invitations

How often are you in LinkedIn? I’m logged in every day. I have multiple tabs saved as my ‘home pages’ and LinkedIn is one of them. So I’m prompted to be there every day, checking for messages, invitations and articles and posts of interest.

LinkedIn is a great networking tool, if you use it as intended. LinkedIn never intended for us to connect with strangers but with people we knew or had a passing acquaintance with. Of course, these days they make it really easy to connect with strangers by prompting you with potentials you might know because they’re connected to someone you are already connected to.

But don’t be fooled – it’s still important to add a note when sending an invitation to connect and this can’t be done via your phone I don’t believe. At least, I haven’t yet found a way to add a note after pressing on Connect, even when viewing a profile. You still need to use your computer to do this, i.e. view the profile, click on connect and then add a note.

I get lots of invitations and to every one of those that don’t add a note, I send a message asking them their interest in connecting. Those that don’t reply within a week, I click ‘ignore’ as clearly they’re not serious about their use of LinkedIn, but for those who respond it opens a communication channel and I often find out what is really going on inside their head. Sometimes it’s potential work.

Sometimes it’s because I can lead them to someone else. Today’s answer to my question produced this following message:

“Good morning and thanks for presenting your question Kathie. You’re the first Virtual Assistant that presented substantial articles detailing a Virtual Assistant’s value. In that spirit, I saw value in connecting. Either way, thank you for gate-keeping your connects as time is money.
Respectfully,”

Naturally I’ve accepted. This guy has seen value in how I use my LinkedIn profile and the fact that I also ‘gate-keep’ my connections. This means that if I end up supporting him further down the track, he knows I will look after his business as much as I look after my own. He has shown respect for what I do and in turn, he has also shown he would be someone I’d like to work with, if the opportunity arises. At the very least, a communication channel has been opened.

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Kathie Thomas

Kathie is the owner of VA Directory and is former past President of the Australian VA Association. She founded the Virtual Assistant industry in Australia in the mid 90s, having already been operating a home-based secretarial service. Today the VA industry covers a multitude of office-based services for clients worldwide.

Invitations I never sent. Are you getting acceptances from people for invitations you haven’t sent at LinkedIn? I’ve had the same thing happen. These are for people I do not know personally and would not be in any address contact list that I own. They are genuine in that I can go to LinkedIn and see the acceptance message, but I don’t know the people and have never conversed with them via a forum or other means. LinkedIn does have a discussion forum and there have been many people complaining about this same thing. You can see one of the threads here.

The LinkedIn staff do oversight but often it can be a week or two, or more, before you hear from them. If you have a concern it is better that you contact them direct and not hold your breath waiting for a reply. Seems to me they’ve gotten too busy and don’t have enough staff to cope with the load.

To add to the complication there have been fake invitation reminders sent out to people and they look like they’re coming from LinkedIn but aren’t really. Not something we really need. There’s a discussion about this here at LinkedIn. But it’s not really something LinkedIn can do anything about. Best to report the spam if you can ID the spammer, or delete it.

What about if you have sent invitations that you now wish to withdraw? Perhaps you gave LinkedIn access to your address book and now regret doing that because it’s sending invitations to everyone, including your Vet, Doctor, or the parents of the kids down the street? You can withdraw them – but only one by one, which is a time wasting exercise. You’ll need to go to Invitations, then the Sent folder and click on the title for each invitation to view it, then click on Withdraw.

Endorsements for things I don’t do. Have you been frustrated, like me, when people endorse you for skills you don’t have? Or perhaps they are people who have never used your services and don’t know you well at all? I feel the endorsement thing has been overused to the point that people don’t believe them or overlook them now. The Recommendations listed on your profile is much more believable and a better tool I feel. But apparently LinkedIn feel it has improved the amount of activity on their site – yes, because it’s in everyone’s face when they visit a profile, and perhaps they feel they have to endorse, or should, before leaving. If in doubt, I suggest you don’t – unless you know for sure that person really does that thing. Again, there is discussion about it here. You can remove endorsements you’ve accidentally accepted, again one-by-one.

While I still feel that LinkedIn is a great tool for business I do believe it has gone overboard, perhaps feeling the need to compete with Facebook (heaven knows why, as it’s a completely different tool) or Twitter, or something. There’s room for all three.

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Kathie M Thomas