Ought to You Settle for All Connection Requests on LinkedIn?

Do you have to settle for all LinkedIn Connection requests?

The logic, in fact, is that you just in all probability shouldn’t, as you might open your self as much as spammers and individuals who would possibly look to scrape your profile for contact data, which they may then, probably, accumulate up and on-sell to the very best bidder.

However then once more, for those who join with extra folks, you increase your LinkedIn community, which supplies you extra alternative to get your posts seen and amplified within the app.

Do you settle for each connection request that comes your method?

We lately asked the SMT community for his or her ideas and greater than 5k folks participated in our LinkedIn ballot.

As you’ll be able to see right here, the overwhelming majority of individuals don’t settle for each request to attach. However nonetheless, many do, and within the feedback, some famous that they felt that this was a great way to increase their community and attain.

‘Why wouldn’t I?’ one consumer questioned.

LinkedIn’s own advice is that you must solely settle for connection requests from those who “you realize personally and who you belief on knowledgeable stage”. Which may very well be pretty limiting, and there’s some worth to increasing your connection pool just a little additional than this. However once more, the chance is that you just open up your profile to strangers, which exposes not solely your private historical past, but additionally your contact data, your organization telephone quantity, contacts, connections, and so forth.

In April final 12 months, a hacker group was discovered to be promoting an archive of private knowledge, scraped from 500 million LinkedIn users, which included all the above info and extra, which the group had pieced collectively by combining the LinkedIn listed particulars with different databases accessible on-line, as a way to construct a extra full private data profile on an enormous variety of folks.

LinkedIn says that this group didn’t hack its methods, however that it had been in a position to seize the data from public and personal listings, with the latter coming by way of random connections within the app.

So there’s some trigger for concern, and warning in connecting – however on the opposite aspect, LinkedIn L.I.O.Ns as they name themselves (LinkedIn Open Networker) have constructed large presences within the app by connecting with anybody that they will, and a few have completed so to good impact.

However there’s a stage of threat. Another commenters on the ballot additionally famous that accepting all requests may backfire if none of your connections find yourself participating along with your posts. In the event you’re simply connecting with randoms, after which posting content material that none of those folks care about or have interaction with, your subsequent publish attain will decline over time, as a result of LinkedIn’s algorithms will decide that nobody desires to see what you share.

Or worse, they may mute you, which sends detrimental alerts about your posts.

It looks like a lesser concern, as your whole posts will probably be seen by a few of your first-degree connections within the app, and a few of them, you’d assume, will have interaction. However for those who’re not producing strong response ranges, it will not be a perfect technique for maximizing your attain.

Completely different folks can have totally different opinions, and as famous, some L.I.O.Ns will swear by their ‘networking at scale’ strategy. However you do have to weigh up all the weather.

As a minimum, you must take a second to evaluate all connection requests earlier than deciding whether or not so as to add them in.