Being a social Media guru, having the background MBA, many business people welcome connections, but not everyone is like that. So, if you’re a physician, you might be only limiting yourself to a certain group or a certain sector in a certain industry that you might not want everyone to be a part of this exclusive network.
Jim Neister: Great advice. What are some other tactics that are supposed to be successful about how to succeed on LinkedIn, but can actually hurt your chances of success?
Steven Burda: One of the things that people misunderstand is that LinkedIn is a platform. What you and other connections make out of it, is up to you. So LinkedIn is not a magic genie that connects people and finds you jobs or finds you candidates for positions you are looking for, but actually builds your connections.
Many people have the misconception that someone owes you something on LinkedIn, which as you know, is not necessarily so. You may ask politely someone to make an introduction or send someone an email, which is an invite for someone who is not part of your network, but you have to be very careful and you have to show them that you are looking for synergy. Build your network, cultivate your network, invest time in it and the fruits of your labor will definitely be rewarded.
Jim Neister: What about emailing and calling people, that’s a good way to do it, right?
Steven Burda: Absolutely. Now days with people spending so much time on their tablets, their smartphones, but the old fashion way; pick up the phone, call somebody and ask for a five minute introduction and say, “Hey, how have you been? How has the last quarter been for your business?”
Give some kind of personal touch to you online connection. If the person is local to you, ask them out to lunch to see what is going on and offer some of the synergies that you can maybe help them with, because it’s very important to offer help to other people. Offer your knowledge, your expertise or anything else you can to help that individual, so hopefully, the bond is there.
Jim Neister: That’s a really good strategy and it gives people several options. What is people’s biggest or most common problem?
Steven Burda: Well it depends. Again, many people don’t fully understand the purpose of LinkedIn. The goal is not just to connect to anyone and everyone and leave it at that, but to try to engage each of your connections.
Now, the biggest problem is not the size of your network, it’s the quality, like I mentioned earlier. It’s very important to cultivate it, and if you do that, everything else…the cards will fall where they fall, and the market efficiency and everything else will come into play.
Start slowly, invest your time and energy into this and the fruits of your labor will follow. I can’t stress it enough, people want to get to the end result right away; too quickly, too fast. Take your time, enjoy the ride so to speak and ultimately the opportunities will knock on your door.
Jim Neister: What are the 2 – 3 most common questions people ask you?
Steven Burda: (Laughs) That is the question: “How did you get to that number of connections where you are now?” and my response is, “One person at a time.” I started early, I was an early adapter. You have to be dedicated and understand that with LinkedIn, there is nothing in the world out there supplementing, and in a way, complimenting your world. And the other question is, “Well Steven, with such a huge network, you must be really well connected?” Well, I am connected in the sense that I have a lot of connections right? But I also do give the time to speaking with them, where people who have 20,000 or 30,000 or 10,000 connections don’t do that.
So being connected is a very unique terminology. What does it really mean to be connected? Is it just the number or actually knowing those individuals and seeing if you can call them up? If someone calls me up and says, “Hey Steven, I need a recruiter who is in finance in the Atlanta area, Philadelphia area, New York area, I can connect them to my network because over the last 8+ years that I’ve been on LinkedIn, I made the connections, and I recall that I had those contacts there.
I can go back to my spreadsheet where I keep all the contacts that I made and how I know them, from where, and what they specialize in, and the last time that I talked to them, and I can go and say, “Hey, I do have 2, 3, 4 individuals that I can recommend for you to reach out to. And this is not just because I have a random number of people, but because in my past, I made the connections.
Jim Neister: To wrap this up, why would working with a professional, like you greatly improve people’s chances for success?
Steven Burda: Well one of the things about me is I’ve been in it; I have the experience, I know the ins and outs, I know tips and tricks that the average person wouldn’t know. Working with me you would be able to understand what you can do with LinkedIn and what you can do without LinkedIn, and how those two will complement each another.
