Do you want to have a larger network? You have written and received recommendations and connected with people you know. Look at your network statistics. That is how many people can find you easily on Linkedin. If you are job hunting, you may want to increase that number.
There is always a controversy on whether you should be an open networker, in other words, a person who connects with strangers as opposed to only friends and colleagues. There are pros and cons. The major pro is that more recruiters and hiring managers can find you to tell you about an opportunity. The drawback that many people fear is that they will be inundated with spam from all their new connections. As someone who has a few thousand connections, the spam has been very minimal and as a recruiter it has been worth it to me to be able to find potential candidates easily. Make up your own mind as to how open a networker you wish to be. I am just going to give you a tip to increase your connections if that is what you wish to do.
Today’s Tip:
Join and participate in the groups on Linkedin.
There are groups on Linkedin and you can belong to as many as 50 of them. Belonging to the groups will increase the size of your network as a whole. You can join groups related to your career, your hobbies, your school, former companies and other interests. To find groups, do a search under “groups”. If you pick “art” as a keyword, groups related to art will populate and then you request to join the groups that you have chosen.
If you would like to increase the size of your network, there are groups for that as well. There are the “Happy to Connect” group and the InvitesWelcome.com group, to name two. Look for groups related to LIONs, which stands for Linkedin Open Networkers. Most of these groups have rules saying that you will not IDK (hitting the I don’t know tab) on any invitation you receive from a member of the group. The archive button is always an option to ignore an invitation.
So, what groups do you belong to on Linkedin? What groups would you recommend? And have you had a very successful networking experience because of participating in a group there?
