Very often you will receive LinkedIn connection requests from people you don’t know, it will very often be a person with no face and a name you don’t recognise. A company name may be stated but usually there will be no personalised message and you will be left with no idea who they are or why they want to connect with you – this is what you should do;

As with other social media platforms you need to manage your social media professionally, there will be lots of bots, scammers and spammers out there and you will not want to connect with every person that asks you to connect with them. It’s easy to follow the childhood rule of never speaking to strangers, but what if you’re missing out on a potential customer?

It will take too much time to click on every single connection request, so instead reply (but do not connect) with a short, brief message saying you are sorry but you don’t recognise them from their photo or name and without a personalised message you’re not sure how they can help. If you want you can add that you are sorry you don’t recognise them. You could also stick a link to your website in their too and ask if they could contact you directly if it is to ask about your service or place an order for your product.

I send this sort of message once a week as a minimum for one month. I literally copy and paste it to all pending requests, then when I have not heard back from them for a full month I message to say I have tried to contact them but had no response so sadly I will be deleting their connection request as I presume it was done in error, again including my website address and asking them to contact me directly if they do have a query.

Most of the time people will not reply and this shows you that they were in fact bots, scammers and spammers, in which case you didn’t need them as a connection anyway!

If you need help managing your social media then give us a call, we can manage your social media account for you or offer one-to-one social media training in Peterborough to help you improve your online presence.