Last week I had an anniversary related to one of the collaboration projects I am involved in. It is listed on my LinkedIn profile. When this happens all of my 1st connections are told either on their home page under ‘Ways to stay in touch’, or now in their messages area it welcomes you with the ‘Hi Paul. Some ideas for conversations’
LinkedIn makes it very easy for these connections to congratulate me. Now don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the sentiment. However, the default is to send the ready made message ‘Congrats on the anniversary! Hope you’re doing well’ , which in itself is not too bad. The system makes this very easy for you, like this;
Unfortunately where the system really lets you down is that it seems unable to register when you have done this. So the next time you login in to the system it might well tell you again the same news.
So what can end up happening, as it did with one of my connections, they repeat the generic congratulations message. In fact this particular person was very excited for me and proceeded to congratulate me every other day for the whole week!
LinkedIn rewards activity, it raises what it labels your ‘interest factor’ – the problem is when its manufactured it comes across as robotic and not authentic.
With all its technological know how you would think LinkedIn would be able to program easily enough to stop this repeat happening. And while they are at it not to have any generic messages and force the user to write something new.
If networking and your connections are important to you take the extra 30 seconds to compose a personal message. Something like:
“Hey Paul, just saw that you are celebrating 3 years at XYZ Company. That’s great. It’s been a while, we should catch up, would love to hear what else is happening with you”
It will mean more and make you memorable.
Do you have a LinkedIn question? Please contact me and I will find the answer for you and may even include it in an upcoming tip.
P.S. I have recently completed a couple of live LinkedIn consulting/training sessions with clients, using screen sharing and accessing their LinkedIn profiles so they can see the changes, understand better how to use the platform and have great, personally branded profiles too. Would you like some similar help? We can work on any aspect of LinkedIn that you need and the consulting can be broken up in to 3 one hour sessions over a period of time – click here for the details