Having an outstanding profile on LinkedIn while your network consists of only your three best friends is kind of like going to a party in a fabulous new outfit, then spending the evening huddled in the corner with, well, your three best friends. Fortunately, you don't need a couple of stiff cocktails in you to start "putting yourself out there" on LinkedIn. :)

What's the difference between your connections and your network?
A first-degree connection is someone you're directly linked to on the system. If I ask Jane to join my network, and she does, she is my first-degree connection. I can see everything on her profile and she can see everything on mine, including the list of all my other first-degree connections. We can also send messages directly to each other through the LinkedIn interface.

A second-degree connection is someone who is linked directly to your connection, but not directly to you. So if Jane has a LinkedIn friend named John, who is not directly connected to me as well, he is my second-degree connection. We can see most of the information on each other's profiles, but not the list of our connections or our contact information. We also can't send a message directly to each other—we would have to ask Jane to act as an intermediary by forwarding on an Introduction.

A third-degree connection is one step further away. John's friend, June, is not connected to me OR Jane, so she's my third-degree connection. I can see the same information on her profile that I can see on John, but I need to go through two people to send her a message, i.e. I send a message to Jane, who forwards it to John, who forwards it to June.

Note: To learn more about how Introductions work, check out my earlier post, The INs of LinkedIn.

Your network consists of all of your first-, second-, and third-degree connections. As you can see by this display of my Network Statistics (from the Contacts menu at the top of my page), it doesn't take all that many connections to have a huge network of people you can reach through the system.

From my measly 182 connections, I have a network of more than 1.8 million people. (182 might not seem measly to new LI users, but there are lots of people who have thousands.)

The LinkedIn network number refers to all the users on LinkedIn. If one of those people were to turn up in search results, I wouldn't be able to see their name—just their headline and basic public info. And there's no way to contact them directly without using a paid InMail (assuming they have chosen to accept them in their Contact Settings). As you can see, I still have a long way to go to connect to them all! :)

So now that you know what a connection is, it's time to start making some!

How to add connections to your LinkedIn network

Before I get into the "how," I think you should take some time to figure out what sort of criteria you want to use to decide who you'd like to have in your network. Some people want to have as many people as possible, regardless of whether they know them or not. You'll see them referred to as LIONs (LinkedIn Open Networker) on the site. Others just want people they've worked directly with and whom they would be willing to give a personal reference for, if asked. I'm closer to the latter, although I have people in my network I haven't actually worked with, but know well enough in other ways (personal friends, volunteer contacts, etc.) that I would be comfortable if they asked me to introduce them to someone else in my network. All of these are totally valid approaches, but it makes sense that you give it some thought at the beginning. For one thing, once your profile is up there, you can expect to be invited by others to join THEIR networks and sometimes you're not going to want to accept. Having an actual strategy for building your network can help you make those decisions.

I wrote a post last year that you might want to review that talks about this further: The Etiquette of LinkedIn Invitations. The core idea is:

Everyone has the right to determine who she wants/doesn’t want to connect with for any reason whatsoever.

Now that you've figured out who you'd like to add to your network, here's how to go about inviting them.

From their LinkedIn profile
If you know someone is already on LinkedIn, search to find his profile. Click the "Add [PERSON] to your network" link at the top right.

Note that there's no limit on the number of invitations you can send out at a time but LinkedIn wants to make sure that you have some legitimate relationship with the people you're inviting. So, when you invite someone from her profile page, you'll be asked what that relationship is.

Let's say I wanted to connect with Jane Doe, whom I went to university with. When I click "Add Jane to your network", I'll be prompted to say how I know her.

If I say we were colleagues, a dropdown box will appear that will list all the places I've worked that I've included on my own LI profile. If I say we were classmates, it will ask me to pick from all the schools I've listed, etc.

When I select the one we both attended, LI will send an e-mail to Jane saying something like, "Elizabeth Kricfalusi has indicated you are a Classmate at Queen's University." That gives Jane a point of reference as to who I am. Now, if I haven't worked together or gone to school with Jane or had some other listed relationship with her (maybe she gave me her business card at an event), I'll be asked to provide her e-mail address to show I'm not randomly picking names from the database.

Note: You can see the default message that will be sent to the person when you invite him or her. I find this a bit terse, so highly recommend you edit it in some way. If this is someone you think enough of to have in your network, surely you can take a moment to say something a little more personal. (When people send me an invitation but haven't bothered to edit the text in any way, I feel more like some random person taken off a direct mail list than a valued colleague.) At the very least, I usually change the message to say, "I was wondering if you would be interested in joining my network," which changes the tone from what I want, to what the other person would like to do.

From the Contacts page

From the top menu, click Contacts > Add Connections. On the first tab, you can enter e-mail addresses of friends, separated by commas, whether or not they're on LinkedIn. (If they're not, they'll have to join before they can accept your invitation.)

You can also allow LinkedIn to search your existing address books from web-based services like Yahoo and Gmail and your desktop e-mail clients like Outlook and Apple Mail. For the web-based ones, enter YOUR e-mail address and click Continue. You'll get a number of prompts to log in to that account, give permission to LinkedIn to access it, log back into LinkedIn, yada, yada, yada... until eventually a list of your contacts will pop up and you can simply check off the ones you want to invite.

For the desktop clients, click the link at the bottom and it will give you instructions on how to import your Contacts file.

The Colleagues and Classmates tabs will show the companies and schools you've listed on your profile. When you click one, it will give you the names of other people from those places that have LinkedIn accounts so you can check off the ones you want to invite to join your network.

Note: If you're sending an Invitation to multiple at once, they won't see the other people's names.

So now we've covered the basics of setting up your profile and building a network. If you have any questions about any of this, send me an e-mail and I'll respond as soon as possible. Tomorrow I'm going to talk about LinkedIn groups—the benefits of joining them, ways to participate, and creating your own group. Friday I'll be covering some miscellaneous topics, including organizing your contacts, giving and receiving testimonials, and participating in the Questions/Answers section.

Posted in Etiquette, How To, LinkedIn, My Two Cents, Series, Social Media