Who are your key influencers in LinkedIn?

Many people have 100’s if not 1000’s of connections on LinkedIn and keeping in contact with all of them is impossible. What if you knew who your major connections were and started building better relationships with them to reach a broader audience?

LinkedIn recently launched a new application in LinkedIn labs called InMaps. InMaps is an insight into who the major connections, bridges and influencers are in your network. People with bigger dots and their names in larger fonts have more connections (and typically more sway) in specific clusters.

At first glance the application just looks like some eye candy that lets you see your network in a different way but after further investigation, InMaps could be a great tool for a sales person that wants to maximize their social selling productivity. Every dot on the InMap besides being another point of connection also provides intelligence on how influential a specific contact has within your entire LinkedIn social graph. Paying special attention to your key influancers should be a goal in your sales profession since these connections will be able to get you introductions and spread information to much larger groups of people.

A sales person looking at their InMap can quickly identify who their key influancers are and take steps to be more engaging with them and leverage that relationship for additional referrals to new connections. This becomes more prevalent as your LinkedIn network grows but this can work if you have as little as 100 connections. Using my InMap as an example I was able to find one person that was connected to dozens of people across my network. Identifying who you are connected to in LinkedIn and how they are connected to the rest of your network gives you some great insights.