5 Best LinkedIn Tools for Your Business
How many tools do you *actually* need to implement your LinkedIn strategy? Whether you're a business leader trying to get more conversations with your ideal clients or an international corporation with thousands of employees, it helps to know which tools can help you reach your goals FASTER.
LinkedIn in and of itself is one of the best tools for professionals, business leaders, subject matter experts and B2B organizations who are trying to build a following, elevate brand voice, or skyrocket their impact.
Choosing your "stack" of tools for LinkedIn can be as simple as having a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account and a good ol' fashioned spreadsheet. Or you might be looking to kickstart an integrated social media advocacy program to enlist hundreds of ambassadors from your organization into a synergistic LinkedIn marketing initiative.
The scope of your program and objectives will determine your LinkedIn stack. Too many people get "sold" on a tool that they don't really need, while others waste precious time trying to manually pull data that a tool could provide on-demand at a fraction of the cost.
In this episode of Mondays with Mindi, we discuss five of my favorite LinkedIn tools that you can use for your business and how to determine whether or not they're a fit for your personal profile or your company.
Do I Actually Need ANY Tools for LinkedIn?
This week’s topic actually comes from one of my members inside my 90-day group program who asked about how to streamline her “stack” of tools LinkedIn. She was curious to know which tools are actually worth the investment and when it was time to invest in a tool.
When it comes to tools on LinkedIn, I’ll make it pretty simple… you don’t need as many as you might think.
Some people don’t need any other tools besides a free LinkedIn account to reach their objectives. If you’re a casual LinkedIn user, then you might just need to log onto LinkedIn each weekdday, send a few connection invitations each week, post when you can and field inbound requests.
For those of you who are eager to grow your business using LinkedIn, get connected to your ideal prospects with the intention to have a sales conversation, or want to kickstart an social media advocacy program with LinkedIn, you’re going to need some other tools.
Thing is… you can keep your stack as simple as you’d like.
Never add complexity or another tool to your stack if you don’t need to.
Though most of the experts I work with come to me early enough in their journey to NOT have accumulated a bunch of subscriptions to tools they’ll never use, it’s important to K.I.S.S. (keep it simple smartypants) with your LinkedIn stack.
One thing I want to be sure to address right away is that you don’t need any tools to get started using LinkedIn. I’m going to share some of my favorites, but they are NOT necessary at the beginning.
Wait until you learn a bit more about LinkedIn before you invest in any tools because there’s enough on a free LinkedIn account and with the LinkedIn Page analytics (if you’re a company Page admin) that will tell you what’s working and what’s not.
But, I know you’re still a little bit curious, so here we go!
Understand LinkedIn Before Adding Tools
Too many social media managers or business owners make LinkedIn a lot more complicated than it actually is and needs to be.
When it comes to making LinkedIn work for your business, you have three objectives:
Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile (and Page, if it’s a company)
Share Some Content (Live, Newsletter, Podcast, Videos, Employee News)
Build Professional Relationships (Network, Connections, Following, Sales Calls)
How much time you need to spend in each domain depends on what you need more of in your company, your business, or your organization right now.
Oftentimes, we try to “do it all” at the start, instead of breaking the process down into very manageable steps that lead to us achieving our overall objectives.
LinkedIn is not the place where you are trying to get too clever, where you need to know how every moving part works, and must spend hours a day to get the attention of the right people.
Nail the basics before you start getting into complex tools stacks.
No matter whether you’re new to using LinkedIn, want to build your personal brand, or recently have been charged with growing your organization’s Page -- I caution you about going too hard, too fast.
Start with optimizing your LinkedIn personal profile and your LinkedIn company page. Know how you want to use your profile or page, and then you’ll match the amount of inbound and outbound within your strategy.
We’re all here with different objectives. Your objectives will lead you towards the right strategy and tactics for you, and then the LinkedIn tools will help you get there just a bit faster.
Don’t rely on tools to dictate your strategy! Just because a tool can do something, does not mean you necessarily need that tactic as part of your strategy.
I’ve worked with a number of organizations and business experts who “have a tool” and want me to help them “maximize their use of the tool” for LinkedIn.
That’s the backward approach. Determine what you need to do first, find a tool that will help you do that thing, then run some LinkedIn experiments with your tool to ensure it ACTUALLY delivers what you expected.
If you can avoid it, sign up for tools that have a monthly subscription option to ensure you actually like the tool before you upgrade to an annual subscription.
Okay, now that we have that settled, let’s talk about when is the right time to start adding tools to your LinkedIn toolbox.
When You Should Add LinkedIn Tools
The best time to add a LinkedIn tool is after you already have developed a comfort level with the basics on LinkedIn.
For example, don’t upgrade to a LinkedIn Premium account or Sales Navigator account before you have optimized your LinkedIn profile and know exactly why you want to upgrade your account. I’ve worked with a number of people who thought they “needed” to have a Premium account, though they never actually used its features.
Just know that if you’re a basic LinkedIn user and not planning to do much outbound outreach on LinkedIn at the moment, you probably do not need a paid LinkedIn account unless you’re a job seeker or a recruiter and want those subscriptions.
You can get access to all the LinkedIn Creator features and many of the LinkedIn tools and analytics with a basic LinkedIn account.
When you start wanting to do outbound prospecting or run some more complex searches to identify a specific audience, that’s when you’d consider a Sales Navigator account.
And for those of you who think you should be scheduling out your LinkedIn posts in a third-party tool, that’s likely NOT a good idea. You can save yourself some money and post organically.
I won’t go into too much detail on WHY it’s best to post natively to LinkedIn in this livestream, but just know that it’s better than scheduling posts with another tool.
LinkedIn tools are especially useful if you want to start meticulously tracking your LinkedIn efforts to make data-driven decisions, manage more complex campaigns, and start getting a bit more sophisticated with your LinkedIn strategy.
If that’s you or you’re simply curious what to expect when you reach that levels, let’s talk about five of my favorite LinkedIn tools and when to use them.
4 Best LinkedIn Tools for Your Business (and one to avoid!)
What should you consider as you’re approaching your LinkedIn tools selection and what to invest in and when?
There are some basics when it comes to LinkedIn specifically that we’ll talk about, but I’m not going to go into the nitty gritty details of what each of these tools do. It’s more about when to use them and why you might want to consider using them.
#1 - Google Sheets
I love a good old-fashioned spreadsheet to keep on top of my metrics and which KPIs I need to track in order to make progress on my LinkedIn strategy.
I track everything from content posts to engagement on posts to follower/connection growth to number of sales calls to how many connection requests sent to connection acceptance rate and more. By simplifying everything into a dashboard where I can easily see all the numbers that matter to me for a campaign in one glance, I can make better decisions.
With a team of virtual assistants manually pulling many of these numbers for me, I can ask for certain numbers and have them automatically show up on my dashboard every week and every month.
This is a great starting point for many people, especially if it’s a relatively simple campaign with just one or two LinkedIn profiles as part of the campaign. Once you get up to multiple subject matter experts or trying to manage an employee social media advocacy program, you’re going to need to find something a bit more robust.
#2 - Shieldapp.ai
This is one of my favorite tools for measuring personal LinkedIn profile performance when it comes to finding out if your content is resonating with your audience. You can track data from now onwards, and you can also pull historical data.
This will NOT trigger LinkedIn in a negative way to shut down or restrict your account because it does not violate any of LinkedIn’s policies or best practices.
If you’re a subject matter expert posting a good amount of content or an agency managing a number of subject matter expert’s LinkedIn profiles, you’ll want to look into this tool to help you get better data.
This tool does NOT gather LinkedIn Page data, so if you’re trying to get analytics for a company page, you’ll want to learn how to use the LinkedIn Page analytics tools available. They have gotten better over time.
This tool is a must-have for any B2B sales or business development professional who is actively doing social selling on LinkedIn. You can run robust searches that allow you to search people’s profiles for even the most hidden data and keywords, so if you don’t have a spreadsheet to work from and need to identify your target prospects, sign up ASAP for a Sales Navigator subscription.
There’s also a Sales Navigator Team Edition that is perfect for sales teams or companies with more than one salesperson, as you get a number of extra perks that regular Sales Navigator does not have.
If you want to try Sales Navigator for the first time and haven’t used it in the past 6-12 months, you can likely get a free trial for 30 days to take it for a test run.
#4 - TextExpander
If you’re sending a number of messages based on templates or find yourself sending the same types of messages over and over again, this is a great snippets tool where you can actually save all your best templates and type in a keyboard shortcut to use them to send messages on LinkedIn.
All of my LinkedIn messaging sequences are loaded into TextExpander, and I can share them with clients or team members who might need this copy. There’s also room for plenty of personalization, so you can ensure that messages coming from you are personalized enough.
NOTE: One other thing I wanted to mention is that there are a LOT of LinkedIn automation tools out there that you do not want to touch because they can put your LinkedIn account at risk.
If a tool says it can send messages for you, view profiles, or take actions on LinkedIn for you while you sleep, this is a tool you should NOT use unless you understand the risk.
#5 - Avoid LinkedIn “Automation” Tools
One other thing to mention is that there are a LOT of LinkedIn automation tools out there that you do not want to touch because they can put your LinkedIn account at risk.
Here's a list of blacklisted tools, if you want to check them out.
If a tool says it can send messages for you, view profiles, or take actions on LinkedIn for you while you sleep, this is a tool you should NOT use unless you understand the risk.
If you’re looking for that extra edge to get you started on the right path with LinkedIn to start booking your perfect-fit clients, get on the waitlist for the next cohort of The LinkedIn Accelerator kicking off in July 2022, which is tailored to take you through ALL of the sections on your LinkedIn profile in just five days flat - - one week, and you’re off to the LinkedIn races to start growing your network and getting conversations. If you’re interested, here’s the link to get on the waitlist and find out a few more details.
What additional questions do you have about LinkedIn tools? Any specific tools you’re looking at and want some feedback on? Leave them below in the comments or shoot me a private message. I’m happy to answer them👇!
