Am I Doing LinkedIn Wrong?

Am I Bad at LinkedIn?

It’s possible (in fact, based on some of the analytics I see, it’s probable) that you have gotten to this post via LinkedIn. I generally post the announcement of new blog entries to Twitter and LinkedIn and get some interest from Twitter, but more often I get a bit more “click-through” from LinkedIn. I’m not entirely sure why, but there it is.

When I post to LinkedIn, I usually take time to scroll through and see what other folks I am connected to are up to. I often find this to be interesting, and if I have something to say I try to comment because I know how gratifying it is when someone comments on one of my posts. A few times this has turned into a full back and forth conversation, which usually gets moved to LinkedIn messaging for further discussion.

“Well, I checked every inbox across all my apps this morning. Time to get to work - it’s only 3:00 pm!”

Someday I will write a post about my intense displeasure due to the many varied modalities of communication that I constantly monitor that I would prefer were aggregated into one location that I could manage, but aren’t because of restrictive (or non-existent) APIs that force you to go to the app in question to use the messaging natively because they want to get that traffic in order to ferry you advertisements. However, now isn’t the time for that. Instead, I will say that though I don’t monitor the LinkedIn messaging that fastidiously because I have other things in life that I prioritize, some of these back-and-forth conversations have been quite fruitful and I’ve been able to reconnect with several folks I either used to work with or knew from various professional capacities. In general, I’ve appreciated that folks can message me without knowing my university or personal email addresses. Of course, sometimes beneficial reconnections are not what I get in LinkedIn messaging – and I’m betting that you don’t always get them either.

Back when I was in business school I attended a social media branding workshop and the one thing that the main speaker drilled into my head was that you should only accept LinkedIn network connections from people you actually know at a bare minimum, and preferably people you have worked with, sold to, bought from, or otherwise collaborated with in the past. In short, it should mean that you in some respects “vouch” for that person because you’ve had some professional dealings with them in the past and have accepted them into your network. More recently, I was able to have someone who makes almost their entire living on social media take a look at my LinkedIn profile. Not only was the idea of “only connect with people you know” reinforced, it was also made clear to cull people from the list that you may have accepted in the past that you didn’t work with – and to be clear with people about why you aren’t accepting their requests when you “ignore” them.

These guidelines make sense to me because people have the option to “follow” people they are interested in without actually being connected. For instance, I follow Bill Gates because I’m interested in exactly how he got the microchips small enough to inject in me when I got my Covid vaccine, but I’m not connected to Bill because frankly, we just aren’t that tight. Also because we’ve never met and he doesn’t know who I am.  In other words, I follow a few people that I admire and/or am interested in who likely would reject an actual connection request from me.

Of course, this brings me to the biggest reason I don’t monitor the LinkedIn messaging I was talking about before. About once a day, but occasionally as often as three to four times per day I will get connection requests with a message from someone I’ve never heard from. There are a variety of reasons given in the message, but they all really boil down to one thing: they want to sell me something. Whatever service or product they are representing, they want me to fork over some cash for. It’s important to note that these are not people that I’ve interacted with at a trade show or even online when I’m researching a product that could help be a solution to a problem we are having. These are people that I’ve never heard of, representing a product or service that I’ve never heard of– and very often have no use for. One time it was a personal financial planner who wanted to connect, and honestly I was happier when the Ameriprise people just tried to buy my friends and I a dinner at Fuddruckers instead of stalking me on social media.

As you have no doubt guessed, I do not accept these requests. When I have the option to, I reply with a canned message that I keep connections to people that I’ve worked with in the past and that if they are interested in what I’m working on they can follow my feed to stay apprised. The vast majority never reply to that message, and I think only one has ever actually followed me. One person though got belligerent and demanded to know why I would “artificially keep my network smaller.” I didn’t reply (because blocking that guy was much easier and took less of my time), but if I did reply it would have been something like this: “I am not keeping my network artificially small, Executive Account Manager, but instead keeping my network honest. Were I to accept requests from everyone that I don’t know, my network would actually be artificially larger. Also, since the size of my network does not immediately affect your network, I recommend you seek elsewhere to peddle your ‘IT Optimization Services’.”

Often, these are reps for services that aren’t even interesting to me. One time it was someone who wanted to buy our old office computers. If you’ve ever worked in education, you know that we aren’t getting rid of serviceable computers very often, and as a state entity we have very, very strict rules about how we do so; even if we went down this path it would be fruitless for both of us. Sometimes it’s even less valuable. Once someone was offering me a way to save 15% on my SAP bills - we don’t use SAP. Never have. It’s obvious that these are just people firing requests out to see if any stick without actually trying to see if I have a need that they can solve.

Seriously though - they should have used Stan Lee for this scene. Don’t @ me. They could have CGI’d it.

This leads me to a whole other cryptic message that I often get. Sometimes I get someone who wants to connect to “hear about my IT priorities over the next year.” Cool. I can’t wait to take time out of my day to chat with someone to let them know what we’re doing without any idea what they are offering just to see if maybe I could become a lead for them. Wow, sounds like a great time. I hope we can book 90 minutes for the discussion.

I’m the kind of person that when I send a connection request, I always put a personalized message. If it’s someone I haven’t seen in a while, I put some notes in about how we know each other. While I don’t necessarily expect everyone to be that fastidious, it’s nice to know why it would be beneficial to me to include someone in my network when they request such an addition. I certainly understand why it would be beneficial for the person requesting – they have a new target to pitch to. But what’s in it for me? As far as I can tell, if you’re an unknown salesperson reaching out to me – the answer is nothing. I prefer – and think you should too – to keep my connections limited to people who can vouch for me professionally and I can speak to the same for them. Otherwise, LinkedIn becomes nothing more than a web of sales leads rather than a true professional network.

Now, is it possible that I’m just viewing LinkedIn entirely wrong? Sure. Maybe it’s a numbers game - but I feel like LinkedIn is different from Twitter.  On Twitter when someone follows me to see what I’m tweeting, I’m under no obligation to follow them and see what they are tweeting. On LinkedIn, if I connect with someone I'm forced to see all of their posts which, in the case of these salespeople, are just copied and pasted marketing messages from a vendor they represent. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a longing in my life for more advertising. I get plenty each and every time I watch YouTube, or browse Twitter, or even between the posts I want to read on LinkedIn.

So, I have two big asks of you, Dear Reader:

First, if you are in sales: please do not use LinkedIn as a way to cold call me. It’s not a good look for your company and it’s much more annoying than if you email me at work. In fact, because I consider LinkedIn to be part of my personal brand, it’s more like you called me at home than at the office. Keep your sales pitches to my official university channel and we’ll get along much better. The one exception I will give is that if we know each other well and you heard of something that can actually assist with a need you know I have, you can certainly start a conversation there - but we’re moving it to my professional email ASAP.

I don’t know if it’s LinkedIn that is broken, or if it’s me. Are my expectations too high?

Second, if you are like me and on the customer side - am I doing this wrong? Are you having a better experience than I am? What advice do you have for me? I have some questions below as always, but please, please use the comments and let me know if I’m off base. I want to be a good community member, but it’s getting increasingly frustrating that LinkedIn’s signal-to-noise ratio is getting worse and worse. And who knows – your comments or questions could not only help me, but help someone else in the community who wants to make better use of LinkedIn too.

Questions for reflection:

• Are you actively using LinkedIn to try to help your career?

• How do you decide who to accept connection requests from? Is it working for you?

• Is the onslaught of LinkedIn cold calls a problem for you? How do you manage it?