Maximizing LinkedIn with Minimal Compliance Exposure

With the proliferation of mobile devices, social media has quickly become a dominant influence on modern communication and culture. Clearly, as a tool for client building and marketing, social medial cannot be ignored. While many financial professionals have jumped into the equivalent of the deep end of social media, many still wait at the water’s edge or with their feet barely in the shallow end. One of the major reasons for the hesitation is compliance – the cost, the rules, or both.

 In this post, we look at one powerful idea for using LinkedIn with limited compliance exposure. All you need to get started is a LinkedIn profile.

Using LinkedIn To Connect Within Your Network

 If you have not yet built a LinkedIn profile, obtain the specifications from your Compliance department and follow them closely. Your objective is to build a static profile that is essentially an electronic résumé. Other than updating résumé items, such as achievements, awards, education, and so on, you will not be posting client- or customer-oriented content. Instead, you will utilize LinkedIn purely for networking – at least until you decide you are able to navigate the compliance requirements.

 Now you are ready to network. LinkedIn allows you to conduct searches on your connections and/or everyone on LinkedIn based on several different search parameters, including keywords, company, industry, school, and location. Consider the following examples below to get a feel for how this might work.

Example: Jasmine is a financial advisor in the Atlanta area. She wants to use her public-speaking skills to market her services to employees of mid-sized businesses by giving presentations on various financial topics. She has identified a list of local businesses through her local chamber of commerce. Her plan is to identify and contact HR professionals at these companies. Accordingly, she conducts the following search on LinkedIn:

Relationship: First Connections and Second Connections
Keywords: HR
Company: Name of a company she wants to target

Example: Hector is an insurance agent in the Philadelphia area, specializing in commercial insurance and employee benefits. His objective is to identify financial advisors who do not sell insurance and who work with business owners. Hector’s value proposition is that he will enable the investment advisor to add value through providing advice about commercial insurance and employee benefits. Hector uses the following search parameters in LinkedIn:

Relationship: First Connections and Second Connections
Keywords: Financial Advisor
Location: Greater Philadelphia area

Once you have identified members of your targeted group, you can segment them based on how well you know them, which will determine what you need to do to attain your ultimate objective. First connections can usually be contacted at will. However, there may be some first connections in your network you do not know all that well who will merit finding a common connection you know well to formally introduce you.

Networking With People Outside of Your Network on LinkedIn

For second connections, identify the people you know in common to see if one of them is someone that can provide a personal introduction. If a common first connection is weak but represents someone with whom you otherwise would network, consider cultivating the relationship. This approach will often take time and should generally be used when the second connection represents a large enough opportunity to warrant the effort to build this intermediate relationship with the first connection.

The key with all networking is to focus on how you can add value to the other person. Reflect this objective in how you approach setting up a meeting or phone call. During the meeting or phone call, focus on their needs and desired opportunities. How can you help them? How can you add value to what they are doing? Determining how you can add value requires you to ask good questions, listen carefully, and take notes. Take time to review the person’s LinkedIn profile to help formulate questions to ask.

Networking is a powerful way to prospect and build your practice. Using LinkedIn to network can supercharge your networking efforts as discussed already. But what makes LinkedIn so powerful is the ability to identify how you are connected to your prospects and having a mechanism to contact those connections to build relationships with them. Best of all, you can tap LinkedIn’s networking potential with minimal compliance exposure.

If you want to learn what more you can do with social media before diving in, check out the Social Media: Don’t Get Left Behind course (a part of The College's FSCP^® designation program). This course teaches how to establish an online social media presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as how to create a basic social media strategy. 

This post was co-authored by Dr. C.W. Copeland, Assistant Professor of Insurance at The American College of Financial Services.