LinkedIn is a wonderful tool for meeting new clients and suppliers, and the more connections you have, the better your chances of meeting new clients. Nevertheless, it is important to be selective about who you connect with – in particular, only connecting to people you actually know.
If you belong to a networking group, for example, it might be tempting to connect to everyone in that group, even if you have never met some of them, or to accept as connections friends-of-friends who have asked to be linked to you. But LinkedIn works because of the personal element: you know you can rely on your friends’ recommendations, and approach your friends to introduce you to valuable business contacts, precisely because you know them.
If you don’t know the person you are connected to, they are nothing better than a cold contact. Would you ask someone you don’t know to introduce you to someone else you don’t know? And how would you know you can rely on their recommendations?
At the very least, you should have personally met everyone with whom you connect on LinkedIn. If someone in a group you attend , or a second-degree acquaintance, wants to become your contact, why not organize a one-to-one, so that you can establish whether this person is a useful contact for you?
When I go to networking meetings, and meet contacts with whom I would like to stay in touch, I always ask whether it is okay to connect with them on LinkedIn. I then ask for a follow-up meeting so I can get to know them, and their business, a little bit better.
LinkedIn is about the quality of the contacts, not the quantity. Your LinkedIn contacts are potentially your sales team. At the end of the day it is better to have 200 reliable contacts who know you properly than 500 contacts who are strangers.
