Time to reflect at 4000 connections?

As I’m about to hit 4000 connections on LinkedIn, I wanted to take a minute and reflect on how I got here and my experiences of LinkedIn so far.

The beginning

I initially joined LinkedIn when working at Boston Scientific and I simply wanted to see who my colleagues were and what their names were!! It was that simple. These were the good old days of having maybe 75-150 connections and I knew the majority and worked with the remainder.

The now

Nearly 10 years on and I’ve hit the 4k milestone, I’m wondering if this had a positive impact or do I have difficulty seeing the wood from the trees these days?

After working as an engineer for several years, I’m now working in a job where relationships are key to success. I need to be able to connect with professionals looking for a job and indeed hiring managers and companies to help grow Dillon Engineering Services. I also need to maintain relationships with all the other companies that support the sector I’m in and indeed the organisations and people that help to support me every day.

Moving to the US in 2012 was like adding rocket fuel to this platform for me. You had to be connected on LinkedIn to know “who was who” and who I was meeting every week. Knowing what role they were in and the last few jobs they had was hugely beneficial. Everybody had their LinkedIn profile button on their email signature, and it was such a part of my work from week to week.

Key advice

1.      It might be tempting to accept all invites, but I think you need to protect your pool of connections. If somebody wants to connect and you don’t see any obvious relationship or interest or working sector similarity, just ask them why they want to connect. Some might get peved off, but who cares, but somebody with an legit reason may respond with no harm done.

2.      Purge your connections. I did a purge of connections back in 2017. I removed 500+ connections, mainly US contacts with no effects on my work. I think it greatly helped, as I only now get notifications and feed updates that are at least more relevant to what I do.

3.      If you want to connect to somebody, state why. Reasons like “can I connect, I’m interested in your company” “I like your profile, I’d like to see if you would be interested in a new role in the next 6-12 mts” “I seen your article/blog/website, I’d like to connect”. Obviously, the main reason and main premise of LinkedIn is for the “Good meeting you at meeting/conference etc, I’d like to connect” and should be expected and accepted in equal measures.

4.      As the picture above shows, I’m at nearly 4k connections, but I’ve 11.5k contacts synced to my LinkedIn account. These are contacts I’ve gathered throughout my personal and work life, but I don’t see any benefit in connecting with them. I don’t have anything to offer them and I’m fairly sure they don’t want to work with me as they’re mainly in mainland Europe or the US. So, don’t connect with every contact you have.

The future

Nowadays I use LinkedIn to broadcast (freely) to my target audience that Dillon Engineering Services is available to help them. I use LinkedIn to hopefully help people I’m connected with, to see what I’m doing and get a sense of who I am and as much info as possible to help them easily contact me or not.

These days, my connections are nearly all from the lifescience sector or from an associated sector that I’m engaged with. I’m going to keep my connections very specific and sector focused through 2020, but I might wander from time to time, but only if necessary.

I’ve used LinkedIn job postings and company promotion campaigns in the past with medium success. I found the response was to generic and the geographical spread was globally. I found you need to invest time in sorting and filtering to get the best results. I’m going to initially avoid these huge costs and see how I get on. I need to better use the groups I’m in to learn what I don’t already know and keep up to seed within my sector.

In summary

LinkedIn is very useful for keeping up to date with whats happening in your sector. I like seeing updates from people I know -new jobs, promotions, winning awards etc. Events that are coming up that interest me. It’s very useful for making initial connections, but these need to be followed up with an email and a call.If you use the analytics properly it gives you a broad indication of who is looking at your content and if it needs to be tweaked.I'd love to get some comments and feedback from this. What do you think works best on LinkedIn and what areas should I focus on?