A few years into blogging on my own site, I started looking for other places I could share my writing and thinking. I had one particular publication in mind, but it was a big-name outlet that seemed unreachable. I was daunted by the challenge, but couldn’t help looking on LinkedIn to see if I knew somebody who knew somebody at the publication. While some 2nd- and 3rd-degree connections popped up, they were all too distant or tentative to ask for introductions. When I did see someone I knew well enough to ask for an introduction, his relationship to that person was too tenuous to produce a response.

Finally, after two years of intermittent searching, I found a promising opportunity: a senior executive at the publication I was trying to reach showed up as a 2nd-degree connection of a close colleague and mentor. I called my colleague to ask whether he knew this exec well enough to make an introduction. He did indeed, though he hadn’t realized that his former colleague was now working at the company I’d targeted. He was happy to make the introduction and, like any good mentor, even offered to fine-tune my self-description before forwarding it.

I was on the phone with the exec less than a week later, and less than four months after getting that introduction through LinkedIn, my first blog post went up on the publication’s site.

That story illustrates not only what LinkedIn can do for you in terms of making a new connection, but also what it can’t. Thanks to overfilling my network with tenuous connections when I was a LinkedIn newbie, I got a lot of unusable suggestions in my searches for an entry point into an organization I was interested in. But when I finally did get a useful connection, it was one I would never have discovered without the help of LinkedIn: though my colleague/mentor knew I wanted to write for this particular publication, even he didn’t realize he had a contact who could help me do it. LinkedIn is an indispensable tool for today’s professionals because it can expose relationships and opportunities that were invisible in the pre–social networking world.

FROM A LINKEDIN USER: When all the employees in an organization are on LinkedIn, the company benefits from their personal connections as much as their skills. The company can leverage those connections to grow their client base, provide a high level of customer support, and gain access to an exponentially large candidate pool from which to source new talent. Employers get the biggest benefit from LinkedIn when they ask employees to maintain active profiles, and provide LinkedIn best practices for new hires as part of the onboarding process.—Chip Luman, COO, HireVue

Of course, it takes more than identifying a potential connection to make it happen. My introduction worked because it was carefully crafted (by me and the person introducing me) and because what I offered really was a fit for the publication’s audience. LinkedIn can open up possibilities, but it takes work and diligence to make them come to fruition.

Making Use of LinkedIn Introductions

LinkedIn can help in most situations where you need to meet or find a specific professional. Here are a few of the most frequent scenarios:

Job hunting. The most obvious reason to use LinkedIn is if you’re hunting for a new job. But in the professional world, many of the best career moves are made by people who aren’t job-hunting but get recruited by word-of-mouth or based on their demonstrated talents. That’s why it’s crucial to think of yourself as living in perpetual job-search mode, and keep your LinkedIn profile up-to-date so that it reflects where you want to go in your career.

When you are applying for a job (whether on LinkedIn or elsewhere), use LinkedIn to search for someone in the organization—or better yet, the department—you are applying to, and ask a trusted colleague for a personal introduction. Once you’ve been introduced, you can ask your new inside contact for background or context on the position.

Don’t limit your LinkedIn use to searching and applying for posted positions. Think about what kind of position you want and identify specific people who can help you plan that shift, including people who may not work for a potential employer, but will have useful perspectives on how to get where you want to go. Reach out and ask for enough LinkedIn introductions so that you can book a new meeting or phone call every week (or if you’re actually out of work, every day). Your goal is to expand your network with people who will know you’re job hunting and can point their colleagues your way if they hear someone is hiring.

Sales and opportunity targeting. Any smart salesperson will tell you that selling is all about relationships. So use LinkedIn to connect with people on the basis of some common interest or person you both know. Just as important, think carefully about whom to target: What kind of person, in what kind of role, has been responsible for approving your last ten, twenty, or one hundred sales? Is that the same kind of person who is your typical entry point into a client organization? Know who your clients and purchasers are and study their LinkedIn profiles; then reverse-engineer the advanced search criteria that would find them on LinkedIn. Use those same search criteria to find new people like them and then reach out to them with the targeted approach outlined above.

Hiring employees, contractors, and suppliers. Your LinkedIn network can help you make that brilliant hire or find that reliable vendor, but only if you do your homework by thinking carefully about what exactly you are looking for. LinkedIn can help with the process of clarifying your thinking: look at the LinkedIn profiles that come closest to your mental picture of whom you’d like to hire and reverse-engineer your posting. Once you’ve got your position or request for proposal clearly specified, use LinkedIn to identify who in your network might know the kind of person or company you’re looking for. Again, do a very targeted LinkedIn search for what you want (for example, M&A specialists based in Chicago) and then see who you know who knows people like those you’re looking for. Once you’ve got your preferred candidate, use LinkedIn to get third-party verification of her talents.

FROM A LINKEDIN USER: I only hire people who are personally recommended by someone I know, because you really really don’t know people you don’t know. Even though we all know that we have private lives and secrets, we somehow assume that an interview process will somehow reveal secrets, problems, and shortcomings. But there is no substitute for time or experience; thus there is no substitute for a recommendation from someone you know and trust of someone they know and trust. LinkedIn helps me put that philosophy into practice because it amplifies connections with people I know and trust in a professional context, and extends my reach. I can identify all the people who are just one degree away from someone I know and trust, and for whom I can therefore get the kind of trusted personal reference I rely upon.—Doug Richard, founder, School for Startups

Finding experts, speakers, and contributors. If you are looking for a subject-matter expert to speak at an event or give a quote for a story or report, a targeted LinkedIn search can make fast work of it. Search for somebody who has the relevant keywords in his or her profile and the title or seniority level you’re looking for. There’s no shame in admitting you only want to quote people who are vice presidents or CEOs. If you’re looking for a speaker, include “speaker” in your search terms and look for endorsements of this person’s past appearances. Whether you’re writing a story or planning a conference, make sure you validate anybody’s LinkedIn profile with a little Google searching. Somebody may describe herself as a professor at Stanford, but if she’s not listed in the faculty directory, you may be dealing with an occasional guest lecturer who’s creative in her self-description.

TIP: If you’re a premium user, you can save and organize an unlimited number of LinkedIn profiles. When you find a useful profile, save it. Your collection of saved profiles can include both people to whom you’re connected and people you haven’t met but may want to reach out to. Once you’ve got a profile saved, stash it in a folder by using the profile organizer (under profile/profile organizer). You can create folders for specific industries, cities, or topic areas you cover and easily find everyone you’ve looked at without having to search all over again. Depending on the level of service you pay for, you can have anywhere from five to seventy-five different folders.

These are only a few of the most common uses for LinkedIn introductions. As you gain experience conducting LinkedIn searches and asking for personal introductions, you will find more. As a professional, your network is as much a part of your professional value as are your skills and talents. By documenting and organizing that network in LinkedIn, you make it visible as a professional asset and get more use out of your network yourself.

How to Find New Connections on LinkedIn: Advanced Search

The key to unlocking LinkedIn’s power for introductions is making smart use of advanced search. (Just click the “advanced” link that appears on most LinkedIn pages to the right of the search box in the upper-right corner.) You may find it worth investing in premium service, since it will allow you to fine-tune your search with premium filters and display more search results.

Useful advanced search criteria include:

• By company. If you want to work for or sell to a specific company or organization, LinkedIn is your best bet for finding a way in.
• By industry. LinkedIn has a list of almost 150 industries; you can limit your search to one or more of these, so (for example) you can look for introductions specifically in banking and financial services.
• By connection. You can limit your search to 1st-, 2nd-, and/or 3rd-degree connections. I often begin a search by looking at my 1st-degree connections, just to remind myself whom I personally know in a given industry or city. If I’m trying to expand my network with new connections or introductions, I focus on 2nd-degree connections. I only include 3rd-degree and group members in my search results if I have a very specific target in mind, and then only if I’ve struck out in searching for 1st- and 2nd-degree connections.
• By job. You can focus your search on people in a specific role or function. The quick, dirty, and cheap way to do this is by entering keywords in the “title” field, and setting it to “current” (as opposed to “current or past”). For example, you could use that approach to search for people with titles that include “vice president” and “marketing.” If you pay for premium service, you can narrow your focus by using search filters that focus your search by seniority (for example, searching for anyone who is a CEO or vice president) or by function.
• By location. You can limit your search to a specific country or (in selected countries) a specific city. If you’re visiting Egypt, you can search for anyone in your LinkedIn network in the entire country. If you’re relocating to London or New York, you can narrow your search to anywhere from ten to a hundred miles of a specific zip or postal code.
• By alma mater. Enter your college or grad school in the “school” field to limit your search to your fellow alumni. Depending on your school, you may need to enter its name in quotation marks; for example, enter “Boston University” in quotation marks so that your search is limited to BU, rather than showing you alumni of any school with Boston in the name.

TIP: If you went to a school with strong alumni ties, you may want to do a periodic dig through its alumni profiles. From the “contacts,” drop down in the LinkedIn top nav bar, choose the name of the university network you want to browse (you’ll have to add your alma mater to your profile first, which typically requires some form of verification). Once you bring up a list of your entire alumni network on LinkedIn, you can continue to drill down by the other criteria described above.

Combining multiple search filters allows you to quickly find your best route into a given business target. For example, if your top sales goal for this year is to expand your client list into the health sector, and your typical purchaser is VP-level or higher, you might search for all 2nd-degree connections in the health and hospital industry who are vice presidents (either by filtering on seniority level, or including “VP” in the “title” field).

Reading Profiles and Evaluating Connections

Once you have found someone who meets your search criteria, it’s time to make sense of his or her profile. Like a résumé, a profile needs to be reviewed carefully for what it doesn’t say as much as for what it does. Look for:

Overall narrative and trajectory. Is this someone whose career adds up to a coherent story of progressively more responsible positions? If she has changed fields, was it a big leap or a logical pivot? Does the chronology suggest a lot of churn in her employment history or any gaps? All of these are clues to how much influence she has within her organization, as well as whether she’s likely to be a dependable supplier, employee, or contact.

Focus and interests. What does this person’s headline and summary tell you about how he sees himself? These are your best clues to what someone is really about. If you’re planning to pitch someone on your accounting software because he’s the vice president of finance, it’s worth noting that his career and bio focus on his compliance expertise, giving you a big hint about what to talk about in your meeting. Similarly, past publications, presentations, and employment details can all point you to the interests that could form the basis for a common connection.

Recommendations and endorsements. Focus on quality rather than quantity. Someone with a lot of endorsements and recommendations may simply be a LinkedIn machine; conversely, someone with few or no recommendations may just not be much of a LinkedIn user. What really matters is the specificity and quality of any recommendations that are there: Is this someone who evokes enthusiasm and respect? Are there recommendations that describe particular accomplishments?

Credibility. If you’re looking at a profile that makes grand claims about various accomplishments (“top seller five years in a row,” “leading expert on topic X”), you may want to determine whether this is someone who is self-aggrandizing or merely a compulsive salesperson. Look for claims that can be validated or disproven with a little Google searching or by checking this person’s visibility and influence on other social networks. If your gut tells you that something doesn’t add up, take the time to investigate.

If this makes you think twice about your own LinkedIn profile, that’s for the best. Go back and tweak your profile until you think it meets this standard. Whenever you come across a LinkedIn profile that wows you (or conversely, horrifies you), be sure to think about comparable improvements you could make to your own profile.

From Search to Introduction

Once you’ve used LinkedIn to identify someone you want to meet or connect with, you need to determine the best way of making contact. LinkedIn nudges you toward reaching out from within the site, offering you the option to “connect” (which will work only if you have some verifiable contact point, like a common alumni network, or if you have this person’s e-mail address already). The other option is to send InMail, which are internal LinkedIn messages that are allocated to you as a paid user (or purchase-able by free users), allowing you to reach people even if you don’t know them.

In most cases, however, once you find a new person you want to connect with on LinkedIn, you are actually better off reaching out through non-LinkedIn channels. For one thing, you can’t assume that people will check their LinkedIn messages as often as they check e-mail. A recent Vision Critical study found that half of LinkedIn’s users visit the site less than once a week. For another, even well-crafted LinkedIn messages may suffer from their association with the deluge of “connect with me,” “help me with my job search,” and “please recommend me!” messages that characterize a LinkedIn mailbox. Precisely because many people do take the kind of selective approach I recommend when it comes to accepting LinkedIn connection requests, you may be better off reaching out through a channel that sidesteps the whole issue of whether and how to connect through LinkedIn.

A better approach is to reach out through normal e-mail, Twitter, or (better still) a personal introduction from someone who knows you and the person you want to reach. Which of these channels you use depends on the accessibility of your target, the strength of your connection, and the nature of your interest. Making a successful approach to someone you have identified through LinkedIn means following the same best practices you’d follow to meet someone you identified in just about any other way.

TIP: A desire to expand your network is a great reason to be a blogger, podcaster, or YouTuber. If you’ve got an established presence on social media—even a modest one—then asking for an interview can be a useful way to get in the door and get acquainted with just about anyone. No, you can’t follow up that interview with a sales pitch, but if you’re looking to build long-term relationships, it can be a great starting point.

The best way to meet someone new via LinkedIn is through a personal introduction from whoever knows you and the person you want to reach. In the case of 2nd-degree connections, that is pretty straightforward: e-mail or call the person you know in common and ask whether he is in a position to make an introduction. A few things to keep in mind before asking:

Be clear about why you want the intro. It’s one thing to ask someone to introduce you to someone you simply want to meet; it’s another thing to ask someone to introduce you to someone for a sales call. Make your long-term game plan clear: “I’m considering making a career transition, so I’m trying to meet more people working in higher ed to see if that feels like a potential fit.”

Make the introduction easy. Help your contact make the introduction by drafting an introduction she can simply forward, while making it clear she shouldn’t feel as if she needs to use the intro verbatim. That introductory text should read something like: I’m writing to introduce Lois Lane. Lois and I worked together at the Daily Planet, where we collaborated on a few features. Lois has recently moved to New York and asked me if I might introduce her to you since she’s a big fan of your work and eager to get a feel for the NYC media scene. Would I be able to put her in touch with you directly so that she could meet with you to get your perspective?

Protect your contacts. Don’t jeopardize your existing relationships by asking for frequent introductions (more than one or two a year is too much to ask of anyone but the closest colleagues and friends) or by making them feel cornered into making introductions. Always give your contact an easy way to say no (“I more than understand if you’re not able to make an introduction right now”).

Thank your contact. Once you’ve been successfully introduced, be sure to let your contact know how the meeting or conversation went. Let her know that her introduction mattered and consider sending some gesture of appreciation, whether that’s a bouquet of flowers or a handwritten note.

TIP: Ask before you introduce. Since you will always give someone an out when asking for an introduction, show the same courtesy when you are making an introduction. You may think you’re doing a colleague an enormous favor by introducing him to a professional with related interests, but for all you know, your colleague is already overloaded or just dying for some uninterrupted work time. So before you make any direct introduction, ask both parties if it’s ok to put them in touch directly. Unless it’s an introduction to the President, the Dalai Lama, or Ryan Gosling, you can’t assume the introduction will be appreciated.

While personal introductions are invaluable in connecting with senior or high-profile contacts, you may often find yourself eager to connect with people who are peers. If you have reason to think that these folks will be happy to hear from you—because you have common interests or you’ve got an interesting opportunity to offer—you can approach them directly.

The easiest path for the direct approach is often Twitter, but it’s only effective among people who are regular Twitter users. If you’re a regular tweeter yourself (that is, you tweet at least a few times a week) and the person you want to reach is too, then consider reaching out with a Twitter mention and a simple message: “@newfriend Just discovered you’re a fellow Oberlin alum in social media. Would love to connect if you’re going to SXSW.” If you want to approach him with something more sensitive (like a job prospect), follow him and ask him to follow you back so you can send him a direct (private) message.

Then there’s the old standby, e-mail. A self-introduction via e-mail can work if it’s engaging and concise and conveys its key point in the subject line (“Fellow Memphis accounting exec looking for your perspective on new state regulations.”)—and if you can find your target’s e-mail address.

When you actually get that sought-after meeting, do your homework before you go. Return to your target’s LinkedIn profile for a refresher on who he is and what he’s up to. (This is good practice for any meeting or re-meeting. These days, it feels almost rude to show up for a get-to-know-you meeting without knowing the basics of someone’s job title and career.) Better yet, look at other online clues to what is on his mind or agenda, like tweets or blog posts, or media coverage of his company.

Don’t be embarrassed to admit you’ve done your homework. LinkedIn may well have tipped your new contact off to the fact that you’ve been reading his profile. A premium LinkedIn account allows a user to see people who have viewed her profile, as long as those people were logged into LinkedIn at the time (and unless they have turned off their “see and be seen” setting). But no worries: Googling someone doesn’t intrinsically qualify you as a stalker; it just makes you diligent.

If all this seems like a lot of work for an introduction—or a lot to ask of colleagues who can connect you to your targets—that’s a good thing. The chief danger of LinkedIn and other social networks lies in their potential to cheapen connectedness: to make it so easy to make new connections that we forget why we are connecting or what we hope to achieve by meeting someone new. It’s not that each new relationship needs a transactional value but, rather, that you need to have some sense of why you might want to meet or get to know someone before you reach out to them on LinkedIn. Otherwise these “connections” become metrics rather than relationships, and we forget what connection really means.