How to grow your LinkedIn network without going to jail

By Neil Patrick

Building your network on social media and especially LinkedIn is a great way to increase your career opportunities as I described here. But if you send out invitations to connect without enough care, you’ll not see much return on the investment. In fact, if you are really careless, you could even end up in LinkedIn jail!

The ever insightful Stacy Donovan Zapar has provided some very helpful pointers here into the various types of LinkedIn jail and how to get out.

But I am sure you’d much rather never go to jail in the first place, so here are my tips on one key aspect.

How can you make new connections without risking the dreaded IDK (I don’t know this person) response?

The current assessment is that gaining just 5 IDK responses to your invitations to connect will result in your LinkedIn account being ‘restricted’, meaning that for all future invitations you send, you’ll have to include the person’s email address.

So here are my thoughts on how to send invitations to connect safely.

I get an increasing number of invitations to connect. That’s great, but there are a few that I pass over. I never hit the IDK button, but not everyone can be trusted to do that.

Like anyone would, when I receive an invitation to connect from someone I don’t already know, I make judgements about them based on what I can see on their LinkedIn profile.

Reading various other posts about how to set up a great LinkedIn profile, in practice I apply some different criteria to who I connect with.

Here’re the things I don’t worry about:

Some profiles are so packed with information that it would take me too long to read it all. But that’s not a reason to decline an invitation in my view. It just means I simply skim read it. And too much info is better than too little. Once we get more engaged, this stuff will all be dealt with as needed.

Some don’t have a personal photograph - just the bubble head or a company logo. Not best practice agreed but neither is it a reason to decline. I have quite a few great contacts who usually through shyness don’t include a personal photo.

Some people are at an early stage in their careers. So they don’t have a lot of accomplishments yet and I understand that. So that’s not a reason to decline them either. In fact, I interpret this as a great opportunity to be of help to that person and build our relationship.

So what are the reasons I do decline invitations to connect?

There’s never a single reason, but almost always, it’s a combination of some or all of the following:

No recommendations

I don’t care if you’ve got 20,000 Linkedin connections. I care what they think about you. And if only one or two people think enough of you to provide a recommendation, I only have what you say about yourself to go on when I make that judgement. And some people are let’s say extremely “creative” with the descriptions they apply to themselves.

More often than not, such connections immediately bombard me with spammy updates which just fill my homepage with junk. No thanks.

In my view, someone who boasts about thousands of connections, but has no recommendations, is just collecting connections at a frantic pace in the belief that this will give them status and kudos on LinkedIn. If they are not engaged with the community, neither are they likely to engage with me.

On the other hand, if a dozen or more people who are clearly professionals say some good things about you, I will take you much more seriously. 

You say you are a LION

In case you’re not yet familiar with this acronym, it stands for LinkedIn Open Networker. This is a tricky one. I consider myself an open networker. In other words, I am happy to connect with MOST people even if I’ve never met them before.

And this includes LIONS.

But even so, I still apply some filtering. If someone's headline shouts, “I’m a LION and I’ve got 50,000 connections”, I am likely to look much more closely at them before deciding whether to accept or move on. Especially if they have very little on their profile to suggest why they deserve and are engaged with so many connections.

 
They don’t include a personal message as to why they wish to connect with me

This doesn’t have to be much. Just including my name in the message and an explanation as to how you found me would suffice. But still at least half the invitations I receive show no such courtesy or interest. How can I be expected to think you are someone who is likely to engage with me or anyone else if you can’t even invest the effort to write a single sentence? 

We have no shared interests at all

I apply very generous criteria to this. I think one of the great things about LinkedIn is how it can broaden our network beyond our normal sphere of influence. So if someone has a different industry background, that’s great. If they are at a different career stage, no problem.

On the other hand, if we appear to have nothing in common and no shared interests, then I wonder why the invitation was sent? Especially if any of points 1,2 or 3 above also apply.


So these are the criteria I apply in accepting or declining invitations to connect on Linkedin with people I’ve never met or engaged with on other social media platforms.

And I am sure that I’m not alone in applying such criteria. If that is the case, then it is really very simple to build a great network with new connections on LinkedIn.

Just avoid the traps above.

So: 

Make sure you've got some recommendations on your profile

These don’t have to be amazing or long. Just someone else’s positive comments about you. And you’ll find most people you already know will be happy to provide you with a recommendation if you help them out by providing a draft of the sort of thing you’d like them to say. This makes it easy and quick for them to just do any editing they’d like and post it. So a big task is reduced to a couple of minutes. 

Don’ t assume that someone will choose to connect with you just because lots of others have

I think if the most interesting thing about you is how many connections you’ve got, then something’s adrift somewhere.

I also have a feeling that as the number of LIONS grows and we all get bit tired of the game, the folk who just build huge numbers of connections and do nothing else will become more and more sidelined. We'll see...

Show everyone you invite to connect the courtesy of telling them why you’d like to connect

It doesn’t have to be anything world changing. Just be open and honest about why you'd like to connect, show that you know a little about them and compliment them a bit. Flattery works wonders with most of us! 

Especially if the person has a different area of professional interests to yourself, then the reason for the invitation really does need some justification. So this point is especially important in such cases. 

Finally avoid overt self promotion on LinkedIn

Networking and marketing are not the same thing and in an understandable drive to control spamming, the Linkedin police are getting more and more sensitive to promotional posts. So save your marketing and promotional efforts for discussions one to one with your contacts not on LinkedIn.

Do you agree with my criteria? Or do you apply different ones? I’d love to hear what criteria you apply and will be happy to post them here. Please share your thoughts below!