 Friends, whether this is your first day on LinkedIn or you have an established following, continuing to connect will help get more eyes on your profile, your content, and your business. But connecting with prospects isn't as easy as just pressing the big gold connect button and you're on your way. No, I do believe you need a targeted, strategic way of connecting with someone and then engaging them to a deeper relationship with yourself. This will create more meaningful connections and likely more business opportunities for you. Let's take a look. Hey friends, it's Leanne and you know LinkedIn is my jam everywhere from having a good, complete, robust LinkedIn profile to contributing to groups on LinkedIn, creating content and extending invitations for people to connect with you. Connecting and engaging is a time consuming endeavor but it's one where I see the ROI. So over the years I've created some best practices and those are the things that I want to share with you today. But before we launch into the tips, don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and click on that little bell to be notified of new content. We have new videos going out every week for the media industry and I don't want you to miss a thing. And stick around to the end of the video. I have a newly updated resource that will help you connect better with meeting planners, regardless of your social media platform. So let's look at seven tips that will help you better engage with your LinkedIn connections. Tip number one, make sure your LinkedIn profile is complete. There's nothing worse than someone finding you on LinkedIn and then not being able to learn anything about you when they go on to your profile. Now if you have questions on how to create and complete your profile, you're in luck. If you have a resource coming out in the fall and if you'd like to be added to the wait list to be notified of when it's coming out, you can click on this link here and be added to that notifications email. Tip number two, extend invitations to people you've met, people you have a common connection with, or people in our industry or field of study. Growing your network with relevant industry connections will help you grow your engagement so much quicker. And if you're looking for a quick list of event prompts that I think you should connect with, you can check out a video I did quite a while ago here with some of those great people. Tip number three, connect with a personal message. Now you could send the generic templated message to connect with people on LinkedIn, but studies have shown that people will connect faster if there's a personal message attached. This is simple enough to do on your PC. You simply click add a note when you connect with someone. Now if you're connecting via your mobile phone, things work a little bit differently with the connections. I filmed a video not too long ago that you can check out here that outlines some hacks when you're using your mobile phone to send personalized invitations to people. So check that video out as well. Tip number four, that you're incoming invitations with a message. So people are going to connect with you now that you've created a really great profile. And you want to respond to them when they reach out to you to connect. You have all the opportunity in the world now with all of your first connections to send them a message. So start crafting some messages that you can template and send to people who send you a connection request. Together with these introductory messages, this isn't the time for the hard sell, but rather provide the gift of something that they can use in their business. Number five, post relevant content. And you can do this through a number of ways on LinkedIn, either through a PDF, a video, just a written post or even a full blown article. Number six, like, share and comment on other people's content. Your connections will see your activity on your post. And as a result, you will get more eyes on your profile and your own content. And finally, number seven, stay connected with your connections. And you can do this through a number of different ways. Number one, you can send recommendations. And if you need a refresher on how to do that, a little two-minute tip Tuesday video might help you with your recommendations. But recommendations are a great way for you to reconnect with some of your connections, especially those that you have worked with. Number two, make introductions, right? This is the business platform that we make introductions to other people. And we create business opportunities for other people. So spend some time finding like-minded individuals and ensure that they're connected to one another. Number three, endorse their skills. So there's a skills section on LinkedIn that you can create skills for yourself, but you can also endorse skills of your connections. Again, this should be the skills of people that you've had the opportunity to work with and you can speak highly of their work. Number four, message them. LinkedIn messaging is a great platform to reach out and send messages. Again, ensure that they have some value behind them. And the hard sell is saved for an email relationship, not on LinkedIn, but there are so many great things that you can send via a LinkedIn message. And finally, engage with your connections and future connections in the groups. Find some like-minded groups with other people in your industry or in your target audience's industry and start to contribute to the dialogue. Those are my seven tips for connecting and creating engagement with people in your LinkedIn network. But now I'd love to hear if there's any engagement best practices that you'd like to pass on to the community. Please comment below this video and let us know what you'd like to do. As I mentioned earlier, I have completely updated the resource of 10 ways to connect better with your meeting planner clients. And I firmly believe connecting them with them on LinkedIn is one of those 10 ways. If you'd like the full list of all 10 ways to connect better with planners, go to pages.liancalderwood.com forward slash connect better. There you can download the resource and start to work on your engagement strategy. And friends, if by some wild chance you and I are not yet connected on LinkedIn, please do send me an invitation. Hope you found value in today's video and we'll see you next time. Bye for now.