How To Get LinkedIn Connections

A quick guide on how to get LinkedIn connections.

As a career professional, if you are not making connections on LinkedIn, you are missing out. Work colleagues, people you meet at conferences, people you personally know – anyone can help increase the boundary of your network.

The platform has already reached half a billion users in 200 countries all around the globe. It is the leading social media for B2B connections. Be active, and you will reap the benefits.

Yet, one trend is quite unsettling. While people are quite open to connect with other people on Facebook, most people do not utilize their full potential when it comes to professional networking on LinkedIn.

They might find it intimidating or complicated. There might be confusion about who they should be adding to their network. There is no reason you should stop yourself from growing your network just because your connections are not increasing at the same rate you had hoped.

With over half a billion users, it should not be difficult to find 500 connections to get the superuser status. However, most of the challenge comes when people have exhausted their list of close contacts and personally known people from the workplace. They struggle to find other people who can be added to the network while keeping their profile relevant.

With the growing popularity of LinkedIn, spammers have also joined up the group. It can be challenging to determine who is a genuine use. If your connection is not adding value to your profile, there is no point in merely sending requests to random people.

Here are the things you should be doing if you are trying to grow your connection in a meaningful way to advance your career.

How To Get LinkedIn Connections Explained

Personalize

If you are trying to send requests to anyone outside your sphere of influence, it can be challenging to get a positive response. Spammers and random people sending requests to other people have turned them off towards accepting professional connection requests just from anyone without vetting.

This is why you should not randomly click on the connect button when you are scrolling through the list of people you know. If you do that, it will send a generic connection request. You should go to the person’s profile instead and click on the connect button to create your own personalized message.

Here, you can write down the plan for which you are sending a connection. You might have met this person at a conference or meeting. You might admire the work they are doing in the field. Further, letting them know why you are connecting with them is a suitable identifier of distinguishing the genuine connections from their counterparts.

People are far less likely to respond to your connection request if they do not personally know you. You have no link, you don’t know each other’s company, you are not from the same industry. You do not belong from the same geographic market where the other person is working in.

If none of the about factors match you and your connections, they will most likely refuse to connect. This is the information you should consider putting in your personalized connection requests.

Have Some Goals

You might want to grow your network at a fast pace with any straightforward goal in mind. If you have around 100 connections, going to the 500 mark will only worsen as you get closer to the destination. However, you can divvy up the task between some weeks or over months so you can decide how much time you can devote to this task.

Remember, when you personalize your requests and research your prospects, it is not a very small task to connect with 500 people. You can try to set a goal of sending requests to 100 people within a month. Depending on your success rate, you can double the number or choose your own goal next month. Keeping yourself on track with goals will help you accomplish your ultimate goal in time.

Be Active

If you are one of the people who only visit LinkedIn when searching for a new job, you are less likely to make it far in growing your circle. You have to be active on the site. You have to post out articles, share important news about your industry, or even comment on the status shared by your peers.

As you grow your presence on the platform, other people will take notice. This way, you can develop a list of 2nd-degree connections that will take the step to send invitations to you. In turn, you can also keep an eye on who are the people liking your articles, commenting on your post, etc.

If you do not create an opportunity to engage with people, you will not meet many interesting people. That does not mean you have to post something every single day. In fact, posting quality articles in a week or two weeks is enough to get you unnoticed by the important people in your groups.

Follow Up

People forget. Even if someone has every intention of accepting your connection request, they might not get across to it. You should consider sending a follow-up request. If you have met people personally at a conference, meeting, trade show, or place of business, consider sending your connection request to these people with follow-ups.

And if you do end up making a connection, make sure that you get in touch with these people personally if they are interested. There is no point in merely sending correction requests to people if it does not help you grow in any way.

Use Images

Images have a significant advantage over text content. They are easily attracted to eyes, and it can help people in your existing network to give you more exposure through shares, comments, or likes.

Research has repeatedly shown that visual content is much more powerful than text content, and it will increase your view count. So do not merely stick to sharing links but include photos, infographics, and any other visual media you can find to make your engaging articles even more enjoyable.

Add Your Linkedin URL To Other Social Media

It does not matter what social platforms you are using, adding your LinkedIn URL to other social media will help increase your visibility. This is utilizing all the potentials of the biograph. You turn your profile into a connection-driven mechanism where you can influence your followers, friends, family, and other professionals to connect with you on LinkedIn by merely being connected on other social media.

Don’t be afraid to add the LinkedIn URL in your other posts. If you send out a tweet, you can even add your LinkedIn URL there. This is simply increasing your presence on as many platforms as you can to take advantage of the fact that professionals exist in every sphere. They might not often utilize the same means of communication.

Utilize Keywords

Like all social media and shopping sites, LinkedIn also has its own robust algorithm that determines how you find your connections. This means it is not just vital that you legitimize and put the time to improve your search engine optimization on your website or other profiles; you have to do the same for LinkedIn.

You can attract people based on the keywords you are putting in your profile. Your summary, skill – everything is utilized by the LinkedIn algorithm to find people based on your common keywords. You have to make sure your profile is not invisible to the site. Because you have not utilized the industry-specific terms that the algorithm uses to match you with other people.

Publish Articles

When you publish an article on LinkedIn, you improve your chance of exposure and create an engaged audience. It also allows people to see all the non-article related content because they know you make good content. You are also giving them a break from the fatigue of sharing pre-created content.

You can add a simple call-to-action on these articles. So, people can decide if they want to hit you up with a connection request. However, be very cautious not to turn your article into a sales pitch. That is something people absolutely despise anywhere, even LinkedIn.

Conclusion

These were a few ways on how to get LinkedIn connections. And believe us, there are many others that you can utilize to grow yourself on LinkedIn. So, what strategies have you adopted? Let us know in the comments below.

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