Are you having trouble finding what you want in LinkedIn Search? Or are you running into problems with LinkedIn’s search quotas on free accounts?
Hi, I’m Allison Shields Johs, President of Legal Ease Consulting, where I help lawyers create more productive, more profitable, and more enjoyable law practices, and the co-author of the book, Make LinkedIn Work for You, A Practical Handbook for Lawyers and Other Legal Professionals.
One of the best uses for LinkedIn is to expand your network of referral sources and go-to professionals to help your clients with services beyond what you can offer to them. But sometimes it’s hard to find people to connect with using LinkedIn’s regular search features, especially if you have a free account. While the free account is usually quite sufficient for most lawyers’ purposes, I do sometimes recommend testing out a premium account if you start running into roadblocks using LinkedIn. One of those roadblocks is LinkedIn search. But you may not need to shell out for a premium account just yet.
Today I have two LinkedIn search tips to share with you that might help if you’re running into the problems I just described, and if the filters on the free accounts aren’t proving to be enough for you.
The first tip is to put those legal research skills you learned in law school to use to help you get better results. Those Boolean searches that work so well in legal research will also work in LinkedIn – you can use quotation marks, ‘and’ ‘or’ and ‘not’ or use parentheticals to perform complicated searches in LinkedIn. When using AND OR or NOT, in the LinkedIn search field, you must capitalize them.
My second tip is to use Google to search for people to connect with on LinkedIn – especially if you are doing a lot of searches and running into LinkedIn’s search quotas on a free account. Enter your search terms in the Google search box, and include LinkedIn as a search term. Or put your search terms into Google but limit the search to LinkedIn using Google’s advanced search and the site: LinkedIn. This will give you results within Google, and then you can click on any results that look interesting to view the person’s profile on LinkedIn and decide whether to connect. Since your original search was done in Google, rather than LinkedIn, it shouldn’t count against your search quota in LinkedIn.
If you want to learn how to use LinkedIn more effectively, click here to get your copy of my 47 LinkedIn Tips for Lawyers and Legal Professionals or check out our online course, LinkedIn Essentials.
Watch more of my videos about LinkedIn here:
- No Time for a LinkedIn Company Page?
- Securing Your LinkedIn Account
- Increase the Reach of LinkedIn Company Page Posts
- Is LinkedIn Using Your Data to Train Its AI?
- Where to Find Images for Your Marketing
- What Does It Mean To Be Yourself And Add Value On Social Media?
- Should You Use AI to Post on Social Media?
- Notify Employees of LinkedIn Posts
- Saving LinkedIn Posts
- Taking Control of Your LinkedIn Feed Part III
