Growth Hacking… LinkedIn?
For the past few months, we’ve been experimenting with different ways to grow JournoRequests.com (a service that delivers PR opportunities from Twitter to your inbox) — and trying to avoid paying for Facebook or Google ads.
Our latest experiment is LinkedIn. Personally, LinkedIn always seemed to be about maintaining professional connections rather than marketing, although one feature they have has stood out: Who’s viewed your profile. Every time I get that kind of notification, I’m curious to see who has viewed my profile what it is they do. It’s just human nature. What if we could use this to get people interested in our B2B product?
To test this out, I wrote a barebones script—it would visit profiles of PR agencies one after another, in the hope that they would look at my profile, see my headline and sign up if they thought it was relevant to them.
My cofounder Ed and I both ran this script, coupled with a free trial of LinkedIn Premium* and were astonished at the results. After a week of running, we noticed a considerable increase in sign ups per day and even had messages from LinkedIn users asking us about our product.
As it seemed so useful for us, we felt it might be useful for others as well and so finished the product with some frog-tastic UI. You can find Profile Hopper, a chrome extension, at www.profilehopper.com.
To use it, just search for keywords that are relevant to you/your startup and start hopping. You’re limited by the number of profiles you can view per day, but if you’d like to try out more views (or hops), email me at harry |at| journorequests |dot| com and I’ll be happy to upgrade a few people for free.
Hope you find it useful!
* from our experience, Profile Hopper works best with LinkedIn Premium as you have an unlimited amount of searches (profile views) per day. When we ran Profile Hopper on free LinkedIn accounts, we quickly hit a ‘commercial use limit’ barrier after roughly 20–30 views per day.
What are your experiences with using LinkedIn to promote your product? I’d love to know — message me here or on twitter at @hyharryhuang
