Solving The LinkedIn Bot Problem
LinkedIn is great for business, once you get passed the spam and bots.
Spending over a decade building a B2B business, you learn a couple of marketing tricks.
The biggest one: discover where your customers hang out.
For AdTech, this used to be conferences like AdWeek, DMEXCO, iMedia, etc, but over the last couple of years, LinkedIn has grown in importance to every B2B marketer.
Instead of traveling to a conference, having a single portal where each of my current and potential customers participates was like a dream.
And LinkedIn was that for me.
I slowly built my network and over time it has grown to over 6,000 people.
LinkedIn worked for me because I was providing data which my network deemed valuable.
The LinkedIn app is on my phone and it’s the only app (besides SMS) where I have notifications turned on.
Yes – I’m a LinkedIn Lover.
But now, with in-person conferences and business travel at a standstill, every B2B marketer has substantially increased their LinkedIn outreach.
The volume of invitations and inMail messages has increased to a point where it disrupts my daily work.
- Yes…I should turn off LinkedIn notifications.
- Yes…I should only check LinkedIn once a day.
- Yes…I should take the app off my phone.
But I don’t want to. LinkedIn is my only social network and is an integral part of my business.
And it’s not just me.
Even other LinkedIn Lovers like Rob Griffin are venting their frustrations.
Rob’s post immediately struck a nerve and started me down a path to find a better solution.
I didn’t have to search far.
Eric Ramos, Director of Analytics at BusinessOnline came up with an innovative solution and shared it in the same thread.
His solution was so popular with colleagues, he created a loom video in April detailing his method for handling LinkedIn connection requests.
Eric’s system filters out 90% of connection requests and is based on growing his network only where there’s mutual value and it’s a real person.
To get this up and running, Eric created a form at Typeform with questions designed to determine if the mutual connection could be of value to both parties.
The process is simple; he copies and pastes a message to any request who sends an introductory note.
No introductory note and Eric will remove your request.
Here’s the message he sends for the 50% of requests who send an introductory note:
According to Eric, 20% complete the form.
A completed form sends a Slack message to Eric with a score he calculates based on the answers.
(I got a 4 out of 5.)
For salespeople, he asks them to refrain for 90 days from pitching him; if they agree, he connects with them.
To date, all except one have followed his request.
Eric’s system of verification plus quality is 100% the right move and I loved it!
Eric used to spend 12-13 hours per month managing Linkedin Invitations.
His system allowed him to reduce it down to less than 2 hour per month for an 89% time savings!
I knew that by integrating a little additional technology, we could accomplish the same goal plus save even more time.
Since Covid, my daughter and I have spent time thinking how to best optimize sales funnels which led to the creation of Overnight Dealer.
This LinkedIn issue was the opposite problem.
We now needed to ‘disrupt’ the sales funnel.
Step 1 was to stop the inbound ‘insanity’ by adjusting my LinkedIn preferences here.
- Scroll down until you see the ‘Who Can Reach You’ Section and
- Click on ‘Change’ as shown
- Clicking on CHANGE displays three options
- I clicked last option as shown
It was a Zen moment.
The LinkedIn noise immediately stopped.
Unfortunately, keeping it this way meant no one new could connect with me, since I did not import my contacts.
And…I want the door open to new people who I don’t know yet.
We needed a process to verify people similar to SpamArrest but, without taking the time to individually act on each one.
Using Zapier with Twilio, Typeform and Slack, we were able to do the following:
- Get a US phone number for my LinkedIn profile
- Prompt people to ‘text me’ to connect
- Send opt-in users to Typeform
- Send responses to Slack
Without any user intervention or time requirements, we quickly duplicated Eric’s awesome system.
And it works great for anyone familiar with Zapier who has a minimum of the multi-step ‘Starter’ plan.
For those that don’t, spending $19.99/month on Zapier to cut down on LinkedIn spam is a far stretch.
And that’s why we’re excited to have you meet Clara.
Meet Clara stops LinkedIn bots without the need for user intervention.
As a virtual ‘artificial’ assistant, Clara allows you to set a reporting cadence and establish networking holidays.
If you’re interested in joining the Meet Clara beta, text me at 646-851-2382 or visit MeetClara.io