LinkedIn can be a great tool, but please don’t waste my time

LinkedIn is a great business networking tool. I’ve found great resources through it, and some of my best clients discovered me on LinkedIn.

But recently, in the span of less than two days, I had two people who offer book marketing services send me requests to connect on LinkedIn.

That’s fine.

After all, I write books and I help my clients write and publish books, and we had mutual connections.

But immediately after I accepted their requests to connect, both of these people sent me private messages asking me what I write.

One wrote this:

Hello 👋 It's Awesome connecting with you How are you doing today?

I can see you are an author, what's genre do you write?

The other wrote this:

Hello Jacquelyn How are you doing?

Are you a published author?

Excuse me? Did either of them read my LinkedIn profile? That would be the profile that clearly describes what I do and lists the books I’ve written.

Apparently not.

I ignored their messages.

I understand people use LinkedIn to prospect for clients—that’s a big part of the purpose of the platform. But if your prospecting irritates your targets and makes you look incompetent, you might want to rethink your approach.

A message that essentially says “I would like you to buy my services, but first take your valuable time to engage in trivial chitchat and tell me everything about your business” isn’t likely to get much of a response—especially if it includes errors.

A better approach is to read my profile, check out and engage with some of my posts, and then tell me why what you offer might be a match with my needs.

Does that take more time? Yes.

Is it more likely to produce positive results? I’m not a sales and marketing expert so I don’t have any proof, but I think the answer is yes.

Why not give it a try?

And if we’re not connected on LinkedIn, here’s the link to my profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacquelynlynn/

 

Jacquelyn Lynn
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