Share

Tweet

Share

Share

Share

Email

Comments

Every professional network has its own work around and LinkedIn is no different. In order to achieve your desired business goals on the fastest growing professional network, you must avoid these 5 common mistakes:

1. Don’t send a general connection invite message:

This is such a common mistake that people even fail to recognize that it’s a mistake. You do not just randomly send out general template connection invites. Give people a reason to connect with you. It shows that you’ve done your homeworkand made an effort by sending out a personalized connection invite. Doing so increases the chances that your request will be accepted.

2. Don’t send out invite messages to irrelevant people:

Another common mistake made by people is to send out invites in bulk just to increase the number of connections. Don’t do that. You should connect with your target audience, business partners, co-workers and with whom you want to develop business relationships. Think before you send out an invite. If you’re not connected with your target audience then no matter how big your connections list is, it won’t get you the desired results that you want to get via LinkedIn.

3. Don’t leave your connections deserted:

If you’ve added prospects to your network then you should engage with them and build relationships. What’s the point of connecting with them when you don’t take the initiative and start the conversation? No one wants to hang around with a stranger or do business with people that they don’t trust. LinkedIn is no different. If you want to build relationships, then engage with your connections. Start off my thanking them for accepting your invite, and let them know what you do.

4. Don’t send out frequent sales messages:

Surely there can’t be a person who has never received a sales pitch on LinkedIn! With the passage of time, the frequency of these messages has increased manifold. Stop annoying your connections by sending out sales messages on a frequent basis. This is not the way to do business. Instead of sending out spam messages, try to send out short and engaging messages. A good example could be your recent LinkedIn post or blog post. Add a sentence or two about the article and send it out to your relevant connections. Of course when the time is right, send your sales pitch but don’t do that all the time.

5. Don’t tag all your connections under one category:

Categorize your audience using the appropriate tags. Place them in separate and relevant categories. Examples can include: colleagues, business partners, prospects, journalist etc. The best part of doing so is that once you formulate a LinkedIn marketing strategy for a particular category, you can send out the messages to only those people by filtering your list according to that tag.

Hope you find the article useful. Your feedback would be appreciated.

Image credit: bigstockphoto.com