Recommendations are all about credibility, they are social proof that you are good at what you do and that other people should also buy from you. The more you have on your profile the more chance that someone will decide to do business with you. The beauty of LinkedIn recommendations is that everyone can see who has endorsed you.
If you run a business this is fantastic, because a potential client can read great stories about how you helped other clients all on your LinkedIn personal page or your LinkedIn Company page. It’s worth investing some time in getting the right kind of recommendations as every time you do get a recommendation, it will appear on your contacts’ home feeds and will give you additional visibility.
Every time you give a recommendation you are helping another person, this giving activity is a great way to build relationships, motivate your network to want to help you back and build greater credibility. You are really taking your relationship building to the next level when you focus on recommending others, as it means that your level of trust with those people is high.
When you recommend a supplier to your business, you are in effect motivating that person to give you a better service, prioritising you over other contacts and helping them to know who to focus on. If a supplier is good at what they do and you go and give them a surprise recommendation it is a very powerful way to give. This giving activity will result in your supplier going above and beyond and when you need a new connection or if you ask for their help in getting into one of their customers, they are more inclined to do it because you already helped their business.
It is a nice thing to do, giving a recommendation to a supplier, as you are building the relationship to take it from a client/supplier position to a position of let’s see how we can help each other with introductions etc. Your suppliers will often be in and out of companies that you would love to work with, so do not underestimate their network and the value it could be to you.
Recommending clients or people that you have worked with in client companies, is a really powerful way to retain customers, keep them happy and go above and beyond. If you are recommending their company to others and you want to maintain that business and make yourself irreplaceable to the customer, then this is a great way to cement a relationship. Your only goal with every customer is to make yourself so valuable to that organisation that even if someone else came along offering another solution that they would not change because they have you and you look after them so well that it would be impossible for them to go elsewhere. Recommendations are one tool you have at your disposal to build a strong relationship. From a LinkedIn perspective, giving a recommendation to the company on their company page and an individual that you deal with on their person page, this would be a great activity to think about doing on a regular basis.
You can recommend people that you currently work with or people that you used to work with. We talked earlier about the value of connecting with old dormant contacts, giving them a recommendation is a sure way to get them to agree to meet with you for a coffee or lunch or over Skype (depending on your location), to have a catch up. If you are a business owner then recognising an employee through a public LinkedIn recommendation is a great way to gain more engagement from that staff member, motivating them to do more, achieve more and get more results for your business.
You probably already have a great deal of your incoming new business from word of mouth introductions, people who refer you on a regular basis, whether that be friends and family or your existing clients spreading the word about what you offer. Just think about how much business has come in to your company from a word or mouth situation in the last 12 months alone. What have you done to thank the person who gave you a referral? Well one of many options you have is to give them a recommendation on LinkedIn.
Imagine how that person would feel if you out of the blue wrote a fantastic LinkedIn recommendation for them, as a way to thank them for the referred business they have given you. The only impact that this can have is a positive one, now they have been rewarded for an act of positivity, they are more likely to repeat that behaviour and refer you again because you thanked them through a recommendation.
I have been asked so many times to give a recommendation on LinkedIn to someone I either barely know or don’t know at all. It usually comes in a spam type email where I can see it’s been sent to lots of people in the hope that someone will actually take 5 minutes to do it. Essentially you should only be asking the connections you have on LinkedIn for a recommendation if you have a real business or personal relationship with them already built up. They have to know you, like you and trust you before they would even consider giving you a recommendation, so don’t approach all of the LinkedIn connections you have (which believe us some people do!), be strategic, pick people that you know will say yes.
People don’t just read what the recommendation says, they also look at who is giving the recommendation. Does it look better to have a bunch of recommendations from other small local business owners, or would it be better to have recommendations from a well-known brand? If you do business with a big and well known client, then try to get a personal recommendation on LinkedIn from the person you were dealing with. Large corporates very rarely provide testimonials or case studies, but they will allow their staff to give LinkedIn recommendations.
When you receive a LinkedIn recommendation, make sure that you copy and paste it onto the testimonials page on your website. This is a great way to boost the social proof on your website that you are fantastic at what you do, and is a great way to promote the person who gave you the testimonial. If you don’t already have a Testimonials section on your site, then make sure that you create one for all those new recommendations you will be receiving after reading this book!
Once you get a LinkedIn recommendation, talk about it and share it with your other social media networks. Put a link to it on your Facebook page, use a quote from it on Twitter, copy it onto a Google+ post, just let people know outside of LinkedIn that people are recommending you on LinkedIn. Sharing success and great things people are saying about you outside of the LinkedIn community shows that you are someone that others should be turning to for your product or service.
So you are on LinkedIn primarily as a business tool, however you will have many facets to your work and personal life. For example you may be involved in charity or voluntary work, you may be involved in an industry standards federation or organisation, you may do work at the local school, attend Rotary or Lions. It is important that people see you through LinkedIn as someone that has outside interests and each strand of you as a person could be recommended.
So you should try to build up recommendations for all of the different hats that you wear. It shows your character and personality and shows you in a different light. It can also be a way to open up common ground and build relationships with people that may not have considered you from a business perspective before but once they see you doing other work outside of your core business it can shed a different light on a person, especially if there are super recommendations that go with it.
As an absolute minimum we suggest that you have at least 10 recommendations for your current business or role in order to give you enough of a credibility factor to look great to someone new reading your profile. This is a good goal to set for yourself if you are not already at 10 recommendations. Start by giving first, you will immediately get some back. LinkedIn suggests that you recommend the person back when you receive one. Focus on giving and you will find that naturally your number of recommendations goes up. If you do have people in your network that you could start with to ask them, then great but only really ask people who have either already emailed you with great feedback on what you did for them or people who have written a testimonial that you already use on literature or on your website and ask it they would mind creating one for you on LinkedIn.