It's Time to Ctrl-Alt-Delete How You View LinkedIn

Neal Schaffer: 0:04

Welcome to maximize your social, actionable 10 minute advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social social media author, speaker, consultant, and founder of maximize social business, Neal Schaffer. Hey, this is Neal Schaffer, welcome to a another episode of maximize your social. A lot of you probably know that before I blog that maximize social business, I had a blog called windmill networking. And before that blog at windmill networking, I actually had a wordpress.com blog that was called expert answers to your LinkedIn questions that was actually launched through LinkedIn when they used to support applications, one of those applications being wordpress.com. And in fact, the first two books I wrote on social media, before my most recent maximize your social, which is obviously the name of this podcast in my brand, we're on LinkedIn. So a lot of you and maybe some of you listening to this podcast, know me as sort of like the LinkedIn person. And I've never wanted to become a one trick pony, which is why I don't necessarily consider myself like the LinkedIn person. But because I've written two books on the subject, I often get emails from past readers fans, and whenever I publish on LinkedIn, or publish something about LinkedIn, I seem to get a lot of support from the community. So if you're one of those people that have stuck with me through the years, and wow, it's been actually it's been six years since I started my blog. It's pretty amazing. So I want to thank you for your support. And you know, I still get these really, really interesting questions, quite randomly in terms of frequency. But I wanted to give you one question that I got today. And I really want you to think a little bit different about engaging on LinkedIn. And that's really what the subject of this podcast is going to be in response to this person's email. So Neil, have been passionate since I joined LinkedIn in 2007. And reading your book, he's been promoting LinkedIn to his database throughout Asia, which is larger than his personal LinkedIn network and building his own network. This person, you know, I don't know what his exact objective is, in building a LinkedIn network, I'm assuming it's sort of sales marketing bizdev. So today, I received this email from LinkedIn that my account is permanently restricted to only connect by email. I've been restricted before but never permanently. I'm shocked by this. Do you have any wisdom from me on what to do? Now the short answer to what I said, I said, LinkedIn is always changing the rules, right. And that's social media is always changing. Every single platform is always changing the way that they do business. But I want to give you some background, this one now, I also was what you would call an open networker, or a lion, LinkedIn, open networker, and there were tactical reasons that if you were an open networker at one time, the more connections you had, the higher you appeared in LinkedIn search results, this is obviously no longer the case. But still, you know, everybody should have a robust network, multiplayer age by 10. That's the number of LinkedIn connections you should have. That's the number of new people you should be meeting on the annual basis that you can add to your LinkedIn network. And it really gives you more visibility other people, you become more visible to other people. So you have more second degree connections. So there's only you're only one degree away from being contact or having others contact us. So there are advantages. But obviously, you don't need to have as many connections as I do. In fact, I've sort of pared down on my connections. And I am really critical now as to if I accept people inviting me if I find out there's something fishy about their profile, or I just don't know why they sent me an invite. And I know a lot of you probably share that same sentiment. But you know, there's some of you that still are aggressively inviting others to your network, I stopped doing this back in, I don't know 2010, probably, but you know, at the time, LinkedIn, hey, you're only supposed to connect with people that you know. And there comes a point when people hit and I wrote about this, and when no networking, understanding, leveraging and maximizing LinkedIn back in 2009, that if you start inviting a bunch of people that you don't really know, and they reply, or you know, after they get the invitation, they tell them then the I don't know this person or what we call an ID K, your account starts to get restricted. It used to be that if you had five of those after the first three, or the first two, there'd be a little thing that would pop up when you want to send out an invite, Hey, be careful. A lot of people said they don't know you, we remind you that if you send him the invitations to people you don't know you're in violation of policy. And what would happen is after doing that a few times and getting a few I don't know as your account would be restricted to only those people that you know the email address for and then you'd have to go back to LinkedIn and apologize and get the restriction taken off and, and I know that I did that multiple times. And I think a lot of people did as well as this person who contacted me. Now, obviously from what he is saying in his email is that the rules have changed. And now permanently, he has to enter an email address. In order to connect with someone, so I realized I'm going to give you my own aha moment. My own epiphany when it when it comes to LinkedIn is, you know, what sort of value are you trying to derive out of the network. If you think of adding a connection as putting someone in your marketing funnel, then you obviously have it all wrong. You know, LinkedIn is where the professionals are, it's about making relationships, connections. And people do business with people that they know, like, and trust. So just the art of connecting have always said was just establishing a virtual connection in a database, right, a virtual data point, for lack of a better word. And what happened to me is I realized, wow, when I search for my name, or when I searched for window networking, I'm appearing like last or next to last in search results. And I did a little experiment. As to all these people in my network, some first degree, some second degree, some from the United States, some from outside of the country. And they confirmed that for some reason, I was not appearing in LinkedIn search results, you'd have to go to the very end in order to find my name, even for search results, like my own name, or keywords, I should say, of my own name, or of my company name, which is really bizarre. So hit me up, ah, maybe these are things that LinkedIn does to tweak their search results. And for some reason, maybe because I was flagged for doing something way back when I don't know. But that was the reality. And when I realized that this is a few years ago, I realized, wow, if I'm not showing up in LinkedIn search results, the only way I'm going to get found my relevant audience is to engage right, and, you know, the avenues for engagement. Were many in LinkedIn, in the past, you know, you at companies, y'all all these different apps at LinkedIn today, it's a little bit limited now. But I'll tell you, it's been very interesting. I think a lot of people have poo pooed, LinkedIn groups, they realize they were great, maybe a year or two ago, and then maybe they've sort of thought there was a lot of spam and they disconnected. But just over the past week, I've really been making a concentrated effort of spending more time in groups of responding to people's questions, engaging with people, not just dropping links, right of, you know, authentically, using LinkedIn groups as a source of content curation, as a source of inspiration for my own social media. And what happens when you start a conversation in a LinkedIn group is that often leads to a connection. And when you connect with someone, where you've you looked at their background, you have a common affinity, a common interest, because you're in the same LinkedIn group, that connection is obviously going to be extremely valuable. Now, not everybody is on LinkedIn groups. If you're in sales, and bizdev, and you're trying to touch the untouchables, there's a whole different strategy. But if you're looking to build up a network of like minded people, of peers that you can call upon in the future, or bounce ideas off of which I think LinkedIn is really all about, you need to be engaging. And I think LinkedIn groups, whether you're trying to develop business, or whether you're trying to, you know, find peers that have common interests, and affinities, it really is one of the best places on the internet to engage. And if it's gonna take a little bit more time than just, you know, uploading a database, or, you know, clicking one to one on profiles, but I think it's gonna allow you to more authentically, and increase the quality of those connections that you make on LinkedIn, so that when you want to ask for an introduction, they'll actually do it for you, because you already have rapport with them. Right. So that's sort of been my philosophy ever since a few years ago. And now if you're at the point where you have to put an email address, you almost have to be doing this in order to expand your network. And maybe LinkedIn is doing that, you know, for that reason. And you know, the interesting thing is in terms of engagement opportunities outside of groups, the choices that you have are few and far between right now, because LinkedIn has really simplified their platform. And they do not offer all these other apps that they use to even LinkedIn events was a great way to meet people, right. But what LinkedIn does have is they've opened up the publishing platform. And what you can do is you can openly follow people that you may want to connect with, follow their publishing, and when they publish posts, like them, comment on them, and from there, build that report on a person by person basis. Now, obviously, those that are really looking for email addresses, there's a lot of different ways of doing Boolean searches on Google, what have you, there are ways of finding out people's email addresses if you want to go that route. But I would rather have you authentically engage with those people that you want to be affiliated with. And you want to have them as part of your network, because you can establish that relationship with them. So don't think about LinkedIn in terms of number of connections, if you multiply your age by 10. And you get into a habit of regularly inviting new people that you meet, and regularly, maybe every three months searching the database for old colleagues or classmates that join LinkedIn, you're fine. It's all the connections you need. It's not about the connections, right? What are you going to do with them? And I've always said I have all these connections, but I really don't use them unless I have a need for them. And that's only when I have a specific objective. And I go into advanced people search and I find that there is some hidden you know, connectivity between In one of my connections and someone that I want to reach out to, that I've discovered, and then I reach out to them, which doesn't happen very often, in all honesty. So LinkedIn is not about the connections. And obviously, it's not about the resume. It's about the engagement. Think about it very, very differently. And I also say this, because I'm in the middle of writing an ebook. Some of you may have downloaded my 30 minutes to maximizing LinkedIn, which was this free ebook that I created back in 2012. It's been two years, LinkedIn has changed, I've changed my business has changed. I'm in the process of creating a new ebook, and even Meteor and beefier and up to date, you know, LinkedIn for 2015 type of ebook, really excited to release that. And I hope to really get it out in the next week or two, along with another exciting announcement, which obviously, since you're listening to my podcasts, you'll be the first to hear. So that's it for today. I hope this changed your mind a little bit about the way that you look at LinkedIn and the way that you can think of using it in the future. And as always, if you have any questions about this, or hey, if you want me to cover something, not only in the podcast, but in the e book on LinkedIn, feel free to reach out to me. I'm always here to listen to you. And thanks for being a listener wherever you're on the world today. Make it a great social Day. Bye Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on this show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social.com make it a social day.