The Power of a Personal Message

I recently wrote an article detailing when you should follow vs when you should connect with someone on LinkedIn . There are good reasons to choose one over the other in a multitude of situations. If connecting is the right choice, adding a personal message is a must. This article will focus on how to send that personal message when connecting on LinkedIn, why it is important, and what to include.

If you've been on LinkedIn for any amount of time, you will have received a connection request from someone you don't know. The message usually reads, "I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn." The obvious question is, why would you want to add this person to your professional network?

How Do I Send a Personal Message

Adding a personal message in most cases is very simple. It's a matter of clicking "Add a note" instead of "Send" during the connection request process. Even when the contact is one of my current students, and I know they know who I am, I still add a personal message when asking them to join my network. People I've known for years get something personalized as it usually helps start a conversation.

There are three distinct challenges that I want to highlight when trying to add personal messages on connection requests that can make things tricky for inexperienced LinkedIn users. Those problems arise when using a mobile app, using the "People you may know" tools on LinkedIn and when a potential connection makes "Follow" the primary option on their account.

When using a mobile app to access LinkedIn, you will notice there is no option to add a personal message when clicking the connect button on a profile. Before you have a chance to correct you'll have already sent out a generic connection request. To send a personal message through a mobile app, you have to click on "More" and then select the option to "Personalize invite."

The "People you may know" tool under the "My Network" tab can help quickly identify people with whom to connect. Pressing the connect button here will send a generic connection request to the contact, and I have no good explanation why. @LinkedIn, help me out? Solving this issue is a little trickier as you must go into the contact's profile and send a connection request from there. It is not difficult but does add one more step to the process.

The third scenario happens when you try to connect with folks like myself. As someone who creates content I was getting many connection requests from folks who didn't really want to connect with me, they wanted to continue to get my content. As a result, I was getting a lot of connection requests that weren't valuable connections for either party. The "follow" feature gives an alternative way to connect, but it added a step to send a connection request.

When you see "Follow" as the primary option you need to click on the "More" button, where you will be given the option to connect:

From there you'll be given some options. You will then select "Connect":

Finally, you can then "Add a Note" to your connection request as you would have done through a standard connection request.

Why Are Personal Messages Important

It is critical to add a personal message when connecting with others. LinkedIn is a networking tool, not a connection tool. Networking involves having conversations, and the best way to do that is to engage in a meaningful way.

There is, or should be, a reason why you want to connect with those you send a connection request. Taking 30 seconds and 300 characters, or less, to explain that is the least you can do. Do not assume that someone will know or remember you. I sent one recently that said, "I am embarrassed that we are not connected already." They accepted the request and responded with "you should be :)" Was this groundbreaking? Absolutely not, but it did create an opportunity for the other party to respond with something. That is your goal - allow them to respond so that you can continue a conversation if it makes sense.

Now that I am creating content more regularly, I am getting 5-10 new connection requests a day. The vast majority of these are from people I've never met. At this time, I make an effort to check out the profile to see why I should connect. I get a lot of these from students, and I want to make sure my students are in my network. Soon, I don't know that I'll have the time to do that. Always assume the person you're reaching out to does not have time to look at your profile. Instead, explain why you want to connect or why they should want to connect with you in your connection request. Make it as easy as possible for the person to click "accept."

Finally, you want to avoid the LinkedIn equivalent of the kiss of death - the "I don't know this person" flag. This is LinkedIn's way of preventing the spamming of connections.

Under your "My Network" tab, the first section holds all of your recent LinkedIn connection requests. You'll notice that you have two options: ignore and accept. I action all of my LinkedIn requests to stay on top of things by either ignoring or accepting them. When clicking "ignore," you will see a message with a hyperlink that says, "I don't know XXXXX." Clicking that hyperlink will flag the contact as a potential spammer.

LinkedIn Help says, "This prevents the person you don't know from sending you connection requests in the future. If someone receives an excessive number of "I don't know this person" responses, they could have their ability to send connection requests restricted."

In other words, if you're abusing LinkedIn by spamming people, they will stop you from doing that. If you lose your freedom to send connection requests, your opportunity to network on LinkedIn will be severely limited. I am not punitive in this way, but that doesn't mean others are not. Adding a personal message will significantly reduce a person's desire to be punitive in these situations.

What Do I Include In The Message

Now that you know the how and why of sending personal messages with connection requests, it is time to talk about what these messages should include. The answer here is my favourite, and likely your least favourite, answer. Here it comes, folks, wait for it.................. it depends.

That's right - there are hundreds of reasons why you want to connect with a person. Some of them may be:

• they are your career advisor
• they hosted an info session or participated in a career fair at your school
• they were your mock interviewer for an event you participated in
• they were a judge for a case competition you were a part of
• they work/volunteer in a job/company/industry you want to know more about
• they had education or took a class that you have questions about
• they posted some interesting content that you found valuable
• they are your new co-workers in a job you just accepted
• they are your classmates, old friends, professors

Regardless of why you want to connect with someone, you will always have a reason you made an effort to connect. Your job is to present that reason to make it easy to accept the request and provide an opportunity to respond and continue the conversation. If you do this, you will have more success.

Connecting with people on LinkedIn does not have to be intimidating or complicated. A little extra effort goes a long way, and trust me; sometimes, the little things end up having the most significant impacts.