Linkedin is continually improving its platform. Sometimes this means that really useful and popular elements are withdrawn from free account holders and made available to Premium, paying customers only. Advanced Search is one such feature and, according to a few friends, it will be withdrawn from free accounts very soon. So, if you were thinking about creating some free focused marketing lists from your LinkedIn connections you better act fast before your account is ‘improved’. Do this….

If you have attended any of my ‘Leveraging LinkedIn’ talks you will know that I am a big fan of the Linkedin ‘Advanced Search’ functionality – especially when used with ‘Boolean Logic Operators’ such as AND, OR, NOT to refine searches. This is especially useful in the ‘Keywords’ or ‘Title’ fields for free Linkedin account holders.

Although we can only save 3 defines advances searches, as free users, we can always delete a search once we have either sent those people a personalised invitation (because that creates a record in your messages module) or created the contact info in our own contact management system.

If you want to see how this can work for you before LinkedIn pulls the plug just search for something like ‘using boolean operators in linkedin’ – it is easy, but you won’t have much time!