I was noticing today that a friend (she’s a consultant who helps companies fight commoditization) had added some connections in Linkedin. In case you hadn’t logged in for a while, Linkedin now has a neat feature on the main home page for your account that mentions any new connections your connections have added. A little note shows up like this:
There two reasons why you want to add connections slowly.
- It’s a free advertisement. You can see that this is, in a way, a kind of advertisement. These people are getting a free ad via Linkedin, at least on the home pages of their connection’s Linkedin accounts. So in order to maximize exposure, it pays to be up there frequently.
- Large numbers of connections turn some people off. Yes, I know that Linkedin would prefer that we only connect to people we know very well, but I’ve yet to meet someone who adheres to this rule religiously. Everyone has a few superconnectors in their network, and if that superconnector is you, you don’t want to remind your those connections of what they might see as a negative aspect. The new feature mentions how many connections were added. Some folks will see that someone’s added 10 or 20 connections and be turned off because their networking philosophy is different. They might be thinking “Wow! That’s a lot of connections – is this person just collecting them?
So, there’s two reasons why it’s better to add connections slowly.
Have you received a lot of invitations? Accept one or two a day, and skip a day once in a while.
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I wish LinkedIn would provide an RSS feed for the info they provide on the homepage.
Yes, it would be nice but I don’t think Linkedin wants people to have the ability to stockpile that kind of info. The next big source of value that Linkedin can bring is going to come from analysis of how users use the system.
That might be true. I just hate using my web browser to use the internet. I wanna keep as much information consumption inside my feed reader as possible.
I agree, but there is a downside. If you only read what comes through in your feedreader, you can be missing a lot. Some feeds are summaries, but it’s not very obvious. Also, some folks have static pages and other things that aren’t in the feed.
Still, for monitoring things where most of it is not really relevant, a feed reader is a nice way to tie it together.
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