How do I use LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a popular professional social networking site that is centered around an online resume. Users "connect" to other users that they know and can recommend other people they have worked with, worked for, or hired. 

Most profiles are public, so I can search for all of the people who work at a company I'm trying to get an introduction to, find out that my good friend Bob knows the VP of Marketing, and get him to introduce me.

I keep my profile up to date with every employer and organization.

LinkedIn encourages you to connect with other people you might know at companies and organizations you've worked at in the past. By filling in your complete profile, you increase the chance that people will find you and can be sure that you are the person they are looking for. My LinkedIn profile includes my first job as a grocery bagger in high school. I usually update it promptly when something changes.

I let my connections browse through the list of my other connections.

One of the easiest ways to find more people to connect with on LinkedIn is to browse the connections of your connections (in Facebook terms, "friends of friends"). LinkedIn gives you a choice about whether or not to let your connections see the list of your other connections. By default this is turned on, but many people turn it off. I guess they are afraid that people will "steal" their contacts. But LinkedIn does a good job of policing the users against trying to connect to people you don't really know so I'm not so worried about it being abused. 

I want to be a hub that my connections use to find each other

I'm more excited about the idea that people come to me to find other interesting people. I like the idea of being a conduit and think that the benefits of that far outweigh any risks of other people stealing my contacts (this idea of the pros of sharing something publicly outweighing the cons will be a common theme in the next few posts).

I search LinkedIn to find people at companies that I want to do business with

This can be really handy for business development. It's always better to get introduced by a mutual acquaintance than to cold call someone. I rarely will request an introduction unless the person I want to reach is directly connected to one of my connections.

The goal with connections is quality, not quantity

Some people think the point of LinkedIn is to get as many connections as possible. I don't. I think the value of my LinkedIn network is dependent on the quality of the connections, not the quantity. If I have too many connections, then the various newsfeeds and other functions of LinkedIn become less useful because there is too much noise. 

My general rule of thumb on LinkedIn is to only accept connections from people that I actually know. For me, that means that we have corresponded over email, phone or in person and I would probably recognize you if I saw you. If I'm having lunch with someone for the first time, I will usually look them up on LinkedIn first but I won't request to connect until after we have had lunch and gotten to know each other a bit. This is just a rule of thumb, there are always exceptions. But please don't be offended if I don't accept your request to connect - it's just a sign that I don't know you well, not that I don't want to!

I don't accept connection requests "to grow my network." If you'd like to add me to your network, invite me out to lunch or come and meet me at Bootstrap Austin, Austin on Rails, Social Media Club, High Tech Happy Hour, or another Austin event that I attend regularly.

Also keep in mind that you don't need to be connected on LinkedIn to send messages to each other. If you want to ask me about something specific, feel free to send me a message even if we're not connected.

How do you use LinkedIn? What should I be doing differently?

Comments

[Joshua Baer]

A. Johnson,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I guess we just disagree. I feel very rude ignoring someone's request without an explanation. Often people connect with me from years ago and I have to ask them how we know each other if its not clear from their profile. I try to respond to every inquiry with a personal message and then I give them a link to this description as well. I'm not trying to make anyone feel bad or be pompous.

I'm proud of the fact that I respond to almost every inquiry I get through LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and email (other than solicitations). That said, the goal is to make other people feel like they have been treated with respect and encouraged to become a connection of mine through other means.

If you walked away feeling like I was being pompous then I'm sorry and I will think about ways to improve it.

~Josh

[Anthony Johnson]

Josh,

Although I may agree with you on many points (and believe that a common participation in such a practice would be, in general, a benefit to the LinkedIn community), some people, not in your position of great influence, also use LinkedIn to gain new connections or even to gain access to those that they may not know so well. This is sometimes referred to as, "networking." Thus, although your argument is sound, there would be no point to people using your suggested practice without consideration for those that are trying to benefit from your connections. These "networkers" are not going to have the same outlook on LinkedIn that you do. Such a unilateral argument is counter-intuitive which leads to the reason for comment: I do not believe that this blog is worthy of reference each time you get an invite. Frankly, I see it as a little pompous for you to do so. Just quietly click "no" and we will get over it. We won't be crushed by the rejection and do not need explaination. We would never have known you did it. Personally, I invite many people that I come in contact with and many people do not accept which is fine. My purpose for using LinkedIn is networking with professionals. Gaining access to individuals that may be able to influence my future. Thus, I asked you, along with close to 100 other recent contacts, to be connections. However the reason for this post is not to call you pompous. Contrarily, it is to simply inform you that this post, or at least referencing people to it, might say more than you originally intended. In the future, I hope to be Josh Baer list worthy; and, when that day comes, I now know to wait for you to dawn me with an invitation.

Best,

-A. Johnson

[duktu]

checkout how not to use Linkedin @ http://www.duktu.com/blog/?p=16

[Andrew Donoho]

Josh,

Your comments are spot on. LinkedIn is not about link quantity or trying to be a link nexus but link quality. Mark Cuban likes to talk about there being a "one shot" link. A connection that you can use one time. I view the LinkedIn introduction as one of those. While the connection may get you in the door, you have to keep the door open and you have to reflect well on your introducer and then on yourself.

The other thing I insist upon is that folks who wish to be introduced to my contacts bother to introduce themselves to me. I've had several people somehow believe that because I know someone, in one case, you, that I should just pass them on to my contact. I refused because they did not exercise the common courtesy of finding out who I was and whether I was interested in sharing my hard won network with them. (As any sales person knows, networks that work are difficult to build and maintain. They are valuable.) Just because LinkedIn makes network sharing easy, does not mean you should always facilitate sharing.

Andrew