When you invite people to join your network on LinkedIn, do you customize your invitation, or do you send the standard greeting:
"Everet, I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn." - Your Name
If you are not customizing your invitations I urge you to please do so. There are three reasons for this:
1. It reminds the LinkedIn contact who you are and why you are contacting them. Trigger the person's memory. This way when you connect with them in the future you they understand why you are doing so, who you are, and how they know you.
2. People like dealing with people. Most people don't like dealing with machines. Prove you're not a spam program or contact crawler program and I'm happy to talk to you. Even if I decide not to link in with you I can still use the "respond without accepting tool" to try and help you out.
3. You get a higher response rate for people accepting your invitations. I personally do not accept most invitations that are not personalized. The exception is for friends or colleagues that I know well. I'm not going to make a co-worker who sits across the room from me write a custom invitation. Same for a family member.
I suck at remembering names. I always have. Another reason I prefer to receive a personalized invitation is because I save all of the LinkedIn invitations I receive. I do this because if you are in my network, but I haven't had contact with you in a long time, going to your profile won't always remind me why we are connected and how I can help you. At those moments I look up your original invitation to put in context how I can help you and why we are connected.
So if you wonder why I haven't accepted your invitation, read it and see if it is personalized. If it is not personalized. Please withdraw the original and send me a new one. I don't want to leave your invite hanging in cyberspace...floating forever like Captain Kirk in the Tholian Web.
Don't just take my word for it. Do a search and see for yourself.
Thanks!
Ev
"A Heck of A Nice Guy"
"A Heck of A Nice Guy"
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You are absolutely right Dan!
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