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How do I evaluate a LinkedIn invitation to connect?

I've been getting the hang of LinkedIn as a more professional alternative to Facebook and am a bit baffled: is there some sort of best practice to quickly evaluate a potential link when I don't recognize their name?

Dave's Answer:

Hmmm.... LinkedIn as a more professional alternative to Facebook. I think I can live with that, though I know just as many people who do business on Facebook than on LinkedIn, and Facebook certainly has a larger pool of people (100 million versus 33 million). On the other hand, Facebook is a mostly social site whereas LinkedIn is much more focused on your career and the job market.

Be that as it may, you probably don't really care which one I like better and use more often (Facebook, but I didn't say that, did I?) other than to know that you can tap into my experience as a long-time LinkedIn user.

Here's what I typically see when I log in to Facebook:

If it's someone I recognize, it's easy: click on the "take action" link adjacent to that person's request and you'll see a couple of easy responses:

Not sure who someone is, though? Well, here's where we get into the philosophy of LinkedIn and, more generally, how to work with social networks. Some people will automatically accept any invitation they receive, using the (quite reasonable) logic that the bigger their pool of connections, the more people they gain access to when they need to find someone or do searches. Others, however, take the opposite tact and only connect to people that they know and would feel comfortable recommending. The former tend to have really big networks, while the latter are often characterized by their dozen or two high quality links.

Quality over quantity. Both work, but it's good to be consistent.

To learn more, click on "Invitation to connect", and you'll jump to a second page that has the specific invitation message they sent you, as well as a bit more information about them:

Here's the trick: put your cursor on their name and you'll get a pop-up that has a nice summary of their current professional situation:

Now I bet you have enough information to intelligently decide whether you want to accept the invitation to link or give 'em the boot.

Btw, Jeff, it's a best practice to write a more personal invitation message, so that it's immediately obvious to the person receiving the invitation to connect how you know them and why it makes sense professionally to connect. But I'm a nice guy (and know Jeff!) so I linked anyway. This time.

One final note: LinkedIn has three possible responses to a link invitation. "Accept", "Don't Know" or "Archive". The first means, yes, you want to connect. The second means "don't connect and don't let them request we link again" (think of it as a sort of digital blacklist) while the third means that you want to just ignore the invite.

That's how I work through my never empty list of invitations to connect on LinkedIn. I hope it's helpful.

And speaking of helpful, my site's a good place to get linkedin help and you can also find me on LinkedIn too, of course.

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Categorized: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Social Network Help (Article 8659)
Tagged: facebook, linkedin, social networking
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Comments

Wow, I'm famous!

Thanks for the add, Dave. :)

I thought I'd respond to your comment about a best practice being to write a more personal invitation message. Generally, I agree.

While it takes some thought to decide who's LinkedIn requests you want to accept or not, it also takes thought to decide how to invite them. LinkedIn takes time and energy with either side of the invitation process.

A week or so ago I found myself thinking that I'd not updated my contacts on LinkedIn in a long while. So, I exported my Outlook contact list to LinkedIn and found that hundreds of my contacts were not linked. Wow, what to do?

I decided to not pester anyone that wasn't already on LinkedIn (there is a handy icon on LinkedIn that tells you whether or not the person is a current member), so that filtered the potential invitees down to just over a hundred. Then, one by one I went through the names deciding if I knew the person well enough to invite them. For me, this typically means that I've met or worked with the person two or three times and/or maybe we had a single very good conversation and saw eye-to-eye. In Dave's case, we met initially when he and I were helping out OTO Software with their angel pitch and more recently when we both were critiquing TechStar teams' angel pitches.

Using this as my bar, I went down this list and decided to invite a fairly large group of people; after all, it had been a while since I'd updated my contacts.

I really had two choices: 1) Either write a general invite message, or 2) Write personal messages to each person. I didn't have the time to accomplish choice two. Writing a truly personal message to over a hundred folks would have been too much. I would have just given up. So I went with choice one reasoning that each of the folks I was inviting would (through Dave's aforementioned techniques) remember me and add me. So, that's what I did.

You can see the difficulty one faces when trying to update any sort of social network. It takes a lot of effort to keep them update and thus useful.

As Dave suggests, I also recommend folks use a more personal message when inviting, especially if the person is not likely to remember you. Of course, this is much easier when inviting in small batches.

I suspect that this is a challenge that LinkedIn and others are tackling – making it easier to keep your social graphs up-to-date, so you don’t fall as far behind as I did.

Maybe there’s a business opportunity there?

Posted by: Jeff Herman at December 19, 2008 11:32 AM

Well said, Jeff. I didn't mean to make you feel bad, just wanted to point out that this was the "receiving end" of those pesky invites. :-)

Posted by: Dave Taylor at December 19, 2008 3:37 PM

One thing I would like to point out is that LinkedIn requires users to indicate what "reasons" they would like to be contacted for. There are about 8-10 different choices such as "getting back in touch", "career opportunities", "consulting opportunities", "reference requests", etc. So it would seem LinkedIn wants us to look at the invitation request and see if it falls under the reasons the recipient has listed.

As Dave recomended each person should establish their own philosophy based on their own goals for using LinkedIn.

Here would be my advice for anyone using Linkedin for Business:

I recommend not being serendipitous about forwarding invites. It is not your job to be a gate keeper for your friends and contacts. How can you presume to know who I might want to connect with? What is the worst that can happen? If the introduction/message is something I didn’t want then I just take 3 seconds to delete it.

Also I would add that you need to view building your network from a long term perspective. For example with myself, Perhaps today other recruiters might be my competition but what if a few years from now I decide to compile all of my recruiting experiences into a product or book to help fellow recruiters learn from, well then I would need to have a network full of recruiters to market the book to. Your LinkedIn network is a lifetime asset, and your goals will change many times over your lifetime so I recomend you accept all invitations and give everyone a chance.

PS - I regularly do a 90 minute presentation on Simple Advanced Techniques for Getting Business Done on LinkedIn and I will be happy to send a complimentary invitation to any of Dave's fans who support his famous coffee habit.

Happy Holidays,
Greig Wells

Dave's LinkedIn Buddy

Posted by: Greig at December 19, 2008 3:45 PM

I must say that linkedin has definitely helped me reach out to a lot of professionals online ,And since it shows up on Google.com when someone does a search on your name this definitely increases your credibility especially if you have a few of your past/present colleagues recommend you on your linkedin profile .

Posted by: Steve at December 22, 2008 2:12 PM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!