I hope I got your attention with this title, but I believe we are entering a new era of social networking where people with large networks are now attempting to monetize their LinkedIn connections. And the events of today will certainly accelerate this. As you probably know from my other posts, I am a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker) and I have almost 13,000 direct connections on LinkedIn, which ranked me about #150 worldwide the last time I could confirm this on LinkedIn (since they changed the search application several weeks ago it is now impossible to check this easily). However, …
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I have recently heard that every second a new member is joining LinkedIn. This is an incredible testament to the the growing popularity of LinkedIn. On the other hand it is a reminder to me that there are still lots of questions out there for beginners that may not be necessarily covered on my blog…so today I wanted to attack one of them. This is an actual question that I answered on LinkedIn recently. And, indeed, when I first joined LinkedIn I was a little intimidated by the profiles of people that showed that they were a member of all …
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I got asked this today by someone who connected with me on LinkedIn, and I believe it is a question that a lot of you have, but don’t necessarily know who to ask. As you can imagine, there is no simple answer for this question, and it will depend on why you are on LinkedIn in the first place and what your objective is. But let’s take a closer look as to why you would have lots of connections, how to deal with them, the potential that they have, and finally my simple answer to your question.
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I often see this question of “What is a LinkedIn LION?” on the LinkedIn Answers section, and I already provided an answer on this definition back when I first started this blog in the summer of 2008. It was an honor that the author of the first real good book on LinkedIn, I’m On LinkedIn…Now What?, Jason Alba, quoted me in his blog when he blogged about the same issue: http://imonlinkedinnowwhat.com/2008/07/31/im-a-lion-hear-me-roar/.
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I started out on LinkedIn not knowing anything about it, gradually starting my network by connecting with past colleagues and classmates and then expanding my connections to include those with similar interests and open networking ideas. When I first hit the 3,000 invitation limit, I was shocked that there was a definitive number put on the number of invites someone could send out. And why 3,000? Of course, when you have more than 500 connections and they only display “500+” on your profile, you are being told, in essence, that you don’t need more than 500 connections. They have been …
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If you are like me and are maxxed out at 50 LinkedIn Groups and do a monthly check on your group membership as I recommend, you may notice that your 50 groups are now down to 49 or 48. What happened? And what should you do? I keep my membership information on an excel spreadsheet, so I always know when I have been removed from a group, and this has happened to me a few times. Hey, I am not a spammer nor am doing anything bad Here are some reasons why this happens, based on my own actual experience:
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Just got this question from a new member of my LinkedIn network today, so I thought I would share my answer with everyone. If you have something you want to tell everyone, or something that you want to sell, it makes sense that you want to go beyond your first level network to the millions (in my case almost 18 million) of people that are in your 2nd degree and 3rd degree network. But how to contact those in your 2nd degree and 3rd degree network directly, all at once, in an efficient manner?
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Just as everyone has a good book that they could write, everyone has a good LinkedIn group that they can create. I am a believer that everyone has a niche that they have special expertise in, and thus you can argue that everyone should have their own LinkedIn group. For whatever reason you are on LinkedIn, if you are looking to connect with similar minded people, there is no better way to do this than to start your own LinkedIn group. Live in a region where there is no LinkedIn group? Start one. Work for a company that doesn’t have …
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I wrote a post several months ago on “How Do I Know if My Intended Recepient Recived My LinkedIn Invitation?” that I updated today that also touched upon this subject, but an hour after I wrote that, I realized that recently a lot of my LinkedIn invitations have bounced. What is the statistical trend here? What could be the cause of this?
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As I mentioned in previous posts, LinkedIn Groups allow you to be virtually connected to a number of people that share the same interest. The largest group, Executive Suite, has _95,000_ members as I am writing this blog…that is more than double the number of connections that the most connected user, Ron Bates, has! If you join this group, you will be able to directly send an E-Mail as well as invite, without knowing the E-Mail address of, anyone in this group! Whether or not you use groups as part of your invite strategy is another story, but the ability …
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