How Many Connections Can You Have On LinkedIn

How many connections can you have on LinkedIn? Let’s find out.

30,000. That is the maximum number of connections you can have on LinkedIn. But the numbers on your profile are more significant than that. They tell a story of your professional life and networking prowess.

Once you have set up the LinkedIn profile, you wonder how many connections can you have on LinkedIn. It is one of the top questions on Google, and all the platforms will give you varying answers.

There are two varying schools of thought when it comes to adding connections. Whereas some articles suggest adding pretty much anyone you can who is willing to accept your request, some others will tell you to be very picky in your choice. After all, even if 30,000 seems like a significant number, it is still finite. Why add people you don’t personally know? Why add people who cannot help advance your professional career?

Which One Should You Choose?

The answer depends on your career goals.

In LinkedIn, you should add as many firsthand connections as possible. But some users also prefer adding second and third connections through association to grow their network. Some professionals get to the 500 connection mark, and you can simply see that their profile shows 500+ instead of a specific number of connections. It can be beneficial if your industry needs you to have a broad outreach and meet plenty of strangers.

Other LinkedIn users will network carefully, so they only connect with people inside their respective industry or expertise. This is also the right choice if your industry requires you to have specialized connections inside your industry based on your proficiency or experience.

Do You Have Enough LinkedIn Connections?

Once you are on LinkedIn, it becomes a race to add as many people as possible to create a presentable profile. After all, if you have a considerable number of connections, that means you are doing something right. Right?

Many experts suggest that this school of thought might not be right. For example, you end up sending requests to a lot of people. You try to set up calls with them to get to know them. Most of them will ignore you or will not be of any help.

If the people you are sending connections to are not interested in you, there is no point in being connected to them. LinkedIn is not Facebook. You are not there to stay friends with people who don’t offer any professional advantage.

In the world of professional networking, you have to think of every contact in your list as a potential connection. You might reach out to your contacts only when you need something. And this is why you need them to respond to you. On the other hand, you should also be ready to extend as much help as they need because this is the only way to create your online presence.

What Are The Factors That Can Determine Your Connection Number?

If you are trying to network and grow your connections but not succeeding, you need to look at your LinkedIn profile. Although you can have 30,000 connections on LinkedIn, getting people of real caliber can be a challenge.

 To be up to the mark, you also have to make sure your profile meets the quota that quality people want to meet you. It includes your photo, headline, summary, tag line, and so on. All of these details should tell an engaging story of your professional life and what you are offering to the world. This is not just about where you work or where you have gone to school.

Take a moment to see some profiles of memorable persons on LinkedIn. You can even take a moment to ask for recommendations from people you have worked with. This way, new connections can understand that you have collaborated with other people, and you are someone that can help other people.

Here are the factors you have to perfect to make better connections.

Better Online Presence

When you are a professional, it is no secret that people are going to Google you. Ensure that the top results that appear when people search your name are a reflection of your work and service.

Make sure you are comfortable with the search results. If you are not happy with the search results, you should also try making them private. Creating the right online presence in the professional world is mandatory. But this is not just about cleaning up your image. You don’t just go to Facebook and delete all your wild party photos from college. You also have to create valid sources for your reputations and credentials that you advertise on LinkedIn.

For example, if you work in fashion, make sure there is a portfolio site where clients can see plenty of your work. This site should appear at the top when people search your name online.

Use Personalized Connection Templates

Whether your connections accept your request or not depends on the kind of connection message you send. Creating a personalized message can mean all the difference between meeting the right people or not. This is an elementary requirement in the professional world.

You have a small template of 300 words where you can sincerely represent your profile depending on who you are sending your message to. If you have already met this person, remind them where you worked or met. If you are a stranger to this person, state your intent for sending the request and how you can professionally collaborate with this person. This would make it worth the time too.

Network

Although seemingly simple, this is the most significant part of the networking many people miss out on. Sending a connection request and getting it accepted is only the beginning. You actually have to do the task of taking some time and speaking to this person after this. You can set up an offline call, chat, or even online calls.

Additionally, you can review the person’s profile and see if they have left any specific instructions about how they prefer to connect with their LinkedIn connections.

Remember, most professionals will go through their profile once and purge all the people who do not belong there. This means all the time you have taken to create a connection means nothing if you turn out to be someone who has never spoken to this person and offered nothing.

Change Your Cover Photo

Previous LinkedIn had an interface where you could see the photo of the person in the center. They have currently changed the interface, so the picture has shifted to the left side when you see it on your laptop. As of now, the mobile app still has the image is displayed in the center of the screen.

Whereas the design change may or may not remain the same in the future, you have to still a factor in that this is a crucial detail. Take a look at your old photo, see if your profile photo has been shifted, or cut off any sections depending on the outlet change.

Your image can be 1584 X 398 pixels. Upload a photo appropriate to the allocated size, and make sure your cover photo reflects your current personality in the most professional way.

Don’t Misuse The People Also Viewed Feature

The people also viewed feature shows what other people are looking at. When you are looking at the prospect profile, you can see this section on the right side of the page. Whereas this is a great feature, if you are trying to create meaningful connections, you don’t want the same people to see this feature when visiting your profile.

Go to your settings and turn off this feature. This way, whenever any prospect visits your profile, they will not have a competitors’ list to check out, improving your opportunities.

The aim of your LinkedIn profile is not only to boost your visibility, but it is also to make sure that your competitors do not get extra publicity from your profile. You can simply change this feature by going to settings and privacy options.

Click on the privacy section at the top of the page. Inside, you can see the feature called viewers of this profile also viewed. You can change the checkbox to mark it as no, so whenever other people visit your profile, they will not be able to see your competitors.

Utilize Your Status Updates

If you have tried creating a wholesome profile, the status update is going to come in handy. There is a character limit to the status update section. This can be a cause of issue for some people who have a lot of things to include.

You still want to communicate the best message you can, so your prospects understand your status better. This is also applicable to your LinkedIn post. Whereas the status update is capped at 1300 characters, your LinkedIn article will be capped at 40,000 characters. Similarly, your publisher headline will be capped at 100 characters. Use this character limit judiciously to maximize your visibility.

Utilize The Who Viewed Your Profile Section

If you are looking for potential prospects, this is a feature that will be very helpful. The who viewed your profile page will show you competitors, prospects, and other users who are checking out your profile over the last three months. However, you need a premium membership to be able to see the complete list.

If you have a free account, you can only see up to five people that have visited your profile in the last three months. To have the list, you should go to every person’s profile and see if they can be a potential prospect or connection. If this comes in handy, you can create your personalized request for this person and send a request.

Most people will stop at just this. However, to completely leverage your LinkedIn profile, you should also look at the top companies where people are working and checking out your profile.

Another important thing you need to know is the job profile of the people who are viewing your profile. You should also see the search terms they are using to create a more efficient profile that is keyword-based. This way, you have a better chance of appearing in more searches of recruiters, prospects, and clients.

Not only will this give you a holistic view of what companies are looking for when they search your profile and which people are sending requests and their current positions, but you will also get an understanding of if you are missing out on advertising in some of the niches that you didn’t think of previously.

Utilize LinkedIn Followers

Although you can create only 30,000 first degree connections on LinkedIn, you also have the option of getting people to follow you. The network size limit does not have to be tied down to your followers. Every user will have the possibility of exceeding that number by adding followers instead of connections.

This is especially useful if you are working in sales or in an industry where thought leadership goes a long way. You will need more than 30,000 connections to understand the industry better and have meaningful networking.

With followers, you do not have to send the connection. These people can be your past and potential colleagues, prospects, or anyone else you want to connect to but don’t have the bandwidth to add them to your profile. You can also follow other people to get them to follow you as well.

But what does this mean in terms of profile visibility?

Followers are a little different than connections. According to LinkedIn’s definition, when you follow somebody on the site, they can see the post and articles that you write. You do not have to have a connection with them for that. However, if someone else is following you, you will not see their posts or articles if you are also not following them.

This means you have a potentially indefinite number of people who can be added to your profile by following you. If you cannot send a connection to this person who is of influence or is a thought leader in your industry, you can see their posts and articles by merely following them.

You can stop worrying about whether they will accept your connection or not. You now have the power to check their profile by clicking the follow button.

Simply, find your followers and manage them under your articles and activity setting inside your profile. This page will show you a list of people who have recently followed you. You can see the number and follow them back if you think this is a connection worth making.

Some People Ask Us, How Do I Get Other People To Follow Me?

The most straightforward answer is to follow more people. Chances are, you will also get a follow back. However, there is no definite proof that simply because you like someone’s profile, they will follow you back. You have to create your online presence and build yourself as a thought leader who people want to follow.

Create regular articles, posts, and status update that people want to read. You have to become a long term publisher for people to want to follow you and know your thoughts. You cannot merely gain followers if you open LinkedIn once in a while.

Here are the best ways to boost the number of followers.

Creating High-Quality Content

There is no replacement for creating high-quality content on LinkedIn. Think of the point of view from your potential perspective  – the person who knows little about you. They will get to know about you more from what you put out on LinkedIn. This goes beyond your summary and tagline.

You have to market yourself through content creation, and this content should be of high value so people can understand that they will benefit by following your profile. This is the only way to make sure people understand you have authority over the industry. Naturally, people will start following you and even sharing your content with other people, leading to more followers.

Speak About Your Area Of Expertise

Don’t stretch yourself too thin. If you are from industry, try to stick to your expertise area because people will naturally want to find insights about that industry from your profile. If they have searched with a keyword, naturally, they are expecting a particular set of valuable insights from your profile.

Stick to the topics that you understand. Create informative content with useful insights and even share stories from your industry that people can relate to and talk about. If you can get a conversation started on something you have experienced, there is no better way than that for other people to relate to your experience.

Be Passionate About Your Work

When it comes to making connections, passion is critical. People need to see the fire inside you to want to follow you. They will simply not follow you because you put outposts once in a while. You have to engage with your followers actively. This means giving a response to them when they message you and writing comments when they address you.

You should try to set up calls and connect with your followers to discuss topics they are interested in. Being passionate is crucial to making sure people understand where you are coming from. You have to be clear about the issues you speak about. People like intensity, and they want to see how you are transforming your industry.

Be Consistent

Nobody will wait forever for you to take up the role of a thought leader. If you start on this journey, you have to increase your followers by sharing insights, writing publisher posts, creating graphics and info graphs, videos, or other specialized content. All of this should be shared on your profile regularly.

 There is no substituting regularity over anything else. Being consistent with your posting schedule will ensure people understand when they have to come to your profile for high-value content. The repeated Visitation is what lends credibility to a profile and establishes you as someone worthy of following. This will most definitely push up the number of followers and even get people to refer other people to visit your profile to check out the weekly or monthly content.

Mute Group Conversations

You might think this is a controversial opinion because joining a group is a great way to open up your network. However, it can get quickly annoying when you are getting added to large groups frequently. Most of them you might also have no interest in.

Once you start becoming a thought leader or have some influence in your area of expertise, this will happen to you a lot. If you do not want to leave a group outright, you have the option to mute conversations. If you’re going to leave conversations, you can select leave conversation instead of muting.

LinkedIn allows you to modify the various controls of the conversation. If you are having a personalized individual conversation, you can still make the same choices by going to the three dots on the top right corner of the screen, which will give you the option of leaving or muting this conversation.

Leaving a group will outright stop all the messages, and you will no longer see anything that goes on in this group. You may not even reach on the conversation once you have left unless someone else adds you manually. If you do not want to go nuclear and still remain in the group but do not want to get constant notifications, the mute conversation option is what you are looking for.

Tip

If you come across something you want to remember or even reply later, you can mark a message as unread. This way, you can come back to it later and read it at your own time without having to go through hundreds of notifications.

If you are done with the conversation and want to remove it from your inbox, you can select the delete conversation list. There is a little bit of a trick when it comes to deleting a conversation. If you want to leave a group, but you have deleted the conversation, you will still continue seeing the notifications. So make sure you are leaving the conversation before you delete it. After that, you can delete it to get rid of it from your inbox, and you will receive no more new notifications.

Another problem when you become a person of influence is that you will receive many spam messages. You should not only delete these conversations; you should also report them to the moderators before deleting them so they are dealt with appropriately.

Improve Your Search Results

Whatever social media or professional site you are using, understanding the search algorithm will help you perform in the website better. The advanced search of LinkedIn lets you choose Boolean search parameters, which will efficiently filter out the search results you want to exclude. It will give you the best results for what you are looking for.

You have to understand a little bit of syntax for this. If you want to find someone who is an expert in content marketing, you have to use content marketing as the key search word when conducting the Boolean search. The search result will bring up typically anyone who has the word content or marketing in their LinkedIn profile. Even if the words are not located together, these profiles will still flash when searching, resulting in unnecessary links.

Add quotes around the parameter you are searching for, and you will only get the results where these two words are together. So if you write “contact marketer” and search for it, you will only get people who have the exact words in their profile instead of simply added content and market are in different places in their profile.

If you want two phrases to be added together and searched, you can join the queries with an ‘AND.’

For example, “contact marketer” AND “media manager” will show you much more advanced and relevant results.

If you want, you can also leave out the AND because the advanced search algorithm will automatically assume that there is an AND between these two words.

If you want to include the AND, make sure it is in the upper case because case-sensitivity will matter when it comes to the algorithm search.

Utilize The Saved Search Feature

If you are searching for a keyword frequently on LinkedIn, you can now save it. For example, when people are looking for jobs, they will use their job profile to search for relevant openings in the networking giant.

Why go through the trouble of repeatedly entering the search terms and doing the whole thing over when you can simply save the search term and run the query to get the results in seconds? It is an extremely powerful tool, and you can get direct search results whenever there is an update. This means, even after you have searched, if people are creating posts or links with the keyword you have searched with, you will be able to get a notification.

Whenever you want to, you can come back to the notifications and sort through whatever is relevant for your profile and leave out anything that does not perfectly fit your search criteria.

LinkedIn also sends an email every week, which will include all the new profiles that are appearing for these parameters. Utilize this tool to get the best of your LinkedIn experience and grow your connections like an expert.

You don’t have to have any premium membership profile because this is also available in the free version. However, how many search queries you can save on your profile will depend on the membership level. The free account lets you save up to three such questions, where the premium will let you save as many as you want. Depending on your usage, you can decide if you have to go for the advanced search facility by getting the premium connection.

Optimize For Mobile App Users

The key to going one step above and beyond is keeping in mind that not all people will do the best they can to optimize their profiles. This includes considering that majority of users use the mobile app to search Lincoln.

Chances are, you use LinkedIn from your mobile app. LinkedIn lets you save the personalized connection request as default when you are using the mobile version. If you are trying to send a connection from your mobile, they will get the same cookie-cutter message you are sending. You have to be very conscious and careful about not sending that same old message to just anyone as a default.

Take a moment to check that you have created a personalized message. This single factor can be the difference between whether influential people ignore or accept your profile request. Remember, not only will people have the option to ignore your profile connection request, but they can also click on the I don’t know this person option.

Tip

If as many as five people click on this option, your profile could be restricted from using LinkedIn. This is why you have to make sure that you send the messages to the right person with the right personalized message so people at least deny your request if they do not want to connect with you. They don’t click on the I don’t know this person because they think you are sending a spam message due to a lack of personalization.

On the mobile device, you can go to the person’s profile when trying to connect with them. Click on the three dots and click on connect. A new window will open up, which will let you create your personalized message. You can choose whatever option you require and send a message. Remember, the character limit is 300, and you should maximize your chances by making every word count.

Get Ready To Send Those Requests

If you want to create a network of helpful people in your professional life, you have to curate your connection list. The best place to start is by sending a request to people you know in your personal life. These are people you have met face to face, and they can be an excellent addition to the network.

Here are the categories of people to who you should be sending your connection request immediately once you have created your profile.

• Past and present coworkers

Chances are they belong to the same industry you work in. So they can be valuable references. If you have in mind a list of coworkers you want to keep as professional references, you can immediately start sending requests.

• College mates and classmates

Keeping in touch with your old connections can be a massive booster if you need an interview with the company they are working in. Who knows, they might eventually end up hiring you.

• Business connections

For all the external connections you have made while working, you should take out the list and send them requests. This is all about creating leads and opportunities than just having their phone number sitting in your phone book.

Conclusion

This brings us to the end of this article. As you can see, it is not the number of connections that matter, but the quality of connections. Follow the tips mentioned above to boost your network quality on LinkedIn.