One of the most popular social media platforms right now is LinkedIn.
And it’s easy to see why:
- It has 950 million+ members from 200 countries
- The algorithm favors posts sharing expert knowledge
- It allows you to search for the key players at companies
In other words, it is a perfect platform to search for your next ghostwriting client.
But, just like X, LinkedIn does a terrible job at feeding you the posts you need to engage with to run a Social Selling strategy. On top of that, LinkedIn likes to push its paid option, Sales Navigator, as a better way to network and find clients. And while it is a useful tool, it’s good to master the free version of LinkedIn before advancing to that level.
Let’s dive into how to use LinkedIn to find and target your ideal clients so you can execute a “Social Selling” strategy.
Step 1: Find your list of target clients
There are several ways to find clients on LinkedIn:
- Search by job title. This is obvious. If you want to work with founders, search for founders. If you want to work with sales coaches, search for sales coaches. As with everything, get as specific as possible with your search terms.
- Search by keywords in your niche. What are some of the keywords or concepts people use in your niche? Search for them! Then filter your LinkedIn search by post to find the people posting using the same words and language.
- Search by hashtag. On LinkedIn, hashtags aren’t dead (yet). People still use them to tag their posts. If you find a relevant one, you can follow this hashtag, and it appears in your navigation bar on the left-hand side (which helps you get to those types of posts quickly).
- Search by company. This is where LinkedIn shines. If you want to target a particular company, but don’t know who to contact about your services, find the Company’s page on LinkedIn and then look under the “People” tab to find all the people who work there. Then find the person in the relevant department. Easy!
Let’s say you are targeting YouTube marketing agencies.
A simple keyword search brings up a ton of contacts which you can start to curate into a list. This search had 100 pages of results! So it pays to get specific on who you’re targeting and using those keywords in your search. You can also use the filtering options LinkedIn provides.
After typing in your keywords, you can filter by the type of result: