Treat your LinkedIn Connections Like your Twitter Followers

Let me ask a few opening questions:

1. Do you add every single person you can on LinkedIn as a connection?

2. Do you accept connections from random people overseas in a totally unrelated industry?

LinkedIn is a great professional tool for connecting with new industry contacts, but taking a spammy and ‘totally open’ approach is not the ideal way to use this professional network.

There is no point having 500+ connections just for the sake of it.

Think of your LinkedIn connections like your Twitter followers. Would you follow random people from overseas in totally unrelated areas?

Do you want these peoples updates filling up your feed?

The answer is obviously, no.

In fact, before I started work in the social media industry I was an early user of LinkedIn in Australia. I made the typical mistakes, connecting with people who would ultimately never be any benefit, joining groups just on the Group Name and never contributing to these groups.

Every time I opened LinkedIn I saw updates from people I didn’t know at all. The profile became such a mess I scrapped it and started a totally fresh one.

Now with my LinkedIn profile, I take a new approach to how I use the site and the people I connect with.

1. I’m happy to connect with people in Australia who work in a related industry, or followers of my blog. I work in the Recruitment, Employment Advertising, Social Media, SEO, Web Design, General IT Consulting space – so this is pretty wide and I am happy to view updates from people in these industries.

2. I am happy to connect with people overseas who are leaders in their respective field (that I am either interested or working in) – this is obviously a benefit to myself.

3. I’m happy to connect with prospects who contact me through LinkedIn enquiring about my services/ businesses.

4. You can only join a maximum of 50 groups on LinkedIn. I now only join groups that I am likely to post and comment in. There is no point for me to join groups that I will not participate in. As of today I am a member of 19 groups on LinkedIn.

What’s the point of all this? Every time I open up LinkedIn I see useful updates from people I am likely to chat, collaborate and maybe work with. When I use social networking sites, I want the process to be as efficient and useful as possible – having to sift through masses of updates to find useful, local posts only wastes time.

If you are looking to remove connections in LinkedIn you no longer want – you can do so at the following link: http://www.linkedin.com/connections?displayBreakConnections

Some people may say – it’s important to connect with as many people as possible so your 2nd degree connections increase. Why do you want to increase your second degree connections? So more people find your profile? So you show up in more searches?

That is not the best way to go about increasing your personal brand. Connect with the right people, go out and do some real work that increases your personal brand. That is the best way to get people looking you up.