Ten Ways to Make Yourself Unpopular On LinkedIn – Liz Ryan

Dear Liz,

I’ve been working on expanding my LinkedIn network. I have 215 first-degree connections so far, so I’m happy.

The other day I connected with a guy I met at a networking event.

As soon as he accepted my invitation, I sent him a quick thank-you message that I created to send each new person who connects with me.

In my welcome note, it talks about me and my background.

In the welcome message it also says “I write to my LinkedIn connections twice a month to keep them up to date with my projects. Please let me know if you’d rather not receive my mailings.”

I thought I was being polite, but my new connection immediately disconnected from me. We were only connected for about twenty minutes before he kicked me out of his network.

Did I do something wrong, or did he?

Thanks Liz!

Yours,

Greg

Dear Greg,

Your twice-monthly mailing to all of your LinkedIn connections is a newsletter, whether you call it a newsletter or not.

You subscribed the guy you met at the networking event to your newsletter without asking permission. That’s impolite.

A lot of people send a canned welcome message to everyone who accepts their LinkedIn invitation. That’s not the greatest way to make a new friend. Why not focus on the person who accepted your invitation, instead of asking them to focus on you?

Everyone is busy with their own stuff. That guy didn’t connect with you on LinkedIn in order to become one of your audience members.

Think of a way that you could help him, instead of asking him to help you (by reading your newsletter when he never asked to be added to your subscriber list).

Here are ten ways to make more enemies than friends on LinkedIn:

1. Spam your connections.
2. Ask people you barely know to introduce you to their friends.
3. Leave nasty comments on other LinkedIn users’ status updates and blog posts.
4. Make romantic overtures/use LinkedIn as a dating site.
5. Write to strangers or near-strangers and ask them to endorse you for your skills. Instead of doing this, endorse your connections for their skills — most of them will reciprocate!
6. Reach out to people you don’t know to ask them to help you (with your job search, e.g.). Just because you were able to find someone who works at one of your target companies doesn’t mean that it’s polite of you to contact that busy person and ask them to personally get involved in your job search. Contacting random people who work for your target companies is not an effective or appropriate job-search technique.
7. Posting “humble brag” updates about how you went out of your way to give money to a homeless person on your way to work or performed some other charitable deed. It’s wonderful that you are such a good person but the whole world does not need to know about it each time you perform an act of kindness. Do it for yourself — not for the PR.
8. Post inflammatory or inappropriate messages.
9. Bash people, companies or other entities.
10. Steal other LinkedIn users’ profile information or blog content. If you like a blog post another LinkedIn user wrote, don’t plagiarize it — write your own post reacting to it and include a link to the original story. That’s a great way to make friends on LinkedIn — instead of enemies!

You can think about LinkedIn this way. It’s a huge database of people who are willing to put a lot of information about themselves online. That feels scary to many people. Treat your connections and their trust in you with kid gloves. Don’t trample on the new relationships you are forming by being annoying.

Don’t send out a newsletter to tell your LinkedIn connections what you’ve been doing for the past two weeks. Why would they care? Your close friends already know what you’re up to. The rest of your LinkedIn connections are overloaded with information every day and don’t need any more.

Be a good friend to them and lighten up on the broadcast communications!

Your connections will thank you for it.

All the best,

Liz

Reprinted from: Forbes.com – https://www.forbes.com – 5.8.18