What makes you cringe more – receiving a generic LinkedIn request from someone you don’t know or someone messaging you on Facebook with the following message “Hi! I’ve liked your page. Please like mine in return but remember you have to like it from your personal profile in order for the like to count!”
We’ve been talking about connecting lately and today is no different. There is a right and wrong way to connect on social media. I know my reasons for not accepting a connection request but I was curious about you, the ME Marketing community.
Recently, I posted across the ME Marketing platforms asking “What is one thing that immediately makes your ignore a connection request?”. The popular answers were ones I expected, but while reading the answers I found that we all pretty much agree on the same reasons.
Here are the answers, in order of most votes…
1. No profile picture.
2. Incomplete profile.
3. (tie) No Mutual Connections.
3. (tie) Do not know the person online or offline.
3. (tie) Spam or Sales Pitch as first form of communication.
6. Person requesting connection has no other connections.
7. Misspellings/grammatical errors on posts and/or profile.
8. Only connected to get a connection in return to up their number.
9. Use default connection request text – no personalization.
10. Little or no activity on profile.
11. Only post links – no original content.
12. Speak a foreign language.
13. Repeatedly asking for things – likes, retweets, etc.
14. Negativity.
15. Use True Twit on Twitter.
What can we gather from these answers?
- Everyone needs to have a profile picture and complete profile
- Tell the person why you are connecting if you do not know them
- Be real, not an auto-bot
- Do not spam or let your first contact be a sales pitch
Just be you and you’ll have no probably connecting with people online. Show your intent and be honest. There will always be those who want to connect for sake of having a huge number of people they’re connected to. If you want to make meaningful relationships that will help you and your business, be upfront and send the person a message introducing yourself (if you don’t know them), telling them why you want to connect and how you came to find them. Be human and bring it to a personal level.
What about you? If you didn’t get a chance to answer before, share with me, what makes you ignore a connection request?
Interesting! for me, the most important factor depends on the network. In Twitter I’d say not having a bio – it’s hard to follow someone if you don’t know who they are and what they write about. I don’t add anybody on Facebook I don’t know in person, so I guess that’s pretty easy. LinkedIn is harder but I tend to add people working in a similar field.
Good post!
Thanks Antonio! I agree – bios are important, as well as who they actually are!
For me, on LinkedIn I accept almost everybody because sometimes I find some connections that I’m interested in among theirs, but even when I don’t, I say that maybe later on I would, however, lately I stopped accepting connection requests from a specific nationality because they started annoying me asking repeatedly for a job and in a very nosy way only because I used to work for PEPSI in Saudi Arabia, very attractive situation for some, but since I’m not working for PEPSI anymore and I left Saudi Arabia, I will resume accepting all requests, so as a conclusion, people would be annoyed for being asked a connection to help them find a job right away and start following up with you on it everyday, hope my LONG answer was an addition.
Mohamad.