from InvitationAcceptanceRestrictions
Optimizing Invitation Acceptances
I use the following steps to process, view, and accept invitations, including sending a welcome email out to all new connections. It includes all my browser and other software tricks and has been optimized over time so it just takes a few minutes. I hope it will help other ActiveNetworkers who similarly receive many invitations. MarcFreedman
Process invitations
- Display your first Invitation page. Go to http://www.linkedin.com/invitations?displayReceived .
- Display all other Invitation pages. Right click the page number and select Open Link In New Tab.
- Copy all text for each Invitation page. Click on the page and click Control-A and Control-Insert. I use Clipmate clip management Software that stores the text for later acess.
- From one invitation page display all invitations. Right click the invitation subject link and select Open Link In New Tab. This creates up to 30 new tabs/browser windows. While it can take a minute or two for LinkedIn to display a page, the large number of browser windows ensures that the first windows will be fully displayed by the time I'm done creating all the new tabs.
- Scan and dispose of each invitation. I glance at the invitation text and move the cursor over the sender name, which displays a summary of the sender profile. Type Control-W to close the tab of each invitation. In the rare case where I need or want to write a personal response after scanning the invitation, I locate and reply to the invitation in my email in my LinkedIn Invitations Received folder. I use Eudora for email, which has been set up to filter invitations into that folder.
- Accept all invitations. Click the checkbox to the left of each invitation on a page and click Accept.
- Repeat. Display, close, and accept all invitations for other invitation pages.
Contact new connections. For a relatively small mailing like this (a few hundred recipients or less) I use my regular email software.
- Append invitation text. From my Clipmate clip management Software I select the the clips that correspond to the text for each invitation page that I copied above and click the Append icon to create one aggregated clip.
- Extract addresses. I start my email address extraction Software, paste the aggregated clip, click Extract, and copy the resulting list of email addresses.
- Massage email addresses. My Eudora email software won't work with a naked list of addresses. So I created a Microsoft Word macro that appends a comma at the end of every address line. I paste the list of email address to a blank Microsoft Word file, run the macro, and copy all the comma-appended addresses.
- Send group email. I open my Accepted Invitations stationary on my email, paste the massaged list of addresses into the bcc field, and send.