Why LinkedIn Recommended Messages Are Killing Your Credibility

If you’ve used LinkedIn messages recently, you’re probably well aware of the recommended message boxes that pop up. It's simple. Open up your inbox, and you'll see 1-3 boxes at the bottom of any message thread with canned responses like "Thank you" or "Sure" or "What do you mean?" Tap the box and you can send a message without an ounce of mental effort.

As it stands, the suggestions have the potential to completely ruin your credibility and remove any meaning from your interactions. A face-to-face conversation is, in other words, human-to-human, and so are digital conversations with your own, unique messages and style. But a conversation using the recommended messages is machine-to-machine, although you're still talking to a human.

At worst, the receiver will feel that you don't care about them, because you couldn't bother with simply writing a meaningful sentence. At best, the receiver will feel that you're very lazy. Only someone who's very optimistic, coupled with you leading a large company, would assume that you're just too busy to write even one sentence.

I recently exported my LinkedIn data, and it turns out I've sent and received over 24,000 messages. Hundreds, and possibly thousands of those were the recommended, canned "Interesting", "Sure", and "??"-type messages.

Essentially, what those messages are conveying is that the receiver does not warrant any effort whatsoever. You're telling them: You are worth less than the additional 30 seconds it would take for me to write a message tailored to you and your needs.

No matter who you are, that's not the message you want to be conveying.