This document provides an overview of how to use LinkedIn effectively for business development purposes. It outlines how to create a strong profile that highlights your unique experience and skills. Connecting with a minimum of 200 contacts is recommended to improve search results. Managing connections includes accepting, declining or archiving requests. Maintaining an up-to-date summary, profile and connections can help leverage your network to find new clients, partners, employees and opportunities.

1. LinkedIn The Basics
Hilary Schneider, Business Development
Manager
Brown Wright Stein

2. Outline
– Introduction – why LinkedIn is useful for B2B and why
it's important for BD in this firm
– Your Profile – your unique story
– What it is & isn't
– Summary – why it's important
– Specialties - keywords
– No spell checker
– How to add a photo
– Your Connections – how it works
– How to find connections & invite them to link to you
– How to add connections
– Accepting or declining connection requests

3. What is LinkedIn?
• A tool for using the internet to find people
and be found by people
• The world’s largest online business
networking site
• Currently has around 100m members, with
one new member being added every
minute

4. Why should you use it?
• According to the LinkedIn website
– Average member’s household income is
$91,566
– 63% of users hold a university or
postgraduate degree
– 21% are middle managers or above
– A lot of professionals, business advisors,
potential referrers and potential clients on
LinkedIn

5. How is LinkedIn useful for
Lawyers?
• Helpful for building your network of people
in related industries – accountants,
financial advisors
• Leverage your relationships with current
clients to work towards gaining additional
clients
• Expand your network of suppliers and gain
access to products or services that
complement the services you provide

6. How is LinkedIn useful for
Lawyers?
• Find new groups or
associations that might
provide speaking
opportunities
• Help with finding / hiring
new employees with
specific expertise &
experience
• Help you to become
recognised as an expert
in the industry
• Increase your brand and
overall credibility in the
market
• Job searching

7. Your connections
LinkedIn makes your extended network visible:
• Your Connections
Your trusted friends and colleagues 79
Two degrees away
Friends of friends; each connected to one of
your connections 11,400+
Three degrees away
Reach these users through a friend and one of
their friends1, 149,400+
Total users you can contact through an
Introduction 1,160,900+

8. Your Profile
• The unique experience you have gained
during your career, coupled with the
unique relationships you have carefully
developed during your career gives you a
tremendous advantage over the person
who doesn't understand how to use
LinkedIn.

9. Searching on LinkedIn
• The key to successful searches is the
more connections you have, the better
your search results will be.
• 50 – 70 quality connections is the
minimum. The ongoing process of adding
connections will always pay off because
each time you add a number 1 connection,
you're adding number 2s and 3s.

10. Searching on LinkedIn
• Once you land on a search that produces quality
targets for you, LinkedIn allows you to save the
search. One of the best, but often overlooked,
feature of LinkedIn.
• Click "save", then choose whether you want
LinkedIn to send you an email weekly or monthly
to notify you if a new person who meets your
search criteria has been found in your network.
• The Advanced People Search is one of the
most valuable tools in LinkedIn.

11. 4 key elements to a good Profile
• Excellent, descriptive headline
• The number of contacts you have and
recommendations
• Content within your profile
• Keywords within your profile

12. Your Summary
• Most consistently
underutilised section of
the profile
• If you only have a few
minutes to share your
professional story with a
potential client, business
partner or referrer, what
would you say?
• Use your summary to tell
your story in a friendly
conversational way

13. Your summary
• Briefly summarise
specific, quantifiable
accomplishments
• Direct the reader to a few
of the most important
parts of your profile
• Focus on what you are
doing now, how you can
help the reader and what
you plan to be doing in
the future

14. Key to social media / networking is
freely sharing your knowledge &
expertise
• Builds trust, once they trust you, want to
do business with you
• Box.net files – upload Word, PDF, Excel,
articles, firm brochures
• Google Presentation / Slideshare
• Video increasingly important as part of
many companies branding efforts

15. Finding and adding connections
• The winner of the searching
aspect of LinkedIn is the
person who has a lot of
connections
• Only connect with people you
know and trust
• It’s your network, a possession
you’ve worked your whole
career to build
• Recommended goal to acquire
at least 200 – 250 connections
if you want your searches to
be useful

16. Accepting/Declining Connection
Requests
You have 6 options when responding to an
invitation:
• Accept, they immediately becomes a first-
degree connection
• Reply, send them a message without them
becoming part of your network
• Delete, request goes into the trash

17. Accepting/Declining Connection
Requests
• Archive, the invitation will be stored in your
archive folder, so you can reconsider
accepting the invitation at a later time. It’s
a good idea to look at the person’s Profile
to learn more about them before archiving
their request
• Ignore, the invitation will be archived.
Again, check their profile, see if there’s a
reason to connect.

18. Accepting/declining requests
• Forward, you can forward the invitation to
any of your first-level connections who
might have useful information about them,
before you decide whether to accept their
invitation

19. Summary
• LinkedIn is useful for finding potential
clients, contacts, referrers and employees
• It helps build your network and leverage
your relationships and build your online
brand; get speaking opportunities; find
employees; find a job
• The more connections you have, the more
useful LinkedIn will be for you

20. Summary
• Your Summary and Profile are very
important and are worth spending some
time over
• Summary directs people to important parts
of your profile
• Profile is like you business plan and
outlines your unique experience and how
you can help the reader

21. Actions
• Write your Summary
and Profile in Word,
(no spell checker in
LinkedIn). Ensure it
tells your unique story
and include good
keywords
• Upload your photo
• Add your connections

22. Hilary Schneider
Business Development Manager
Brown Wright Stein
T 02 9394 1067
F 02 9394 1011
E has@bwslawyers.com.au
W www.bwslawyers.com.au