Personalize your Linked In invitations and see the acceptances come in!

I just recently posted some amazing stats I came across on the power of Linked In. Did you know that there are 200 million users in 200+ countries? 73% of recruiters filled a position using social media; 97% of all HR and staff professionals use Linked In in their recruiting efforts.

Those are amazing stats.

What is Linked In? Well, it’s many things but to me, Linked In is a professional networking site.

What’s it’s value? That depends. As an HR consultant, I use it for many things:

1. As a recruiter, I use it to source great candidates for my clients.
2. As a career / transition coach, I use it to source roles for my clients in transition or who may be looking to make a move.
3. As a consultant, I use it to connect with folks as colleagues and subject matter experts.
4. As a businesswoman, I use it to keep up with what’s happening in the world of particular interest to me.

The list goes on and on.

But, how you get folks to connect with you is important. As I was building my practice and relaunching the recruiting aspect, I connected with most people who asked. As my network grew, I wanted to ensure that my connections were meaningful to me in some way….either people who I might recruit some day or people who are subject matter experts who I can call upon for advice or potential clients or interesting folks or people who might be seeking my advice.

Increasingly, however, people were inviting me to connect and sending generic invitations. Let me be clear – that is not the way to connect with people on Linked In! If you want to connect with someone, you should have a reason for doing so. If you want to connect with someone, you should take the time to tell them why you want to connect. Clicking ‘send invitation’ with some generic invite is not good enough.

Take the time to craft a personalized note. If you cannot think of what to write, you probably shouldn’t be connecting with him/her in the first place. Take the time and watch the responses come back — from people that make sense to add to your network. This is not facebook. You don’t ‘win’ with the most connections. The satisfaction comes from having meaningful connections.