What's With Adding Notes To LinkedIn Connection Requests?

What’s With Adding Notes To Connection Invites? 

LinkedIn apparently is testing the moderately crazy idea of restricting the number of personalized invitations you can send in a month - unless you upgrade to a premium account. 

As you can see, I have an opinion on this idea. 

First of all, the background: when you send an invitation to connect, you have the option of sending a note with the invitation. There are two lines of reasoning here, one of which is that a note is superfluous, and the other that there is an advantage in using a note. People who fall in the first camp, point out that there does not seem to be a difference in the acceptance rate for invitations with a note or without one. Most people in the “send a note” camp think the note is just good form. 

I am in the send a note camp, but as usual not for the reason most other people are. But let’s go back in time to LinkedIn as it was ten years ago. Back then, LinkedIn was very big on advising users to only connect “with people you know well, and that know you well.” This encouraged a “have a professional relationship first, and then connect '' mentality, though in reality I suspect it was to discourage frivolous connections. Over time this idea has been turned upside down. These days just about anyone will accept a connection invitation, and after that the professional relationship develops (if it does at all). 

This leads to why I like a note in a connection request. To my mind, it is the first step in developing that relationship. I find that if I include a note in the invite, and the invite is accepted, my first message to my new connection is just a continuation of the thoughts I expressed in my invite note, and I subsequently find it is much easier to start the relationship rolling with a note than without one. 

If anything, I would have expected LinkedIn to be trialing a note as a requirement for every invitation. 

The other aspect I think is odd here is that in mandating you need a Premium account in order to send more of these personalized invitations each month, LinkedIn is implying that including a note is important, but has never (to my knowledge) published any data as to why including a note is better than not including one. 

Then again, maybe it’s reverse psychology and LinkedIn doesn’t want us to include notes at all. 

Do you include a personalized note in your connection requests?

Posting Content On LinkedIn Is Still An Opportunity 

I was trading messages with someone on LinkedIn after they had attended a webinar where I was the speaker. In the webinar I had commented that over 6 million people in North America had posted on LinkedIn in the preceding thirty days. The person I was trading messages with had a completely defeatist attitude. “How can I compete with six million people?” 

He had a perception problem. He was looking at it backwards. 

So I went through the math with him. He was an SEO consultant. So first I used LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator to find how many people in North America identified themselves as SEO consultants. 

That number was 3,000. 

Then we looked for the number of those consultants who had published on LinkedIn in the last thirty days.

That number was 410. 

I pointed out that this meant that only 14% of SEO consultants had posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days. If he posted anything, he was ahead of 86% of his competitors. And he should easily be able to (especially with my help) post better content than half of the ones who were posting. 

So let’s reframe his circumstances. Instead of moaning about how he has no chance, perhaps he should be licking his chops over discovering a way to have an advantage over 93% of his competitors.

The obligatory disclaimer: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month. 

Today’s newsletter is a shorter version of my email newsletter (this week’s email newsletter also includes my thoughts on some new Company page features and my take on LinkedIn hitting one billion members) Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/