LinkedIn CRM: Using the New LinkedIn Tags to Better Browse Your LinkedIn Connections

• Tweet

• Tweet
• Buffer

LinkedIn is slowly evolving their functionality to become more like a true Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software package.  While it will be hard for LinkedIn to compete with SalesForce.com, the recent addition of the Profile Organizer as well as the more recent My Connections (also called Connections Beta) have made it significantly easier for businesses and professionals to organize their social networks on LinkedIn.  Have you started using the new LinkedIn Tags feature to start organizing your network?

The Connections Beta feature was added when LinkedIn unveiled their new User Interface.  It can be accessed by navigating to “Contacts” and then “My Connections.”  LinkedIn provided a significant upgrade in functionality by allowing you to filter through your contacts by last name, company, location, industry, and “recent activity.”  Featured prominently above all of these filter options on the lefthand side of your contacts is “Tags.”

You may be surprised to find that LinkedIn has already pre-populated some of your contacts with tags.  All of these tags are coming from one of two sources:

1. People that you recently connected with.  Depending on what you or the invitee chose to explain how you know each other, you’ll find that some of your contacts are already tagged “group members,” “friends,” “partners,” “colleagues,” and “classmates.”
2. People that are easy to associate with you.  If you have a profile which has the same school or company at the same time one of your connections was also present at, they have already been classified as “classmates” or “colleagues.”  Furthermore, while it did not tag all of the people I am connected to, some that were in a same Group were tagged “group members.”

Needless to say that if your connections didn’t fall into one of the above two situations, they were categorized as “untagged.”

Tags should be used to help you navigate through your contacts a lot quicker than you currently can.  Even with the new search filters for Connections Beta, you cannot have a filter that is a combination of location and industry.  The only way to be able to truly filter out your contacts is to create tags that are meaningful for you to be able to filter out various combinations of types of people that you are connected with.  You are allowed to create up to 200 tags, and you can even use multiple tags on a single contact.

Unfortunately, while you can manage tags for each profile on the “Contact Information” of each of your contact’s profile page or in the Connections Beta application itself, there is no way to simultaneously edit tags across multiple profiles.  This means that you’ll need to invest some time at the beginning to correctly tag all those you are connected with.  And if you have more than 50 people that are associated with a specific tag, you can’t use the handy “Send a Message” feature because of the limitation of 50 contacts per InMail.

The biggest problem, though, is that just as with the other categories, you can’t filter through your contacts using more than one tag.  I believe that this is a fatal flaw of this application, something that I hope LinkedIn will improve upon.

The Connections screen has always been a difficult to navigate and performance-wise slow application of LinkedIn.  You can relive the past by selecting “Remove Connections” to refresh your memory of how the old “address book” for your contacts worked.  While definitely a step in the right direction in terms of functionality and performance, the Connections Beta still leaves a lot to be desired to be considered a true CRM tool.

Have you been using the new LinkedIn tags to organize your connections?  What methodology do you use?  Have you found any more benefits or disadvantages other than what I have pointed out above?