Why Should You Look For Breadcrumbs on LinkedIn?

Breadcrumbs on LinkedIn are the small indicators that people are active on the platform. This means when you’re looking to connect and engage with a person you know they will be available to talk back and engage with you. Essentially to avoid talking to abandoned accounts. Here is why you should look for these breadcrumbs on LinkedIn. 

Don’t Waste Your Time With Inactive Accounts 

We call them breadcrumbs because they lead your way back to civilisation. Back to real people you can talk with and prospect to. Without them, you could be wasting your time viewing and engaging with abandoned profiles. Not knowing if you’re actually on the right track can be time-consuming and demoralising. Spending a good amount of time looking through a profile and considering your approach before sending a request or commenting on a post with a message that will never get read. Breadcrumbs will make sure you’re spending time on the right profiles, with members on LinkedIn who will actually respond and engage with you.

What Do Breadcrumbs look like? 

Breadcrumbs can come in many forms. They can be as obvious as the green circle next to the name on their profile. Or a little harder to spot by accessing the activity on their page and noting the date of their last comment. Not a massive list of people post on LinkedIn every day. It’s what makes it a great place to promote content. But, this does make it harder to spot accounts of people who are picking up content. 

If you really want to connect with a prospect and the account seems inactive look to connect and network with their colleagues and within their industry. Just because they aren’t online all the time doesn’t mean you can’t create an awareness of who you are through active accounts. The likes, comments and shares from people they know will put you on their radar. 

Improve Your Connect Acceptance Rate 

With the connection limit on LinkedIn put into place it’s more important to connect wisely. You don’t want to waste your 100 pending per week on accounts that aren’t being used. So searching for breadcrumbs, and active accounts means your acceptances will come to a lot faster. You can even make sure you are accepted by leveraging the seven steps. 

When you get accepted as a connection your pool of requests sent out will replenish. This means the faster they act and accept the more you can send out in a week. Finding active accounts will make that accept come by a lot sooner than an account being used once per week. 

Improve Your Content Performance

When you interact with an active account, they will more than likely look at your profile and your content. This will increase your views and engagement. As long as the content speaks to them of course. Looking and interacting with these live accounts means finding them using breadcrumbs. On LinkedIn, you’re reliant on those like and comments to grow your connections and influence. It doesn’t mean you should obsess over numbers, but having a large active list of users being active on your content will make it skyrocket. 

Breadcrumbs will improve how you sell on LinkedIn. As it limits wasted time, and even shows you who you should be targeting. They are an effective way to optimise your time on LinkedIn.