections for High Engagement

You must do regular exports each month to see people who aren’t active for extended periods of time whether several months or even a year. Then you can go through inactive members by the length of time they’ve been inactive and disconnect with them accordingly.

Next Steps

If you want to run a quality LinkedIn profile, it starts with quality connections.

Without quality connections, you can’t foster relationships.

That means no sales, engagement, and followers.

You can have 30,000 connections, but how valuable are those people?

So use this guide as a fresh start to creating a LinkedIn profile of quality, not quantity.

Make sure they can add value to your life.

Or, at least, you can add value to theirs.

 

 

About the Author

The name's Houston Golden. I'm the Founder & CEO of BAMF — a company I've grown from $0 (yes, really) to well over $5M+ in revenue over a span of 5 years.

How did I do it? Well, it's quite simple, really. I've helped hundreds of business owners and executives get major traction (because when they win, we win), I tell all on this blog.

Growth hacking is a state of mind. Follow along as I explore and expose the unknown growth strategies and tactics that will change the way you think about marketing.
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5 comments

  • Avatar for Houston Golden

    Some great tips here but even if you have narrowed it down to relevant connection targets it doesn’t make for successful ‘neworking’. Really it is just smarter sales and marketing?

    We’ve just done some research with over 2,000 LinkedIn users and it is pretty clear that LinkedIn isn’t seen as very valuable for proper professional networking any more. It is about sales, marketing and recruitment. The findings are available at https://guild.co/blog/linkedin-user-research-professional-networking/

    I think what you are talking about here is a smart sales hack though. But I wonder if LinkedIn will ban some of these tools like Dux Soup and LinkedIn helper as they are against the T&Cs of LinkedIn use?

  • Avatar for Houston Golden

    Hi Houston,

    great article!

    I have a related kind of issue..
    we focus with our product ( emergency nitification/ incident response solution) on different kind of industries. For example we have big chemical plants as customer and the biggest hospital in the Netherlands. Although there is a general need for emergency notification..the customer stories are completely different.

    I am now linking with lots of people in these and other industries. But more and more i get the feeling i get a very confusing / mixed up profile. And i don’t know if this is the way to go….

    To make it more confusing we have created this spin-off API service for developers/CTO’s to get access to a scalable, multi channel (voice, sms, email, push, slack etc), multi provider service with 1 API…..typically not something for end users…..

    I have been thinking about creating different profiles….but don’t feel comfortable with that

    have you got any thoughts on this issue

    you are also a man of many (ad)ventures….., how you do this

    thanks!
    keep up the good work

    ciao
    reinoud

  • Avatar for Houston Golden

    Hi Houston,

    great article!

    I have a related kind of issue..
    we focus with our product ( emergency nitification/ incident response solution) on different kind of industries. For example we have big chemical plants as customer and the biggest hospital in the Netherlands. Although there is a general need for emergency notification..the customer stories are completely different.

    I am now linking with lots of people in these and other industries. But more and more i get the feeling i get a very confusing / mixed up profile. And i don’t know if this is the way to go….

    To make it more confusing we have created this spin-off API service for developers/CTO’s to get access to a scalable, multi channel (voice, sms, email, push, slack etc), multi provider service with 1 API…..typically not something for end users…..

    I have been thinking about creating different profiles….but don’t feel comfortable with that

    have you got any thoughts on this issue

    you are also a man of many (ad)ventures….., how you do this

    thanks!
    keep up the good work

    ciao
    reinoud

  • Avatar for Houston Golden
    Joseph Flahiff

    Correct me if I am wrong but the actions using Dux-soup are only available if you have the Sales navigator.

  • Avatar for Houston Golden
    Joseph Flahiff

    Correct me if I am wrong but the actions using Dux-soup are only available if you have the Sales navigator.

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