 Event planners and meeting partners, we are in the business of connecting people. So today I'm gonna show you three ways that you can connect with people at a conference using LinkedIn on your phone. Are you ready for these LinkedIn hacks? Here we go. This is Leanne and you know I love LinkedIn as my chosen social media platform. I've done a lot of posts and videos about it in the past, but today has to be my absolute favorite. Because today we're going to learn how to connect with people when we're at our events. So whether we're attending industry trade shows or we're going to educate our delegates on how to connect with one another when they're at our conferences, that's what we're gonna go through today. And in fact, I've even created a resource for you event planners that you can use so that you can educate your delegates without having to recreate the wheel. So let's go through the hacks and then I'll show you these PowerPoint slides that I've created for you. Before I begin, don't forget to visit this video over on LinkedIn, subscribe on my YouTube channel and click on the little bell to be notified of new content each week. I do a lot of LinkedIn content as well as content for meeting planners and meeting partners about how to optimize your career in the events industry. Okay, so let's launch into these hacks for connecting with people using LinkedIn on our phones. First way is by simply scanning each person's unique QR code and I'm gonna show you how to do this. So when you're on your phone and you find your LinkedIn profile, at the bottom is a button that says my network. When you click in there, there's going to be a little person with a plus sign and you click there and there's an option that says scan QR code. You can do this one of two ways. So once you press scan QR code, it's going to give you the option to scan someone's code and they're of course gonna go through the exact same steps to find their unique code, which is under my code. Easy peasy, right? So try that the next time you're with somebody and you're not connected with them on LinkedIn, try this scan QR code feature. The second way to connect with people is to find all the connections that might be nearby, be it a general session room, a breakout room, a networking lounge, a networking reception, but everyone needs to be doing this simultaneously in order for it to work. And so here's how it works. Same thing, you're gonna go to your LinkedIn profile and you're gonna press my network again and the little person with the plus sign and there's an option that says find nearby. When you press find nearby, everyone else who has done this will populate and you can connect with them automatically on your phone. Again, this is a really good one to have an education piece so that everyone's doing this roughly at the same time so that you can find everyone's connection at once. Make sense? Now one thing I should note about the find nearby feature is when you connect with people, it sends the generic connection message and you know how I feel about sending personalized messages when you connect on LinkedIn. So I'm gonna show you a third hack on LinkedIn for when you wanna send a personal message to someone again using your phone. Now as an example, I've pulled up someone by the name of John Smith. I have no idea who this person is. He only has 31 connections. I'm not going to connect with him, but here's the example. So I have John Smith's profile here and there's a connect button, okay? Do not press the connect button. That's gonna send John Smith that generic invitation message that I alluded to earlier. No, instead what you're gonna do is you're gonna press the more dot, dot, dot button. That's gonna bring up a few other options and under there is an option to personalize your invitation. That's what you're going to press and you're gonna craft a little text message on your phone to send to that person so that they get a personalized invitation which increases your chances of being accepted as a connection. And before I let you go, my little bonus tip of the day, make sure your profile is mobile ready, especially your headline. When you're on mobile, the headline is the thing that takes center stage. So ensure that your headline is creative. It speaks to how you serve your audience and people can really relate to what it is that you do. Okay planners, what do you think? Is that simple enough to do? But now I wanna show you a few slides that I've created. These are things that you can put into your PowerPoints at the next event. Go to this blog post over at conferencesource.net to find those slides. Simply download them and customize them to how you want them to look with your organization's branding, with your conference branding, whatever branding you want, just make sure it gets in the hands of your delegates so they can start connecting with one another. Event planners, I hope these hacks and slides will help you get your delegates to connect at your next event. And if you do end up using the slides, let me know how it goes. To learn more about Stephen and I's complimentary services for meeting planners, head on over to conferencesource.net, check us out and see if our site selection services are a good fit for your organization. Thanks for watching today's video everyone. Bye for now.