Ever needed to do an in-depth search on LinkedIn, but you don’t have LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
That’s fine …sorta.
Look, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the king when it comes to searches on the platform, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use LinkedIn advanced search to get some stellar results.
In this guide, we take a look at how to use LinkedIn advanced search, and how to leverage other techniques to supercharge your vanilla searches!
Why Would You Want to Do This?
Even if you weren’t a LinkedIn power user, wouldn’t better search results be great?
You wouldn’t have to go through unrelated results and waste precious time trying to find the right people through a pool of searches.
It would make looking for the right person or company so much easier.
Plus, if you only do a couple of searches a month, getting LinkedIn Sales Navigator isn’t necessarily a good financial decision.
Yes, it’s great and all, but to pay that steep of a fee for one or two searches?
No thanks.
The truth is being a growth hacker also means maximizing the options that you have, and that’s what you get with LinkedIn advanced searches, the power to maximize your searches on vanilla LinkedIn.
How do you do a LinkedIn Advanced Search?
Doing a LinkedIn advanced search is pretty easy.
First, you want to log into your account and make your way to the search bar and type in the keywords you want to use.
Once you’ve stuck in the keywords hit enter or click on “See all results”. This should take you to a results page with everyone that matches your keywords.
You will now want to click on “All filters”.
This should open up a sub-menu on the righthand side of the window with a lot of granular filters that you can apply. First, it allows you to filter by the type of search you want to make, i.e. People, Jobs, Posts, Companies, etc. For this example, we will be limiting the search only to people.
Next, you have a choice to choose what type of connection they are, I usually pick 2nd and 3rd+. However, these choices will be completely up to you.
Doing a little bit of competitor research?
No problem.
You can even limit your search to people affiliated or connected with a certain brand or influencer. This helps when you’re trying to take a sneak peek into a competitor’s audience.
Once you’re done with these options, you can now pick the location to bind your search with. If the location you’re aiming for isn’t there, you can always add a new location.
We like these options because they are especially useful for headhunting for a new recruit or trying to boost the presence of a local establishment.
Then, it’s company time, you can choose what companies your potential prospects are currently working in or which companies they’ve come from in the past.
At this point, if you want to complete your ideal customer profile, we suggest that you even fill up their “School” parameters.
Industry options are next if you scroll further down, followed by Profile language.
Profile languages are great if you want to filter your potential clients depending on the language that they speak.
Next, you have options to choose what they are open to, which is excellent for people who are looking to hire someone that works for a non-profit or are interested in joining your non-profit or volunteering their services for free.
Next you can choose the “Service Categories” that you could use in your business collaboration.
Lastly, for even more granularity, you can add specific keywords to your searches.
Type in the Title, Company, and the school that they’ve come from.
Your next step with me is to finally click on “Show results”.
And, there you have it.
More detailed results like you wouldn’t imagine!
Taking it a Step Further With Boolean Searches
Now, you don’t just have to limit yourself to the filters that you get with advanced searches. You can combine this with LinkedIn boolean searches to take your results to the next level.
So, what LinkedIn boolean searches?
They are basically operators that you can add to your keywords to limit or expand their usage. They rely primarily on the search logic of LinkedIn search and you can use them on practically any search engine.
On LinkedIn these are namely: AND, OR, NOT, brackets (), and quotation marks “”.
By using these text strings along with your keywords, you can get LinkedIn to do more with the results that it’s presenting to you.
AND, allows you to combine two or more searches together, say you want to look for two different keywords along with the advanced filters that you’re using. NOT does the opposite by ensuring that keywords succeeding it don’t appear in searches.
OR works by allowing you to search for either one keyword or the other. This broadens your searches instead of you having to do two different ones and removing duplicate results.
Quotation marks ensure that the engine only looks for words that match your syntax, and brackets help you organize your boolean searches.
By mastering boolean search on LinkedIn, you can come up with pretty granular data that you can do pull.
Takeaways
There is no substitute for LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
But, the truth is, not everyone can afford it, and even if you can, it might not be practical for you to use it when you only have to make a couple of searches a month.
That’s where growth hacking with LinkedIn advanced searches comes in.
By using LinkedIn advanced searches, you can make your searches more specific and that comes in handy when you’re trying to build a prospect list.
Yes, it can get tedious, especially with general terms, but it’s a great way to supercharge your results without having to spend money.
Now that’s a quick growth hack.
Stay Golden folks!
