How to Get the Most Out of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Other Networks

Networks of connected people have a certain type of structure, and this structure affects how you benefit from your own connections, either on LinkedIn or in any other context.

More than 40 years ago, Mark Granovetter of Johns Hopkins University studied the diffusion of information through a social network and wrote a landmark paper that eventually became the single most cited academic work on social networking: “The Strength of Weak Ties.” He suggested that having a mix of strong and weak connections is crucial when it comes to spreading an idea or a piece of information through a network, because the information must be able to “jump” from one social cluster to another. (Attention all content marketers, seeking to maximize their content's reach!)

In Granovetter’s words,

“If one tells a rumor to all his close friends, and they do likewise, many will hear the rumor a second and third time, since those linked by strong ties tend to share friends. If the motivation for sharing the rumor is dampened a bit on each wave of retelling, then the rumor moving through strong ties is much more likely to be limited to a few cliques than that going via weak ones; bridges will not be crossed.”

The classic illustration of the power of “weak ties” is demonstrated in how we find new jobs for ourselves. If one of your close friends knows of a job opening, chances are good that you and your other close friends already know of it as well. On the other hand, the job openings known to your weak-tie friends – those friends or colleagues with whom you don’t interact as often – are not as likely to be known to your own friends or you. Granovetter’s research showed that if you’re looking for a job you’ll get your best leads not from your closest friends or the associates who know you well, but from those acquaintances you don’t know so well, because they’re the ones most likely to know people in other social clusters, beyond your own.

Every person’s network of contacts, colleagues, friends and associates (online or offline) is actually a small cluster within a bigger network of clusters, which itself is a cluster within an even bigger network, and so on. So, for instance, if you’re using LinkedIn to make connections with potential customers for whatever product or service you’re selling, you’ll soon find that the most profitable connections on your network aren’t the people who themselves have the largest number of connections, but the ones that have the most diverse connections – that is, the ones who are connected to the largest number of different clusters.

Rather than the “strong ties” you have with your closest colleagues or your immediate co-workers, in other words, the robustness and usefulness of your own LinkedIn network will be based more on the number of “weak ties” you also maintain – that is, ties to the people you don’t know quite as well, or don’t interact with quite as often. These are the people most likely to be connected to clusters you aren’t familiar with and don’t have access to by yourself.

Or consider the issue of customer referrals. In the B2B space, as well as in many B2C categories, a great deal of business comes in via the referral of others. But in addition to ensuring high product and service quality, what should you do to maximize your access to such referrals? You guessed it – concentrate on your weak ties, rather than on your strong ties. By developing your own network of industry colleagues, customer connections, and blog or Twitter followers, for instance, you get access to their connections with others.  

One of my favorite strategies for B2B competitors, in fact, is to prepare material about the benefits of your firm or your product, and then to make this material freely available for download on the Web site (and I mean freely available – with no gating requirement, no email confirmation, no restriction whatsoever). But this material isn’t meant as a tool for persuading the people who come to your Web site to buy. Rather, it’s a tool for helping them to persuade others within their firm. In effect, you are arming these weak-tie prospects with the tools necessary to appeal to their own clusters of connections.  

Ditto when it comes to reaping a benefit from customer advocates. One reason customer advocates are so valuable to your firm is that they are likely to be connected to other clusters of potential customers that you aren’t (yet) connected to. Customer advocates connect your company to prospects outside your own sphere.

And of course, the power of weak ties can hardly be overstated when it comes to generating creative or innovative ideas. All new ideas come from combining previous ideas and concepts. Ideas and innovations can themselves be thought of as being set into a kind of network, with some ideas connected to others, clusters of ideas within other clusters, and so forth. So the surest way NOT to have a creative breakthrough is to rely on all the experts you already know, and all the disciplines you’re already familiar with. Again, your best new ideas will come when you tap into disciplines you know less about, or consider the opinions of experts you have rarely consulted before, or simply talk to people you associate with less frequently. One study of entrepreneurs showed they are more likely to have “deliberately exposed themselves to different sources of information, by striking up conversations on trains, for example, or maintaining a diverse range of acquaintances, to increase the odds of stumbling upon an interesting opportunity.”

But finally, even if all you’re trying to do is to advance your own career at whatever firm you’re working for, the “weak ties” argument will help you better appreciate which other executives you should be trying to add to your own set of connections. The popular wisdom is that the best way to get ahead is to hitch your wagon to a senior star, but research by University of Chicago Prof. Ronald S. Burt shows that this usually isn’t the most productive path. He found that it isn’t those connected to the most senior people who tend to have higher salaries, but those connected to the most diverse groups of other executives. And it’s not because they become linchpins or hubs or gateways to power and information, per se, but rather because managers who maintain contacts in a diverse range of departments tend to get a very healthy and intellectually stimulating “exposure to diverse ideas and behaviors.” 

According to Burt, in his book Neighbor Networks, the most salient factor in most executives’ more rapid advancement within any organization involves “having to translate between different groups” and developing “gifts of analogy, metaphor, and communicating between people who have difficulty communicating to each other.”

So whether you’re interested in a new job or a better job, more customers or simply more creative ideas – thinking more carefully about the weak ties in your own network might be a worthwhile activity.