Inviting people to join you at LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a marvellous way to grow your online business network and get to know people from all over the world. But there are also very quick ways to annoy people as well. And one of those ways is right at the beginning of the process – inviting others to connect with you.
LinkedIn encourages you on your homepage to connect with others you know but they don’t really give you much information on the ‘how-to’ process in doing this. So I want to save you some angst and help improve things for you.
When you put in someone’s email address and name and click on that button to invite them, what happens? Well, if you’ve not actually explored what the invitation says (and many don’t in the early stages) you might be surprised to find that this is all it is:
Kathie,
I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.
-Steve
Nothing else. Now, when I receive that invitation it doesn’t tell me much. I can go to that person’s profile because it is linked to the invitation but if I don’t know that person, or don’t remember them, it’s not going to tell me why they want to connect. And even if I do know them, I still don’t know the reason. Having received one of these invitations proves to me very quickly that the sender hasn’t read my profile.
I do have a request on my profile that I don’t accept ‘canned’ or ‘blanket’ invitations (of which the above is definitely an example) and prefer to receive an introduction and reason for connecting. I don’t want to become just another number to people.
It’s amazing but one of two things happen when I reply to a blanket invitation, asking them the reason for their interest:
1. They ignore me and don’t respond. Their loss – they have a limited supply of invitations and have just wasted one because they didn’t want to really get to know me.
2. They come back with this amazing story of having heard about me from somewhere, or seen me at a conference, or via a forum, or perhaps they’d just been learning about the VA industry and wanted to know more. How am I supposed to read all that in the invitation they had just sent? I always accept after receiving further info – I just like to know what the interest is so that the networking process can truly begin.
So, if you’re new to LinkedIn, or just been in the habit of sending out heaps of invitations but haven’t personalised them, I encourage you to take the time to explore the process further. Building relationships are always worth spending time on.
Oh, and one other suggestion. If you see a really well-worded invitation that comes your way, don’t copy and paste it and start using it for your own – I’ve seen that happen a lot too. Once makes it special, twice makes you wonder, three times makes you realise that some people just don’t have any originality of their own!
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