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How I increased my LinkedIn connections by 167% in 48 hours

by Bren on May 24th, 2007

I was messing around with LinkedIn the other day and ran into a utility they provide for examining your webmail addressbook for other LinkedIn members that you might not have connected with. I pointed the tool at my gmail account and found a bunch of people in my adddressbook that were LinkedIn members but not connected to me. I combed through the list for dupes (same person with two email addresses) and for people I didn’t want to connect with (very few). The thing I struggle with was connecting with people that I didn’t know very well. That’s such a subjective evaluation, though. What’s the relationship with a reader who has commented on the blog several times? How low do I go two comments? One? How willing am I to piss people off by inviting them when they don’t know who I am?

I like LinkedIn, but I don’t have a huge investment in the tool. Even so, I’m a fan of digging the well before you need the water. I figure that even the marginally connected people are willing to help me out in some small way if they accept my invitation. So I went for it. I allowed LinkedIn to send a mass email invitation to connect to over 300 people in my address book.

In order to pull in as many connections as possible, I tweaked the boilerplate text that LinkedIn provided. Here’s what I wrote:

Hey, I just let LinkedIn look in my Gmail address book and am sending connection invites to folks that I remember talking with in the past. You made the cut!

If you don’t remember me…well, delete this and I won’t hit you up again.

Be well,

- Brendon

LinkedIn inserted the contact’s first name above my note, making it look very personal. In fact, I think a few folks really thought it was a one-off invite just to them. A few minutes after I hit submit, I had responses coming in. Within 24 hours I had doubled my connections. As of yesterday, roughly 48 hours later, I had gone from 83 contacts to over 220. As I write this, there are still 176 invitations that haven’t been accepted. I expect a few of them will contiunue to trickle in over time.

I was surprised at the response, particularly at the number of people who sent a personal note in response to the invite. I tried to respond to all those notes, but there were a lot (if I missed you, I apologize). Out of all the responses, only three were along the lines of “no thanks, leave me alone”, which is totally understandable. I responded to all three, and actually ended up converting one of them to a connection once I explained our history.

I’m still on the fence about this method for increasing your contacts. On one hand, I don’t doubt the combined power of more connections. On the other hand, I think the most influence will be found in folks who have a tight connection to you rather than the person with whom you’ve exchanged a single email.

If you want to try this yourself (please think hard about who you send your invites to), go to the My Contacts tab in LinkedIn (far right tab). Then look for the “Add Connections” link that has a green + sign in front of it (directly below the search bar). Once you click that, you should see a sidebar box that invites you to check your webmail contacts. It’ll check all the major services.

Again, if you go this route, really think about the quality of connections you make and whether you’re willing to sacrifice quantity for quality. The tools are there fo you to use–just use them wisely.

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POSTED IN: career, communication, marketing, tips and tricks, web/tech