This week my Linkedin network broke 1700 connections. That does not make me the most connected person (by a long shot) but it puts me well past the average user with 100-400 connections. Several people I know have commented on my growing network and have come to some inaccurate conclusions.
First, they think that a large Linkedin network is the sign of a hard core networking maven. I do try to stay connected within the Austin recruiter community and I do what I can to help recruiters find new opportunities but the bulk of my energies are spent focused on recruiting.
Second, they think that I spend a lot of time building my Linkedin network. The truth is - last March I has 135 connections and set a goal to get to 500 by Summer. Since reaching the 500 mark, I have not sent near as many invitations - maybe 10-20 per month at most.
A lot of people do not understand the value of building a large Linkedin network. For recruiters, the benefit is obvious - I have over 7 Million people in my network that I can access as potential clients or candidates. For people in other professions, you could be contacted by people wanting to do business, companies looking for new partnerships or old colleagues looking to reconnect. Maintaining relationships with people you have worked with in the past is one of the best ways to hear about a new and exciting opportunity that could advance your career.
One thing to keep in mind is that finding people on Linkedin and then contacting them outside of the Linkedin network is a violation of the terms of service and if someone complains, your account could be suspended.
There are two schools of thought on Linkedin. The original vision of the system was that people would use it to stay in touch with people that they knew on a personal basis. The alternative view is that connectivity is more valuable than familiarity and there is utility in connecting with everyone. If you subscribe to the former view, you will probably not find much value in the rest of this post. The latter view is called "open networking" and there is but one rule - if you call yourself an open networker, you should act like one. Open networkers make it easy for other people to invite them to their network usually by making their email address readily available.
(the rule of open networking is: if you represent yourself as an open networker in your profile, you must accept or archive every invite - never use the "I don't know
this person" button. It only takes five such responses to get an
account suspended)
So how do you quickly build your network? You could probably Google a better explanation, but here it is in a nutshell:
Search for people using the keyword "LION". Most of the people that turn up will have their email address visible in their profile. LION stands for "LinkedIn Open Networker". There are a lot of SEO'd imposters and wanna-be sites so follow that link for the real deal.
At this point, it is easy - grab the email addresses, paste them in the invite screen (you may need two browser screens open) and when you get six of them, send the invites. Don't worry about the first and last names - a few of the invites will fail without that info, but just move on - you want volume and quantity. Send ten invite screens and you can get up to 60 new connections. With just a little time and effort, you should be able to built your network up to 500 or so in a few weeks (or a few days for you impatient obsessives).
Take the time to go through the LION registration process - its a little inconvenient, but worth it. Next you might want to look at TopLinked and MyLink500 as getting setup on those lists and adding the right keywords to your profile will cause you to generate a lot of passive invites every day. That is the real mojo - every day I log in and accept between 4 and 25 invitations that I did not have to actively seek out. In fact, out of the 1700 people in my network, over 1000 of them were the result of other people sending me an invitation.
Bear in mind, this does not make you "networked". That is an entirely different activity. I will say that I have been surprised at the number of business opportunities that have come from people finding my Linkedin profile. Make sure your profile is up to date and accurately describes the type of contact you might be interested in. I certainly do not know each of the 1700+ people in my network, but I know quite a few and I make it a point to look at each invitation. I send a personal note to everyone who lives in Austin or who works somewhere I used to work or has some other point of interest.
Your Linkedin network is a tool. It is something like a personal search engine and everyone uses it in a different way. A significant portion of my traffic is driven by my profile and I am sure there are other interesting ways to use it.
