With 225 milion members interconnected among them in a professional network, Linkedin represents a needful tool that every professional should wisely manage in order to empower his network and his skills, and grow his own business.
For these reasons, during my MBA Career Friday Day IE Business school, last week I attended an interesting class from Professor Pedro De Vicente about the importance of using Linkedin and about the best practices to capitalize all the features of this amazing social network.
Taking a part the important hints he gave us about how to improve our profile and make it appear into the first results by using some simple but efficient SEO tricks, he focused on the structure of the connections and on the importance of being, ore being in contact with, a LION.
LION stands for LinkedIn Open Networker and it basically indicates an open networker who, thanks to a huge numbers of contacts, is able to connect people by introducing them to his first level of connections. As a consequence, getting in contact with a connector means spreading our own “market” and potentially acquire more and more visibility. Let’s see how it works.
Imagine that you don’t have any contact on Linkedin and you add 1 person who has 5 contacts, then you have 1 first degree connection and 5 second degree connections. Imagine now that you add a LION who has 1.000 connections, then now you have 2 first degree connections and 1.005 second degree connections; assuming that there’s no overlap among those 5 people and the following 1.000. It means that getting in contact with a LION has tremendously expanded your potential connections. Therefore if, for instance, you were working in a B2B sales position, now you would be able to reach a huge number of potential customers. A similar reasoning can be applied up to the third degree of contacts.
Having said that, I strongly believe that the first rule of networking is giving. Sharing opinions and good quality contents is the key to establish good connections, make people to know you and gain visibility. Once you respect this important and simple rule, then you can chose whether to spend effort in being a LION or to be just one of his connections.
I’m trying to be a valuable LinkedIn Open Networker, and you?
Gianluca
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