Did you know that LinkedIn currently has more than 875 million users across the globe? Crazy, right? This metric alone makes LinkedIn one of the most important social media platforms. 

There is so much you can accomplish by using LinkedIn the intended way. From sending out connection requests to the right people to reaching out to senior executives with an outreach message done well, the possibilities are endless. 

With a strategy in place, LinkedIn can play a key role in boosting your professional network and your brand’s GTM strategy. 

This guide will show how a text expander tool can help you in your quest to effectively use LinkedIn to reach out to more leads, hire top candidates, and connect with other professionals. 

Why is LinkedIn important to your GTM strategy?

When you think about social media marketing or your GTM strategy, you might be tempted to overlook LinkedIn. After all, how much can you squeeze out from a platform for professionals for free? 

That’s where you would be doing your business a massive disservice. As the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn generates leads 227% more effectively than Facebook and Twitter. 

LinkedIn allows you to drive traffic to your website, reach out to prospects, gather feedback and suggestions, identify quality leads, share your expertise through thought-leadership content, and grow your network. It's also a great way to market job openings and attract new talent to your company.

What makes the platform a must-have for your brand’s go-to-market strategy? Here are the reasons: 

1. Audience

With a user base of 875 million, most of whom are professionals and business decision-makers, LinkedIn is the ideal platform for B2B brands to reach their target audience.

2. Professional Branding

LinkedIn allows brands to create company pages and showcase their products and services to a professional audience. This is an opportunity to establish the brand as a thought leader and establish credibility in the industry.

3. Lead generation

LinkedIn offers several tools and features that can help brands generate leads. For example, sponsored content and InMail allow brands to reach targeted users and promote their offerings.

4. Talent acquisition

LinkedIn is a great platform for finding and recruiting top talent. Brands can use LinkedIn to advertise job openings and find candidates that fit their job requirements and company culture.

5. Networking

LinkedIn is a platform for professional networking. Brands can use it to connect with industry professionals, partners, and potential customers, and to stay up-to-date on industry news and trends.

How can a text expander help you get more out of LinkedIn?

No matter how you choose to use LinkedIn, your experience would involve typing and sending out the same message to multiple people. If you do not reach out to as many connections as possible, you would not be reaping the benefits of connecting with them. 

To simplify this incessant typing and outreach, you can use a text expander. A text expander is a productivity tool that helps you summon and fill out content on cue with shortcuts such as o/outreach or o/intro. It helps convert your most-used content, images, or formatted text into simple, easy-to-remember shortcuts that auto expand into snippets wherever you work. 

Text expanders ensure that you do not waste time and effort coming up with the message each time you need to send it out on LinkedIn. 

It also helps you type out a message that is personalized in under a second, so you can send out as many as you want - 30x faster. Apart from supercharging your speed of outreach, text expanders also prevent you from embarrassing yourself thanks to typos and poorly (read: hurriedly) crafted messages.

Now that we know why you need a text expander to boost your LinkedIn, let’s delve into the how. 

How can you use a text expander on LinkedIn 

You can use a text expander for all of your GTM requirements. These include but are not limited to: 

1. Sending sales outreach messages to prospects 

Before sending out outreach messages, curate your network to include the executives who fit into your definition of ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). You can also use InMail - LinkedIn’s messaging system - that allows you to message people you may not be connected with. 

Once you have narrowed down who to reach out to, divide them into groups of 10-50 and send across different versions of your pitch to figure out which one works best. 

An easier way to do this? Use a text expander to create a snippet of your cold pitch with the option to personalize your message each time. Type out o/outreach, for example, and send out these messages instantly.

For example, o/outreach can expand to

Subject: Want more B2B leads? You’ve got it

Hey Alec, 

Checked out your homepage and congrats on bagging familiar names such as [xyz] as OSlash users. 

In my experience, a startup like yours is always looking to add more names to the list. 

With my outreach expertise, I can generate 2x more leads in the same timeframe at minimal extra cost. 

Are there any specific types of businesses that you’re looking to target?

Best, 
[Signature]

Quick Tip: To connect with the right people who may be interested in your product/service, you can leverage LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It allows you to save leads and accounts, receive lead recommendations, and see who's viewed your profile, among other features. By using Sales Navigator, you can more effectively target and nurture your leads, resulting in more sales.

The average cold messages come with a response rate of 1% to 5%. To book 10 demos let’s say, you’ll need to send messages to 1000 people. Typing out the pitch every time will only compound the frustration, loss of time, and probability of typos. With a text expander to aid you, you will be able to wrap it all up 30x faster! 

2. Sending messages to request feedback

Say you have built a product or conceived an idea for one. What do you do next? You need to validate it ASAP. LinkedIn is a great place to gather feedback and know what actual users (not the persona you have concocted in your head) think about your product. 

Reach out to professionals who may be interested in your product and ask them to give you their honest feedback. Additionally, you can search for people in your target market using the LinkedIn search function.

You will notice that the response rate of such a request would be much higher. Since you are not selling anything and wish to benefit from the sender’s experience.

Hi [Name],

I hope this message finds you well. I came across your profile and was impressed by your experience and expertise in [industry/field]. I am reaching out because we have recently launched a new product [product name] that we believe would be of interest to you. We are still in the early stages of getting feedback from users, and I would greatly appreciate it if you could give it a try and give your honest feedback.

I have included a link to our product [insert link here] and would be happy to schedule a call or Zoom meeting with you at your convenience to go over any questions you might have.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Best,
[Your Name]

Here is another template you can use that we’ve picked up from our ebook with cold messages that can get you users instantly. 

Hey Mike,

I’m the founder of Aero Newsletters: a data-first customer engagement platform built for modern product/marketing teams.

Our core difference is that you can build hyper-personalized segments by **connecting directly to your data warehouse**. There are no engineering bottlenecks or complex integrations to sync data over to our product. We’ve had some super interesting early wins, specifically with tech-enabled businesses like yours.

**I’m not trying to sell you anything**. At this stage, I’m really just interested in chatting with you (5-10 minutes) to get honest product feedback.

Given that we’re totally usage-based (no complex integrations) a common use case has been product-led companies using Aero as a low-risk way to test messages against specific segments. 

Any interest in connecting to discuss?

Once you have identified the best people who would be able to share with you their honest feedback, use a text expander to craft 2-5 versions of your message and send them to batches of people spread across a few weeks. This exercise would help you gauge the audience’s interest and whether there would be any scope for monetization in the future for your product. 

3. Connection request

Isn’t it troubling that every time you send a connection request to someone you really, really wish to add to your network, you have to rethink the message you’d want your request to accompany. 

With a text expander, you can create a template such as o/connection and invoke a templatized note every time you send out a request. It is simple, fast, effective, and a hundred percent free of errors. 

Hi [Name],

I hope this message finds you well. I came across your profile and was impressed by your experience and accomplishments in [industry/field]. I would like to connect with you on LinkedIn and potentially learn more about your experience and insights.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Best,
[Your Name]

4. For a short call

There are millions of people on LinkedIn and millions of experiences to benefit from. No matter where you are in life, someone would hold the key to getting you out of your rut or plain information dearth. 

Not using LinkedIn to benefit from this collective wisdom is a tragedy. And by using a text expander, the initial hesitation that comes with crafting a message to a stranger can be overcome all too easily. 

Just type out o/call-request and you can send out a quick message to whoever you look up to.

Subject: Interested in connecting with a [specific profession]

Hi [Name],

I came across your profile on LinkedIn and was impressed by your experience in [specific field or industry]. I work as a [your profession] and I am always looking to expand my network in the industry. I would be grateful if we could connect and share our experiences.

Also, if possible I would like to have a quick call to discuss your experience and the potential way of working together.

Thanks and have a great day.

Best,
[Your name]

Here’s another template you can use if you want someone to direct you to a person who would be interested in discussing your product. 

Subject: [FirstName], a quick request

Hi [FirstName],

I hope I am not bothering you. 

I stumbled across your profile on LinkedIn. Great to see where your career trajectory has taken you. 

I have been following your current company, [ABC], for a while and I am a huge fan. 

I have a few ideas in mind related to supercharging content creation for your company. Would it be possible for you to connect me to the person in charge of [function at ABC]?

I’d owe you big time. 

Best,
[Your signature]

5. Candidate outreach

Recruiters already have it hard. From scavenging for prospective candidates to telling them why they should join while searching for their own reasons to hold on to their jobs, there’s only so much they can do. 

With great candidates being a priced commodity, you need to be nimble when reaching out to them, and boy, you might want to reach out to them by the dozens.

Here’s where a text expander can help you immensely. By creating templatized outreach messages, you can send them out in minutes to multiple candidates on LinkedIn, via email, or on job portals. 

For example, o/candidate-pitch can expand to: 

Hi [FName],

I hope this message finds you well! We have some exciting [profile] positions lined up at [company]. 

Based on your past experience, you seem like you’d make a great candidate for the role. I’d love to get on an exploratory call with you and tell you more about the position and [company] to see if they align with your career aspirations. 

Let’s schedule a call for later today? Let me know what time works best for you. 

Thanks, I am looking forward to hearing from you. 

Kind regards,
[Name]

6. Have your company blurb ready

As you get seasoned at your job and proactive on LinkedIn, in multiple conversations you and your employees/teammates would be asked the one daunting question — what does your company do?

At the time, you would want a templatized pitch that stays updated and in sync with your product along with the company vision. 

So keep ready a company introduction that you along with your team can use and reuse each time someone has to answer this question on LinkedIn. Having a company introduction ready as an entrepreneur would also allow you to phrase the mission statement in a liner that does the job well. It would allow you to integrate the company pitch in every conversation in an instant and get your product out there in front of the users. It is hard to predict where the best sales come from, and leaving the surface area of LinkedIn unutilized would be a major mistake. 

Here’s a template you can easily use: 

[Company] is a [category] solution. We provide [product or service] to [specific niche you sell to] businesses. Our unique approach to [product or service] includes [differentiating product or service attributes], giving you the benefits of [value of using your product or service].

Get the most out of LinkedIn with the best text expander out there

If you wish to use LinkedIn to its full potential, couple it with a text expander like OSlash. 

In no time would you be able to send out more cold emails a day, reach out to more candidates, and reduce your work while 30x-ing your output. 

A text expander is almost a cheat code for all your brand’s use cases on LinkedIn. And delaying getting one is delaying increased sales, work efficiency, and all the benefits of extra hours at the end of the work week.