Accept all invitations or not?

Whenever I conduct courses in positioning on the labor market, career coaching, or the principles of building a network of contacts, someone will always ask: should I accept all LinkedIn invitations? It is also a matter of endless discussions on the site's forum. Endless, because everyone has their own arguments and usually sticks to them, so discussing them doesn't change much. In a typical manner, we have two basic trends here: one is to accept (almost) everything that moves and doesn’t run away; the other claims that only well-known people are worthy of having their invitations accepted and the network of contacts is to be almost an elite club of the closest friends-and-relations only.

I do have my personal opinion on this one and I will share it with LinkedIn users. In the end, let everyone do it their own way, but with full awareness of the consequences. Well, I'm a strong supporter of the first trend, which means I accept 99% of invitations. The reasons are very simple:

- from the very beginning, LinkedIn was created as a tool to build a large network of contacts; this is not an app to message with family and close friends

- the Internet is all about the contacts of your contacts. If we have a lot of the latter, then the number of the former increases rapidly; hence, if need be we can reach a great number of people, and we never know which one of them and at what moment in time could decide the rest of our lives, even if we do not know each other personally. If these contacts and contacts of our contacts are scarce, then most probably nothing will happen. It is worth then to increase the chances of events in a completely non-exhausting and non-engaging manner (accepting an invitation is a single click only)

- if anyone in our network clicks the "like" button for any of our activity (a comment, a post, an article), then at least his/her followers will see it and so our recognition and credibility is built (if we are consistent in our activity and don't get distracted by nonsense), and that's what it's all about, let me remind you again

- what is every person sending us an invitation actually doing? Well, they are rolling out all their connections in front of us, which brings us one step closer to several hundred or even several thousand people; most of them may never be of any use to us (nor might we be), but among them may be the one and only...; I'll repeat that - the risk is none, and the potential benefit is huge

- what do I do when a person whose invitation I have accepted almost immediately wants to sell me something or to take care of my life's savings? The answer is simple: I do nothing. I consciously ignore this because I do not have to answer every message and it has nothing to do with good or bad manners. This person is acting on a massive scale anyway, sends it to a lot of people and I am definitely nothing more than a speck of dust in the wind in their statistical approach. But they’ve shared their contacts and I did the same. It's a fair deal

- remember: invitation is one thing and following is another; you can connect with someone, which builds the network, but you do not have to follow them, so their activity does not have to appear on our wall; it's good to distinguish between these two basic LinkedIn functions

- LinkedIn has a limit of 30,000 contacts; for most of us it is an abstract number; even I, a heavy user, have about 8,900 contacts for now; the number is growing, but it's still a long way to reach the limit yet. Conclusion: yes, you can accept the invitations, the system is designed and able to do so; I'll start worrying if I ever reach 29,000. Anyhow, I will not even worry about it then, I will simply proceed to the life-required phase of network optimization; but, as I said, it's abstract idea for most of us

What has to happen for the invitation to become the 1% that I do not accept? If the profile lacks information (meaning you cannot see input and openness), the inviting person has very few contacts and has not even put enough effort to write one sentence justifying the invitation, sending it empty and by default, despite my high tolerance, I feel treated too subjectively and I use the "ignore" function.

In conclusion - if the risk resulting from accepting the invitation is none, and there are potential benefits, it is a sin to ignore this. Well, unless someone is a strong supporter of "the close friends and relations club"; but then, what's the purpose of being a LinkedIn member?

What are the effects? In my case, they're clearly visible. Through LinkedIn and its functionalities I am contacted by people/companies whom I do not know directly and they offer to start talking about cooperation. This is no longer virtual reality; this is real. People found out about my existence through shared indirect contacts via LinkedIn thanks to expanding my network and also through the conscious acceptance of almost all invitations.

Q.E.D.: "quod erat demonstrandum" or "what was to be demonstrated".

And in the background there is another fundamental question: whom to send invitations to? This is the key issue of actively building a network of contacts, because it is about a deliberate strategic dimension, not a chaotic sending spree. Let this be the subject of a next post...