How To Do A Boolean Search To Find Clients On LinkedIn Fast With The Click Of A Finger

Created on: March 2, 2022
by Christopher Prouty

I'm gonna show you how to do a Boolean Search on LinkedIn so you can easily find the people who are the best potential customers for your business.

I get people asking me every day how to use LinkedIn to find new clients, and your ability to use LinkedIn search to find leads is an essential skill if you're looking to grow your business.

By the end of this video, you will understand how to use a boolean search inside of LinkedIn so that you can find the best leads for your business and you'll be able to do it in a matter of minutes.

Watch the training video here.

So whether you're brand new to LinkedIn or you've been using it for years, you're in the right place because I want to show you how to use Boolean Search in LinkedIn search to find new clients fast.

For the past 21 years, I have taught thousands of entrepreneurs and solopreneurs how to wildly grow their businesses by attracting clients through the Internet. Learning how to use Boolean Search on LinkedIn is an essential skill in growing a business.

Linkedin as a social media platform has been around for a long time, and the search function within LinkedIn is very refined, and it's something that you should be using every day as you prospect and look for new leads.

When you use a boolean expression in a search, you're actually using the results of the work of a mathematician from the 18 hundreds.

His name was George Boole, and he came up with these, what we now know as boolean expressions that result in either a true or false condition.

And we use these in search to make our searches more robust.

So let's all take a moment and express a little gratitude to George Bull from the 18 hundreds as he was working on calculus.

And he came up with what we're using today.

These boolean operators.

There are five boolean operators that we need to be aware of when we're conducting LinkedIn searches.

They are quotes, the word and the word or the word not, and parenthetical statements.

Those are statements that are inside of parentheses.

And as we get into this, I'm curious, how often do you use LinkedIn search to find prospects or leads for your business?

Let me know in the comments below, because I'm curious if you're using LinkedIn search in your business.

We're going to start our exploration of Boolean search on LinkedIn with the quotation marks.

Now, the quotation marks are super easy to understand.

When you use quote marks in a search, you're telling the search engine that this is exactly what you're looking for.

So if we were on LinkedIn and we were searching for Human Resources Director and we just put Human Resources Director into the search field, LinkedIn is going to search for the words human and resources and director, and it's going to provide us with results for all of those words, but not necessarily with those words exactly in that order.

So if you wanted to search for human resources director those words in that order, put quotes around them, and that's going to produce a set of search results for people that have the words human resources director in that order without anything in between them in somewhere in their LinkedIn profile.

Now, that might not be their current title.

If someone has moved on and they now have a different title, but they were a human resources director and they kept that in their LinkedIn profile, they're still going to show up in the search results.

Your success step here is to try putting quotes around your searches inside of LinkedIn.

The next time you do them, when you don't include the quotes, you're going to see that you have a huge amount of search results.

And when you do use the quotes, you're going to find that that set of search results shrinks just a little bit.

Don't worry about that because you're getting a more refined set of search results, and that's more important in terms of saving time for you as you're looking for leads.

The next boolean operator in LinkedIn search that I would like to talk about is the AND operator.

Now, when we use the words and or and not, we must put them in capital letters in our search.

If we put them in lowercase LinkedIn search is going to ignore them.

So put the word and in capital letters anytime you want to include multiple criteria in a list.

So in our example where we're looking for human resources director, if we wanted to look for human resources directors in the real estate niche, we could use the and operator to find that.

Now notice I'm going to use the quotes and the and operator to get a very targeted, well refined search.

So these results are showing me people on LinkedIn who have currently or have had the title of human resources director and have real estate somewhere in their profile.

You are not limited to using just a single and in your search, you can use multiple and operators in your search to continue to refine your search.

Now, LinkedIn search is going to include each of those.

So the more you use, the smaller your results are going to be.

So if we were looking for someone in human resources and in the real estate industry and they were in Miami, we would use this as the search string.

Notice the boolean operators in there.

And I'm also using the quotes to keep things very specific and very targeted and helps us refine our search.

The next boolean operator is OR and where AND helps us refine OR helps us expand our Boolean Search in LinkedIn.

So let's go to our example where we're looking for a human resources director.

Well, human resources director is just one way of writing that title.

Some people might write HR director or director of HR or director of human resources.

Notice when I said all of those, I said the word or between them.

The boolean operator OR combines things and allows you for flexibility.

So if you created a search string where you were looking for a director of human resources, you could include all of those titles connected by the word or.

And LinkedIn would find all of those for you.

And much like when we were using the and boolean operator, when you use the quotes with the or operator, some real power gets unlocked.

So using this search string here would give me a tremendous amount of flexibility and reach in looking for human resources directors.

The boolean operator OR is very inclusive.

It helps us include many different variations of a title.

The boolean operator NOT allows us to exclude certain words when using Boolean search in LinkedIn.

So when you're using the boolean operator not.

And again, this has to be in capital letters.

You're going to exclude what immediately follows the word not.

So in our example, we're looking for human resources directors, but we might not want to be targeting human resource director assistance.

So I can construct a boolean search phrase that has quotes around human resources director and then the word not and then the word assistant.

And when I conduct that search, it's going to eliminate anyone that has the word assistant in their LinkedIn profile.

Now, keep in mind, if they have assistant anywhere in their LinkedIn profile, it's going to exclude them.

So that's a limitation to using boolean searches that you need to be aware of when you're doing this.

And that brings us to the parenthetical statements in Boolean LinkedIn searches.

Now, parenthetical statements are boolean expressions that exist within parentheses.

And we put things in parentheses that are related or linked together.

I know that sounds complex, but I'm going to show you an example that's going to help bring some clarity to that.

The way that I like to do this is I put similar criteria sets inside of parentheses, for example, job titles separated by or and industries separated by or, and maybe with an and in between.

So what we're doing is we're combining multiple boolean operators and we're using parentheses to help the search engine, whether that's LinkedIn or some other search engine, better understand what it is that we're looking for.

Take a look at this example where I'm looking for human resources director or HR director, and I'm expanding my search beyond real estate into mortgage.

So I'm looking for human resources director or HR director and real estate or mortgage.

And that search statement is going to find people that have either of those titles because we used or and are in either real estate or mortgage because I used or within that statement.

And can you see how I included similar criteria inside of those parenthetical statements?

That really helps LinkedIn figure out exactly what I'm looking for as I'm teaching this to you today.

It's probably worth noting.

My University degree is in mathematics and in fact, I used to teach calculus a long time ago.

So these boolean strings, these boolean operators are like second nature to me.

I've been doing them all of my adult life in some form or another.

Boolean search might not be second nature for you and it might take a little bit of practice before you get it right.

But I encourage you to use these and also realize that as you're refining your searches, Your search sets are going to become smaller and smaller.

And that's a very good thing if you're looking for a very targeted audience.

It can also be not such a good thing if you're looking for broad reach.

So just keep that in mind as you're doing these.

These do have a place in search, but as long as you're using LinkedIn search, you're doing the right thing to help grow your business.

And of course, I couldn't be very specific on this video today because it's a video intended for a wide audience and you are unique and you have specialized and unique needs.

If you'd like to meet with me for 30 minutes to really Zoom in on this and get a customized strategy just for you and just for your business, I'd like to invite you to a 30 minutes call with me.

Here is a link to my calendar.

If you're serious about your business and you're serious about growing your business, hop on my calendar, spent 30 minutes with me and I will come up with a specialized, unique strategy just for you, something that you can use right away.

I'll see you in the very next training.