Invitations from people you don’t know can be frustrating!
Frustrating because you may not know how to categorize the person for your method of communication system. Personally I like to tag all of my connections.
When teaching LinkedIn workshops, I make the participants promise to never send a generic invitation again. Usually I hear an “Oops!” from one of the people, because they had just sent the generic invitation. Well, they haven’t broken their promise, because it starts from that moment.
So many people fall into the trap of sending out invitations to the people in their email address book because LinkedIn suggests it and they think it is a good idea to increase their connections. Instead I suggest that they send them one at a time and make sure to personalize them.
Since so many of the millions of LinkedIn users have not taken a class with me
, they don’t know the benefit and importance of personalizing the invitations so I get scads of generic invitations. I like to “Reply don’t accept yet“. LinkedIn has recently changed the way their messages work and the option has moved. I thought I would share how the changes now look.
- You need to hover over the small message icon on the pending invitations.
- In the upper right corner of the box that pops up is an arrow that indicates you can reply to the invitation. Right now it is a bit finicky, but if you can actually get it to click, you can send a message to the person to help you figure out how you will tag the person for future reference.
If the person replies to me, I will 99.9% of the time connect with them. This is just one way to help me keep my LinkedIn connections a bit more organized.
