I was wondering – how do you find small pools of people on LinkedIn?
Sure, it’s easy enough to find “Software Developers” (113,240), “Engineers” (2,125,674), and “Managers” (7,981,035), but what about people who have uncommon names, titles, and tags…
So come along with me while I try to find search criteria with at least one, but no more than ten profiles that match.
The search
This isn’t news to anyone who normally reads this blog or has the benefit of my book (The LinkedIn Personal Trainer), but it generally bears repeating…
I’m not using the generic search – I’m clicking through to the “Advanced” search.
Title
Since I brought you into this post with titles, I thought I might start my search with titles as well.
Here it is:
Picolo
And there’s just one of them.
What it means – I’m not quite sure. I started with some ideas about what might be scarcely represented within profiles and the term Flute resulted in over a thousand hits, so I thought I’d go smaller…
Last Name
Let’s just make our way through these categories.
My own last name has less than two dozen, but more than ten. I thought that was rather:
Quaint
Two of them have profiles on the system.
First Name
This was a bit hard – how could I come up with a not-so-representative first name?
I can’t quite give you the logic behind it, and I was sure there wouldn’t be any, but:
Mibs
Belongs to eight individuals on the system.
Company
Well now I’m just getting a little punchy.
I settled on this term:
Imbecile
And found two of them on the system – because dumb and idiot had hundreds…
School
So I got a little flighty and thought of:
Fairy
And found one.
Keyword
I figured this category would just be hard – these words can be anywhere within an individual’s profile…
My first couple attempts found no success with “fitmaster” and “flymaster” but this one:
Funmaster
Had success, I found one profile with it. And it’s apparently a booming item because before I could publish this article, I checked my facts again, and now there are two!
Get out of obscurity
So yes, there are ways to distinguish yourself – be creative about it.
Here’s one thought though – just like one of the best ways to become a millionaire is to be born to millionaire parents, you might not want to change your last name – unless you’re headed to Hollywood…
(And yes, everybody with a former or maiden name can in fact enter that under the Edit Profile detail section;-)
To your continued success,
steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock