…that is the question. I recently came across an article offering advice to those looking to improve their LinkedIn profile visibility. One of the recommended tactics, the article offered, was to accept and indeed seek as many connections as possible, in search of the illustrious 500+ connection milestone, and in the process, partially loosing or at least diluting, what I perceive to be the intended goal of business networking – relationship building.
Personally, I admit the allure of having a large business network is a power aphrodisiac. And LinkedIn is quite similar in this way to other forms of online social networking (Tweeter et. al). We all crave popularity and the number of connections is hard to ignore. After all, there are no other ways to measure the quality of one’s LinkedIn network – engagement level, number of updates, what our connections do outside of LinkedIn, etc.
Let me then try to answer my own question, “Should one indiscriminately accept/seek LinkedIn connections, or be very selective?”. The answer is: Maybe. If you use LinkedIn as a kind of sounding board for what you’re doing, then by all means, reach as broad of an audience as possible. Some positions, perhaps recruiters, need not be concerned with the quality as much as the quantity. On the other hand, if you’re using LinkedIn to manage a close knit community of former colleagues and friends, then don’t allow “strangers” who haven’t yet graduated to your inner circle. Until there’s an easy way, without alienating anyone, to create an inner and outer circle/group of friends and manage them separately, this question will continue to yield a “Yes or No” kind of answer for many of us.