I remember joining LinkedIn in 2007 when I was getting my engineering bachelor's. So far, all through my career, I have earned a lot of values through LinkedIn, because of the connects —every connects is the actual asset. That's how I see it. Of course, I even got all of my job opportunities through LinkedIn connects.
The higher the number of connects, the higher the number of feeds to read every day, so what you really learn, depends on what/who you follow. (The same applies to Twitter/ any other feed streaming networking sites.) I get to know about what is happening in my technology industry through the feeds shared by my connects. Just by following my feeds I am able to keep myself up to date about latest happenings in my industry, so I keep reviewing whom I follow every month (on an average).
Because LinkedIn has grown so popular and nowadays people use technologies to automate the connection requests, it is indeed important to follow a discipline. That way I am able to achieve the following things:
- Every feed becomes valuable to read; it is worth spending time to go through them.
- Avoid feed spams - Yes, we all know people have started using LinkedIn like facebook. I know, you know what I mean! So it's absolutely important to understand that, there is a minimum of spam we can bear every day.
- Give focus to my profession connects - At least know how many connects you have, who your connects are, and what do they do.
So, How do I Achieve This?
Here are a few LinkedIn policies I follow:
- Connects who I personally know, met, admire/inspire, worked with, stay forever.
- Technology connects always stay forever. I respect them, and I learn a lot by following them.
- New technology connect requests whom I have never met in person will always be accepted, but reviewed every few months.
- Recruiters - I will accept them all the time and they will stay all the time, but only if they communicate/send a message within a week's time after the connection is accepted.
- All other connects follow the same rule as point 4 - will review them whenever possible.
Technology, especially the Internet, is no longer a fantasy playground. It absolutely dominates our everyday life, and our careers, so it's important to efficiently use it and attain the actual purpose of it!
Cheers!
Note from the author: This is my personal view and this article also applies to any professional networking sites like LinkedIn.
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