Reasons for and against accepting all LinkedIn connection requests: The two perspectives

While some users are open to adding complete strangers as their LinkedIn connections, others are hesitant, or even completely opposed to the idea. Have you ever wondered why? Sure, as in every other situation, there are pros and cons to be considered. Today we bring you an insight into both perspectives.

Reasons for, by Elliot Zissman

For me, it's an easy decision: Ignore or Accept? I always accept.

Yesterday, I was introduced to a new team member at a client and it didn't take long to see we'd connected on LinkedIn a few years ago when both of us were working elsewhere. It made for an easier introduction with a bit of reminiscing about our past jobs.

LinkedIn connections will stay with you for the long term and you never know where the careers of those connections will go. If I was to reject someone now because I didn't think they were worth networking with, then maybe I'd be turning down the chance to connect with a client 5 years down the line.

When I accept a new connection request, I'm allowing people to listen to ramblings and read my posts; they can like them and share them, so that they are then seen by their connections. And that's got to be a good thing, right?

And yes, they can message you directly - but so what? It might be interesting - and you can message them as well if you want to.

The biggest reason I hear for people not accepting an invite is that they don't know the person. Well, so what? Do you never want to meet someone new? They might be interesting - even if they do work in sales! Or recruitment. Maybe they can solve the pain you have or find you the next job at some point. Sure, you can't introduce two connections with confidence, but every relationship has to start somewhere - and if it's a cold connection now, then let's warm it up, not kill it with an ignore.   

Reasons against, by Kevin Thiele

Call me old-fashioned (plenty of people do) but I still view a LinkedIn connection as (at least) the equivalent of my old Rolodex of business cards.

If you connect with everyone who reaches out to you surely you may just as well go with “LION” meaning LinkedIn Open Networker – if that is still a thing?

I want LinkedIn to be an authentic network of people that I have preferably met – either face to face or, in these strange times, at least online. Worst case I need to have made some genuine connection with them – even if it is only a line or two of introduction with their connection request.

Why? Because I don’t want to devalue the currency of knowing me or knowing them – even if it is in a really superficial way.

I guess, to some extent it depends on the nature of your work as to whether an “influencer” network of 30,000 people will really help your business – but in quite a targeted market like mine I really don’t think that there would be more than perhaps 2,000 connections that would be truly valuable.

So, my process is to accept interesting connection requests from people in the tech sector so long as they come with some kind of introduction explaining the reason for an unsolicited message. Then I reply asking them to book 15 minutes in my online calendar so that we can have a chat – this very thing happened today – resulting in a very enjoyable and useful exchange.

How about you?

As seen above, connecting with people on LinkedIn is a matter of personal preference and one’s own perception of the nature of this network.

Now that you’ve read about these two opinions, we’d love to hear yours as well. Do you accept everyone? Why or why not?