Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business
Page 12
CONCLUSION
As you can see, recommendations are a form of social proof, validating your work history and expertise, and can be a very powerful addition to your LinkedIn profile. I strongly suggest you focus on a smaller number of quality recommendations instead of many lower-quality recommendations. Get at least five quality recommendations for each position you’ve held. Take time to recommend co-workers and colleagues, which adds credibility to your profile.
People will endorse you for skills because LinkedIn automatically prompts them to do it when they visit your profile. Make sure to keep your skills list updated and ordered properly so you receive appropriate endorsements.
In the next chapter, I’ll show you how to connect with others on LinkedIn so you can build a powerful professional network.
For additional updates and how-to videos, visit https://tedprodromou.com/UltimateGuideUpdates/.
Chapter 11
Connecting with Others
How many connections should you have on LinkedIn? People ask me that frequently, but there is no magic number that works for everyone. LinkedIn isn’t a popularity contest, where the person with the most connections wins, and it isn’t like Twitter, where Lady Gaga has more than 77 million followers but has no idea who they are. LinkedIn is about building one-on-one relationships and connecting with individuals, which is very different from the mass communication of Twitter.
There are two distinct approaches to networking on LinkedIn. The first, which is used by most members, is called strategic networking, where you focus on quality, not quantity. Strategic networkers usually have less than 500 people in their network and keep in touch with about 100 to 150 of them. They have a deep connection with a small number of people.
The other approach, which is often used by sales representatives and recruiters, is called open networking; this is where you cast a very wide net. Open networkers often have thousands of connections in their network because their business is a numbers game. The more people you have in your network, the easier it is to find someone to fill an open position or outreach to customers for a sale. As an open networker, you have a limited connection with a lot of people. Let’s take a look at both.
STRATEGIC NETWORKING
How many people do you think are in your professional network now? Most business people know hundreds of people and often have more than 500 contacts in their online address book. But the real question is how many of those contacts do you correspond with on a regular basis? Some people apply the 80/20 rule and estimate they correspond with about 20 percent of their professional network on a regular basis. But if you have more than 500 people in your network, you don’t have time to regularly correspond with even 20 percent of them.
A number of studies—such as “In Your 20s it’s Quantity, in Your 30s it’s Quality: The Prognostic Value of Social Activity Across 30
Years of Adulthood” Cheryl L. Carmichael, Harry T. Reis, and Paul R. Duberstein (Psychology and Aging, 2015), and “Sorry You May Have Gone Over Your Limit of Network Friends,” by Carl Bialik (The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 16, 2007)—have been conducted over the years trying to determine the optimal size of a professional network. The studies vary dramatically, with some concluding we can only maintain a stable social network of 100 people, while others suggest we can manage up to 300.
Maintaining a stable social network means we know everyone in our network and maintain regular contact with each and every individual. Maintaining a larger network requires more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms, so essentially you are almost being forced to maintain these relationships, which is not natural.
A widely accepted, landmark study by Robin Dunbar in 1992 and reconfirmed in 2007 resulted in the formulation of Dunbar’s Number, which suggests the theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable relationships is between 100 and 230. Dunbar did not specify an exact number because there are so many variables, but the generally accepted number is 150. Dunbar concluded, “This limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable interpersonal relationship can be maintained.”
Do you maintain a regular relationship with 150 people? If you work for a medium- to large-sized company and count your co-workers, you probably do. If you work for a small company, you may not. If you own your own business, you should be communicating with at least that many people on a regular basis to generate leads or find opportunities.
When you view someone’s profile who has more than 500 connections, you will only see “500+.” Once you are connected, you can view the complete list and connect with any of their connections because you will now have a 2nd-degree relationship with all of them. A great way to expand your network is by connecting with appropriate 2nd-degree relationships.
OPEN NETWORKING
Open networkers on LinkedIn are often called LIONs (an acronym for LinkedIn Open Networkers). LIONs seek to actively increase their connections by freely sending out and accepting connection invitations. LIONs generally accept invites from anyone, so it’s relatively risk-free to invite a LION into your network.
Most LIONs take pride in touting their large number of connections, much like the way celebrities compete to have the most Twitter followers. LIONs believe that bigger is better and that large networks lead to more opportunity. I don’t see as many people promoting themselves as LIONs these days, but it’s still a “thing” on LinkedIn.
How Do You Become a LION?
LION is an unofficial designation coined by people willing to connect with anyone to grow their network as large as possible. The official LinkedIn response in the Help Center is that LION is not a term endorsed by LinkedIn, but is a designation used in some user-created Groups and individual members to show that they are highly open to connecting with members they do not necessarily know, thus the acronym LION (LinkedIn Open Networker).
If you want to be recognized as a LinkedIn LION, you can add “LION” to the end of your name or your headline in your profile, as seen in Figure 11–1. Notice all the LIONs in the People Also Viewed sidebar.
FIGURE 11–1. How to Identify a LION
Being a LION can have its drawbacks. As with any website or online tool that gets popular, people start abusing its popularity. On Twitter, people have automated their tweets so they can send an endless stream of tweets 24/7. There’s also been a steady stream of Twitter spam where people create thousands of fake profiles that automatically retweet posts from popular users, adding fake links that lead to automated blogs intended to sell affiliate products. You can see this spam whenever you follow a popular celebrity on Twitter because you will see a hundred retweets in a few seconds from fake profiles all using the same profile picture.
We’re now seeing similar tricks with fake profiles on LinkedIn. Be cautious if you receive an invitation from:
■ Someone who has no or just a few LinkedIn connections. LinkedIn now warns those who don’t have any connections or are new to LinkedIn.
■ Profiles with no picture—one of my pet peeves, the incomplete profile
■ Profiles with company logos as their profile picture, which is a violation of the LinkedIn terms of service
■ Personal profiles with company names instead of a person’s name. We connect with people, not companies, on LinkedIn!
■ Profiles that use partial names or symbols in their names so they look machine generated
■ Profiles that have an SEO-optimized name, a phone number, email address, or their website URL
■ A keyword-stuffed title or summary
Do not connect with these people because they’re probably machine-generated profiles or on LinkedIn for the wrong reasons. If someone is not willing to provide their complete name and fill out their complete profile properly, they are not fit for your network.
ARE YOUR LINKEDIN CONNECTIONS REAL
PEOPLE?
Let’s say you promote your business online using SEO and paid advertising. You connect with a lot of SEO experts and online marketers on LinkedIn to find great service providers.
One day you receive an invitation from someone who has SEO in their job title; this looks inviting to you because you are looking for SEO experts to hire. This person claims they are an SEO expert (their job title and professional headline tell me) and have 127 connections. On first glance, this looks like a good fit for your network because they rank #1 when I search for “SEO expert” on LinkedIn.
FIGURE 11–2. The Profile Headline of an SEO Expert
Should you connect with this person after reading the profile headline in Figure 11–2?
If you said “no,” good for you! Let’s take a closer look at this person’s profile, shown in Figure 11–3 on page 125, and I’ll show you why they probably aren’t a good fit for your network.
This is an example of an SEO-optimized profile that contains very little information about the individual. This person claims to be an SEO expert, but there is no description in their job title under Experience. There are no recommendations, no summary, no education, and nothing that would make me want to hire this person to help me with my SEO. If the person were a legitimate SEO expert, they would at least claim their LinkedIn personal URL, add a summary with keywords, add SEO-related skills, and get at least a dozen recommendations. This person is gaming the system. I highly recommend ignoring or declining requests like this. Better yet, report them as spam so we can keep LinkedIn as professional as possible.
By the way, the first red flag? Her profile picture is a photo of Taylor Swift, and her name is listed as another celebrity, actress Sophia Bush. I really doubt Taylor Swift (or Sophia Bush, for that matter) does SEO in her spare time!
CONNECTION INVITATION ETIQUETTE
As your network grows, you will begin to receive invitations to connect from people you don’t know. When you join Groups and participate in conversations, more people will reach out to you inviting you to join their networks. What should you do?
FIGURE 11–3. This Is a Sparsely Populated LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn has simplified the process, and now you have three options when you receive an invitation instead of six. Your options are:
1. Accept. The person will immediately become a 1st-degree connection in your network.
2. Reply. You can reply to the person who invited you to connect if you are not sure you want them to become a 1st-degree connection at this time. If you just met someone at a networking event or in a LinkedIn Group but don’t know much about them, you can reply to the invitation and set up a meeting or phone call to get to know each other. I also review the profile in detail to see if they will add value to my network. After that, I will know if I want to add them as a 1st-degree connection.
3. Ignore. You have two options here: You can select “I don’t know them” or “Report as spam.” If you select “Report as spam” a message will be sent to LinkedIn so they can review this person’s profile and potentially suspend their account.
REMOVING A CONNECTION
Sometimes you connect with someone thinking she will be perfect for your network, but it turns out they are not a good fit. Sometimes your connections are overzealous, with constant invitations to webinars or live events they’re hosting. Don’t get me wrong. I love to see people actively promoting their businesses and events. I don’t mind occasional invitations if the events are interesting and related to my current position. I do mind people inviting me to weekly events and sometimes daily—especially if the events are irrelevant to my job.
If you are connected with someone you feel is taking advantage of your LinkedIn relationship, contact them and ask them to slow down or even remove you from their invitation list. Most people will get the message and stop sending frequent invitations. Unfortunately, there are those who will keep spamming you, so you will have to remove them as a connection.
You can remove a connection by going to My Network on the toolbar/menu, click See All, click on the ellipsis on the right side of the connection’s profile, and click on Remove Connection. This will remove the connection from your network without notifying them (similar to the unfriending feature on Facebook).
CONCLUSION
You now know the essentials of connecting with others on LinkedIn. It’s up to you to decide if you will build a smaller, high-quality network or become a LION and build a massive network. You know how to vet your connection invitations, so you can create the professional network that best suits your business needs.
In the next chapter, you’re going to learn about LinkedIn’s InMail, a powerful tool that will help you connect with people who are not in your 1st-degree or 2nd-degree networks.
For additional updates and how-to videos, visit https://tedprodromou.com/UltimateGuideUpdates/.
Chapter 12
Using LinkedIn InMail to Reach Out
There are several ways to contact people through LinkedIn. Each has its nuances, depending on whether the people are in or out of your network. LinkedIn is built to respect users’ privacy, so people can pick and choose who becomes part of their network and avoid being barraged by spam or people who will disrupt their business. Of course, the site does want to encourage positive connections, so it has devised a number of tools, such as InMail and Introductions, that allow users to communicate without invading anyone’s privacy.
INMAIL VS. INTRODUCTIONS
LinkedIn has changed the way InMail works and continues to adjust it in response to its users. To see the latest updates on InMail visit LinkedIn help at https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin.
If you have a basic (free) LinkedIn account, you need to upgrade to a premium account to send up to 30 InMail messages every month.
LinkedIn has a number of features to help you connect with people outside your network. The best way is via an Introduction by someone already in your network (only available on the mobile app at the time of this writing, though they may be made available to desktop users at a later date). A virtual Introduction increases your chances of connecting with that person because there is a level of trust between you and your connection and between your connection and the person you want to meet. The trust is essentially passed from connection to connection.
Introductions are free to all users. If you want to contact someone who is one or two degrees away from you, you can request an Introduction on the mobile app through one of your mutual connections who has a 1st-degree connection with that person.
WHAT IS INMAIL?
When you send email to someone you don’t know, it can be perceived as spam or inappropriate if you aren’t careful. Reaching out to people who don’t know you through normal email channels usually has a very high failure rate. How do you respond when you receive an unsolicited email from a stranger who wants to meet with you or sell you something? I rarely respond to unsolicited emails, unless something in the subject line or first sentence catches my eye. There has to be some benefit to me to make me respond.
Reaching out to someone you don’t know in a trusted community like LinkedIn is a different story. Most members of LinkedIn are reputable business professionals. You don’t expect them to bother you with emails unless they can provide value to you. Even though LinkedIn is a trusted network, it understands not all members will respect others’ privacy and may abuse the privilege of being able to reach out to one another. It designed InMail so members can contact each other while still protecting their privacy.
There are several ways to get and pay for InMail if you have a premium account (it’s no longer available if you have a basic account). If you have a LinkedIn Premium Business subscription, you receive 30 InMail credits per month. I have a legacy premium account, so I receive 10 InMail credits each month, which roll over to the next month if I don’t use them. I can accumulate up to 15 credits in my account. The Sales Navigator Professional subscription gives you 30 credits per month,
depending on your subscription level.
What Are the Benefits of InMail?
In addition to helping you outreach and connect with people while respecting their privacy, InMail offers several valuable benefits.
First, it helps you reach out to passive job candidates. For example, let’s say you’re looking for a new network engineer and you read some great responses from a really sharp network engineer in the Groups section of LinkedIn. You want to contact this person because they’d be a perfect fit for your company. They’re not actively looking for a new job, but you see that they have Career Opportunities listed in the See Contact Info section in the right column of their member profile page. They are not in your network, and you don’t have any connections in common, so you can’t connect with them, but you can still reach out with a personal message through InMail to see if they’d be interested in your network engineer position. Compliment some accomplishments you found in their profile, so they’ll feel honored that you know so much about them. This will make them more responsive to your InMail.
You can also reach out to active candidates who listed Career Opportunities in the Contact Settings section at the bottom of the member Profile or have written that they are actively looking for a new opportunity. If they have LinkedIn Premium Career accounts, this will be noted by badges in their profiles so you know to reach out to them using InMail.
Say you are writing an article about social media and are looking for experts to interview. You search for social media experts on LinkedIn and find a few who seem to fit your criteria. You have no connections in your network to make Introductions, and they are not in any Groups with you. Even if you were in a Group with them, they don’t allow emails from other group members unless you are already connected with them because they value their privacy. You can still use InMail to reach out to them even though you do not have a relationship with them.