The More People We Connect with on LinkedIn, the Less Valuable It Becomes

When it comes to social networking, is bigger always better?

Many internet users have taken Tim O’Reilly’s definition of a Web 2.0 application — “one that gets better the more people use it” — as a personal axiom. A big network, goes the argument, gives you reach and, potentially, that holy grail of “influence.”

Many users are beginning to discover, however, that a larger number of social network connections may be less valuable than a smaller, more intimate circle. With an enormous collection of friends or followers on a network, you lose the benefits of intimacy, discoverability, and trust, all of which can work better when you have fewer connections.

Social networks can help us balance the access and influence of large networks with the benefits of small networks, but to do so they need features that let users focus their engagement on subsets of the people they connect to or follow. There is something miraculous about how social networks can connect us to just about anyone, anywhere, even if we’re not Kevin Bacon. But most of the time we want to connect to specific people for specific purposes — and that’s just not possible with networks that drive us to stuff a one-size-fits-all contact list with as many names, email addresses, and mobile numbers as possible.

Let’s take LinkedIn as an example. I’ve long been an advocate for what I call the favor test: only connecting to people you know well enough to ask a favor of or do a favor for. That’s because the greatest value LinkedIn offers is its ability to help you get introduced to the people who can make a difference to your work. But you can only get those introductions if the second-degree connections in your search results are people who are connected to someone you know well enough to ask for an introduction. (And if the person you’re asking for the intro also actually knows the person you want to meet.) When you connect to everybody and their dog, your second-degree search results will include people who don’t actually know anyone you know, so you won’t be any further ahead in reaching them than you would be by simply cold calling.

Now, LinkedIn says, “We recommend you only connect with those you know and trust.” That’s reinforced with a little reminder on the window you see when you reach out to someone you’ve found on LinkedIn: “Only invite people you know well and who know you.”

While these tactful hints suggest that LinkedIn has a “smaller is better” philosophy, the platform’s interface tells a different story. Over the course of its 12-year history, the site has steadily moved away from encouraging people to build their networks very selectively, and toward encouraging users to connect to as many people as possible.

You can see that shift on Grow My Network, the page you go to if you click the profile icon that indicates you have new connection requests. Once upon a time LinkedIn gave its users something like an inbox: a page where you could review all your incoming connection requests as individual, email-like messages. Now your incoming connection requests appear as a strip of pending invitations on the top of a page that primarily serves to prompt you to send even more connection requests. The page loads with just three pending invitations visible (though you can click to see more) but with 24 suggestions of other people you should reach out to.

LinkedIn’s connection process has been streamlined so that the outreach process now favors quantity over quality. Yes, if you view someone’s LinkedIn profile and connect from there, you’ll likely be prompted to add a personal note to the connection request (though apparently some users have to go digging for that personalization option).

But much of the time, LinkedIn defaults to sending a generic connection request without giving you any opportunity to remind someone how you know each other or explain why you want to connect. If you try to add any of the people LinkedIn suggests under “People You May Know” or in second-degree connections in your search results, the network will instantly send that person a generic “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn” message.

It’s easy to imagine the business logic that has led LinkedIn down this path. The more connection requests people send, the more people get brought onto the platform. And the more connections any one user has, the more they’ll use the platform, so LinkedIn can serve them more ads and sell them more upgrades.

This is a problem LinkedIn could solve, however, if it allowed us to categorize our connections and use those categories to filter search results. (Yes, you can add tags to your connections, but you can only use those tags to filter and view your existing connections.) All we need is a search option that allows us to limit searches not only to “second-degree connections” but also to “second-degree connections of [tag].” That would allow users to tag certain connections as “close” and to filter their search results to people who are connected to their close contacts.

Better yet, LinkedIn could make filtering by type of relationship a core part of the interface and philosophy by integrating it into all the site’s prompts and pages. Sure, encourage people to make lots of connections — but every time someone is sending or accepting a connection request, ask, “Is this someone you know well?” Use the responses to automatically build a “close contacts” list for each user, and then offer a “filter by close contacts” option as part of the search feature.

Helping people differentiate between close contacts and connections they don’t know well (or see often, or see at all) would both allow LinkedIn to serve its own goal of growing the network and support those users who want to build a big network so that they can use LinkedIn as a publishing platform and industry directory. At the same time, it would serve those of us who want to use the network to find and make the new professional introductions that can open up new opportunities and make a tremendous impact on our working lives.

If this seems like an outlandishly ambitious suggestion, it shouldn’t: The other major social networks already offer that kind of differentiation among connections, albeit to varying degrees. Facebook does the it best. You can go big on Facebook, friending up to 5,000 people and letting even more people friend you — or if you really want popularity, you can create a Facebook page and collect likes there. But you can also create specific lists of people with whom you want to share specific kinds of news and content, or use your restricted list to ensure that some people on your Facebook friends list see only your public content. That’s what allows you to be professionally personable on Facebook. By sharing work-related content with a “colleagues” list and family-related content with a “family” list, you can be selective about who sees what, achieving the benefits of intimacy without cutting off the opportunities that come from having more connections.

Just as important, Facebook lets you see other people’s news in specific contexts. If you’re overwhelmed by the volume of updates in your news feed, you can zero in on updates from people in a specific list or look at the latest from only your colleagues. You can achieve the same thing on Twitter by organizing your Twitter friends into lists instead of looking through your entire home feed (though Twitter doesn’t give you the same level of granularity when it comes to who sees what you post — either you make your account private, so only people you approve can see your tweets, or everybody sees your tweets). Both of these networks help us balance the value of a big network and the value of focused conversation by offering ways to organize and narrow down whose updates you see and, even more powerful (in Facebook’s case), by allowing you to target who sees your own posts.

Offering a more nuanced approach to how we connect with people would turn LinkedIn into the engine of a new way of looking at the role of social networks in our working lives. Connecting online is now as big a part of our professional networking as face-to-face meetings and conferences. But just as in the offline world, some of those connections are more meaningful than others. Translating those variations into our online experience would help professionals remember what we’re really trying to achieve through our social network connections: reach and influence, yes, but also the kinds of collegial relationships that can transform our careers.