From ActiveNetworkers , LinkedInSurprises
LinkedIn connection invitation limit
Are you in the people or networking business, a recruiter, or an active networker? Be careful! You can't invite everyone.
Prove it!
If you have less than 500 available invitations, it is displayed at the top of your LinkedIn Other Contacts page as below.
What gives?
LinkedIn limits members to sending out 3,000 invitation. All invitations count against this, regardless of where/how sent (Expand Your Network, Other Contacts, Colleagues/Classmates).
LinkedIn forces this limit as a way to control its members. It's a rough measure to reduce complaints due to unwanted invitations. They believe that 3,000 is sufficient for most members. If you go over, they want to keep an eye on you.
Read Linked's official policy and instructions.
My opinion
I think it's absurd for many reasons.
It's a stone age view of the world. The online world and Web 2.0 have fundamentally changed networking. See NewNetworking. Maybe 3,000 invitations made sense in a Rolodex world. It doesn't in a connected world. It's boggles the mind that a service whose very design increases the size of your network doesn't take that into account when setting appropriate limits.
The limit forces many people to limit the size of their network.
- ActiveNetworkers
- Open networkers
- Active Internet users that reach a lot of people through other social networks, blogs, web sites, mailing lists, etc.
- Business owners
- Recruiters
- Business development and sales professionals
- Event planners and managers
- Businesspeople with a long career at many companies or in an external-facing role
- Other professionals whose business is meeting many people on an ongoing basis
- Or anyone with a large Rolodex.
All of these people have more than 3,000 in their network. By limiting who members can invite, LinkedIn not only restricts its members ability to connect, its also reduces the size of its own network because many non-members can't be invited.
Why is it this way? Because ItsNotYourNetwork.
Is that all I get forever and ever?
No, you can get more. KonstantinGuericke of LinkedIn has posted the following
"If feedback from invitees has been average or above from mass inviters, the limit gets raised 500 invitations at a time. You don't have to be a model citizen. It's 200 if users are just below the average and 100 if they are way below--the 100 are there basically to demonstrate that users are willing to target invitees more carefully and write more compelling invitation messages (resulting in higher acceptance rates and fewer complaints/declines)."
Well, that's at least by their definition of a "model" citizen. Many ActiveNetworkers generate more than 500 new contacts a month. So if they're perfect they're still hamstrung. The average acceptance rate is around 80%. If there are sufficient complaints or your rate is low enough, you might get none.
How do I live in such a cruel world?
You'll need to manage and conserve your invitations.
- Gentlemen prefer LinkedIn members. The acceptance rate is much higher for contacts who are already LinkedIn members. And you don't have to worry about the painful education and support of newbies. In your Other Contacts page LinkedIn displays which of your current contacts are already members. Focus on inviting those contacts first.
- Email first. You want the invitation recipient to remember you when he gets your invitation, which increases the acceptance rate. Send email 1-2 weeks before you send out the invitation to renew your relationship with your contact This also ensures the address is valid. You don't want to be wasting invitation on bad addresses.
- Email only. You also can use the email to ask your contact to send you a LinkedIn invitation. That's more appropriate for weak connections who don't know you, and the only option if you have no invitations left. If the connection is a strong one and doesn't invite you within 2 weeks, you can invite him when you get invitations.
- Promote yourself as an open networker. Publish your email address in your profile, join and participate in the Lions and other Groups, and otherwise make yourself accessible so other can can send invitations to you.
- The world is larger than LinkedIn. Don't rely on your current LinkedIn connections as your official contact list. Create and manage your own mailing lists.
How to deal with LinkedIn
- Request invitations from LinkedIn Customer Service. Requests must sit through the service queue and then the Privacy group queue. You must wait a month between requests.
- Get a business account. Business members are promised one day Customer Service responses., which is more like one to three days. And they DON'T handles these requests. Customer Service forwards your request to the group that does.
- Don't wait until the painful end. Request more invitations before you run out.
Gimme, gimme! How long will it take to get my invitations once requested?
It could be a week. It could be never. Consider the process.
1. You write customer service.
2. Customer service "flags your account for review". This used to be manual, as your email request was forwarded to the Privacy group for review. The current terminology (your account is flagged) makes it sound like it's now automated. The processing time depends on your account type.
> BUSINESS. If you have a business account, you're promised a one day response. It's typically more like 2-3 days.
> PERSONAL. If you have a personal account, step 2 may take from a week (rarely) to literally never. A number of people tell me they have never had their account reviewed after they submitted a request.
> 3. Your account is reviewed and invitations granted. This has taken from 2 days to 2.5 weeks based on my experience the past five months.
TOTAL TIME. Add the time for steps 2 and 3.
> BUSINESS. I've experienced 1 to 3 weeks.
> PERSONAL. It can be a few weeks or much, much longer.
More Tips
- When you CAN just stop at one. If you may have multiple addresses for a contact don't send invitations to them all. Just use the primary or best known address. When you send invites to multiple address, you use up an invitation for each and guarantee a low rate of accept because only one of them can be accepted.
Is there' gold in them thar hills?
No. You CAN resend previously sent invitations but I don't recommend it. First, LinkedIn provides no way to resend invitations by any group or page. It's a manual individual invitation process.
Next, such invitations result in a very low acceptance rate. If someone was going to accept, they would have done so with the original invitation. The low rate will hurt when you're evaluated to grant new invitations. So let those old invitations rot away on their own.
Managing invitation grants
If you're run of invitations you likely have a common problem. You have thousands of people you can send invitations to, but only a few hundred LinkedIn invitations to actually use. So which contacts do you invite? The answer is those contacts with the highest acceptance rate. If your overall rate is high enough, you get the maximum 500 invites for your invitation grant. .... Now I'm far from doing that, but a guy can dream, can't he? :-)
I created a spreadsheet to manage and track my invitations and grants by contact group. Contact groups can include recent email contacts, LI members who've sent or accepted Introductions from you, LI members who post their email address, LinkedIn group members, Lions, alumni, coworkers, local professional group members, etc.
Up to this point I've used my best estimate for each group's acceptance rate. LinkedIn has a new Sent Invitations page that improves this from a guess to a fact. See http://www.linkedin.com/mbox?displayInvitationsSent . The page displays the person, subject, status, and date.
The next time your send out your invitations use a different subject for each of your contact groups. Record the number of invitations sent for each group. Whenever you get your next invitation grant first check the Sent Invitations page. Scroll through that to record the acceptances by contact group for the last batch of invitations you sent. You now know the acceptance rate for each group. When you send out your invitations use them for those contact groups that give you the highest acceptance rate.
MarcFreedman
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.