Linkedin is the 1st B2B database with no competitors. By 2024, the network is likely to have passed the one billion mark for user profiles on its platform. Mastering Linkedin’s codes is now a key skill, whether for commercial prospecting, social selling or job hunting.
Salespeople and recruiters, I’ve put together a guide to help you optimize your searches and filter results on Linkedin. With the help of these tips and techniques, you’ll be able to build up quality prospect lists in no time, and make the most of the relevant information available on each profile page.
The different possibilities for information sources on Linkedin
Here are the different sources of information available on Linkedin, enabling targeted searches according to sector of activity and available features.
- People: This option lets you search for specific individuals on LinkedIn via the search bar. It is particularly useful for identifying and contacting relevant professionals in your sector, and filtering profiles according to specific criteria.
- Posts: Posts offer an overview of current discussions and trends in various sectors, allowing you to interact with social content and increase your own profile appearances.
- Companies: This section gives access to company pages, providing detailed information on organizations, their offers, news and employee relations.
- Jobs: This feature is crucial for recruiters and job seekers alike, offering an overview of current vacancies. But also if you are a salesperson and want to start from the customer’s needs to target the appropriate functions and profiles 😉
- Groups: Groups allow you to join communities of professionals with common interests, facilitating networking, relationships and knowledge sharing in your sector.
- Products: Explore products to discover specific company offers, which can be useful for buyers and sellers wishing to bypass traditional limitations.
- Services: This section is ideal for finding professional services offered by individuals or companies, enabling you to seize business opportunities.
- Events: Stay informed about upcoming professional events, such as conferences or webinars, and prospect for attendees.
- Courses: This option helps you find courses and training to improve specific skills, strengthening your LinkedIn profile.
- Schools: Searching for schools can help you connect with alumni of certain institutions, expanding your professional network.
- All filters: This is a separate function because it is cumulative with the others. It lets you combine different search criteria to refine results, bypass limitations and target more specific information.
For each type of source, you will therefore have different data such as profiles, sector information and job offers. It’s a good idea to exploit all of this by using advanced filters to obtain precise searches and optimize results.
For example, for the “Jobs” tab, if you’re a recruiter looking to place a candidate profile, there’s nothing better than to start by precisely defining the requirement according to the function and sector of activity you’re targeting, then click on “Search”.
Similarly, if you’re a salesperson, LinkedIn “Courses” provide you with additional information that no lambda database could. Knowing that your potential prospect has taken an Excel course enables you to precisely target the profile and optimize your prospect list according to the specific terms and needs found in their training history.
Like your Linkedin profile, our Linkedin MirrorProfiles accounts also come with full query functionality, including premium versions (if you subscribe via our license provider SalesNavigator), enabling advanced navigation and access to a full search history.
So always be aware of where the information comes from and how it was scrapped. Often, sales reps or recruiters only focus on data such as Jobtitle, email, LinkedIn URL, education, etc., but the origin of the scrap in each field can provide differentiating information for your relationships and offers when you take them on. However, the origin of the scrap in each search field can provide differentiating information for your relationships and offers when you make contact. Take the time to research key terms and use filters to optimize your results.
Now that we’ve taken a full tour of what Linkedin has to offer, let’s take a look at how to optimize each search using targeted profiles and advanced filtering techniques.
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Tips for optimizing your Linkedin searches
Tip 1: Booleans
The Boolean search operators on Linkedin boil down to these 4 elements, which are essential for refining your searches:
- OR
- AND
- NOT
- Parentheses and quotation marks
These Boolean operators must be used directly in the LinkedIn search bar. OR” is a classic “OR” that broadens the scope of your search by including several terms. AND” and “NOT”, on the other hand, have an exclusive role, allowing you to filter profiles precisely and avoid irrelevant prospects. Parentheses are useful for combining these operators and creating complex search expressions.
Let’s take a concrete example:
Natively, this is how the search would be entered:
“I want to have all LinkedIn posts where people talked about Marketing or Prospecting in the context of LinkedIn. However, I don’t want to include posts that mention ads or advertising.”
On Linkedin, here’s how you set up your search using the search bar:
- Let’s go to the “Post” tab
- In the search bar, enter the following terms: Linkedin AND (Marketing OR Prospecting) NOT ads to filter the results optimally
This function is very useful in the “Person” tab, as it allows you to go further than the job title. In fact, the use of search terms and keywords coupled with Boolean operators enables almost surgical precision in profile filtering. Keywords are like CTRL+F on a Linkedin profile. Thanks to Boolean operators, it’s like performing multiple CTRL+Fs on LinkedIn profiles en masse, improving the effectiveness of your prospecting.
Tip #2: Followers of
It’s a little-known trick, but a formidable one. With the advent of social selling on Linkedin in every niche where your company operates, there are a few key influencers. If you’re not familiar with them, you can rely on the Favikon ranking, which references these influencers by sector, making it easier to identify relevant prospects and establish solid business relationships.
Once you’ve found the influencer, regardless of whether or not you’re connected with them, you can scrape the profiles of people who follow that person and are therefore interested in the content that influencer offers, enabling you to search for and add qualified prospects to your list.
What’s more, you can add your own filters as described in Tip 1. This will enable you to have a database of prospects or candidates with a ready-made hook, personalized according to profile. For example: “I also think X’s content is great! Since you’re interested in Y, I’m proposing a premium offer along these lines, which allows you to Z”.
Never forget that knowing where your data comes from gives you the keys to good copywriting. By combining profile information with precise search terms, you can bypass LinkedIn’s limitations. By the way, if you’re interested in the secrets of good copywriting, here are the 10 golden rules of good copywriting.
Tip no. 3: Events
Did you know that you can scrape LinkedIn events, such as webinars, even if you’re not the one organizing them? This is gold for your sales prospecting. Prospecting webinar participants is very effective. We use it regularly at MirrorProfiles to build precise, targeted prospect lists for your marketing campaigns.
Tip 4: Using advanced filters
To deepen and refine your search, it’s crucial to exploit LinkedIn’s advanced filters. These filters enable you to narrow down results according to precise criteria such as relationship level, geographical area, industry, school or company. Activate these filters by clicking on ‘All filters’ in the search bar to precisely target your searches and obtain highly relevant prospect profiles.
Tip no. 5: Rough search and external search
LinkedIn offers an approximate search feature that finds terms close to the exact words you’ve entered. What’s more, you can also use Google to search for specific keywords across the whole of LinkedIn, using structures like “site:linkedin.com”. This allows you to find profiles or companies that might not appear in a standard LinkedIn search, thus broadening your prospecting scope and accessing a wider version of data.
There are plenty more, but it wouldn’t be fun if I told you them all 😉 However, you’ve already got a good start. If you master all the LinkedIn sources and the three tips I’ve given you, you’ll have an abundant list of quality data to mine. First, you’ll need to scrape relevant profiles. Then, you’ll need to use this data properly to strengthen your business relationships and optimize your offers.
The use of our databases
Now that you’ve got dozens or even hundreds of databases, you’ll need a good number of LinkedIn profiles to exploit quickly. After all, speed is everything (after data). Basing your scraping on one of the LinkedIn tabs, such as webinar attendees, will enable you to build up a list of targeted prospects. Nevertheless, your prospecting message should be based on the origin of this scraping, personalizing your offers according to the profiles, and you shouldn’t delay in contacting them. The main reason for this is that, otherwise, prospects won’t understand your hook and you risk losing their attention.
As you know, Linkedin has limitations in terms of search volume and connection requests, and your LinkedIn account is limited to 100 connection requests per week. It’s hard to be fast with such a limit, especially if you’re targeting a large number of profiles or companies.
That’s why we’ve launched MirrorProfiles, the only Linkedin account rental service ready for automation. If you have 5 MirrorProfiles accounts, you multiply your sales prospecting capacity by 5. That’s 500/600 connection requests per week. Today, it’s just as essential to have several LinkedIn accounts to diversify the profiles and offers you propose, as it is to provide one of your employees with a computer. Renting LinkedIn accounts is the Growth 2025 solution.
In conclusion, mastering LinkedIn has become essential for business prospecting and recruitment. Optimizing searches on LinkedIn can be greatly enhanced by using the varied sources of information available on the platform, such as profiles, companies and events. To optimize your queries, don’t forget to use Boolean operators to refine searches, cleverly exploit features such as “followers of” and events, and use advanced filters. These techniques will help you to qualify your prospects precisely according to their sector and specific profile.
What’s more, managing databases and using multi-accounts, as offered by MirrorProfiles, amplifies your sales prospecting capabilities by diversifying profiles and offering more filters. It’s also crucial to choose the right LinkedIn subscription for greater precision in prospecting and to access premium features that will optimize your offers and professional relationships.
FAQ
How does LinkedIn search work?
Searching on LinkedIn works by using keywords entered in the search bar, displaying results in various profile fields, including people, companies, jobs, schools and content. To refine results, you can use advanced filters such as location, industry, current company, and Boolean operators like AND, OR, NOT, quotation marks and parentheses to precisely target your searches.
How can I find out who’s looking for me on LinkedIn?
To find out who is looking for you on LinkedIn, you need to have a LinkedIn Premium subscription, as this feature is not available for free accounts. With LinkedIn Premium, you can see who has seen your profile in the “Who has seen your profile” section located in your dashboard.
Who sees LinkedIn search?
LinkedIn search is visible to several groups, including your network of contacts, recruiters and the companies you’re targeting. The larger and more engaging your network, the more visible your publications and profile will be. Hashtags and interactions (likes, shares, comments) also increase the visibility of your content to a wider audience.
How can I view my search history on LinkedIn?
To view your search history on LinkedIn, follow these steps: – Go to the search bar at the top left of the page. – Previous searches will appear with a “Clear” message. – Alternatively, go to “You” or your profile picture, then to “Preferences” or “Preferences and Privacy”, then to “Data Privacy” and click on “Search History”.
