Who Should You Connect With And Who To Follow?

It has never been easier to connect with people all over the world whether it’s on Facebook, LinkedIn or similar sites. With one click, you can send a request to connect and surprisingly many blindly accept the invitation. The rationale is clearly the bigger the better however it’s time we tell the two things; connecting and following apart. It differs a bit between sites whether you can connect with, follow or both hence in this post we will primarily discuss LinkedIn where you can do both. 

The pain of the generic invitation 

LinkedIn has influencers and a mountain of other less known people who publishes a lot of great content every day and by reading it people learn something new all the time. With the introduction of long-form posts on LinkedIn along came the ability to follow those that publish content. Following means that you see all the activity the person you follow publishes however unlike if you connect you don’t get access to their network or any changes they might make to their actual profile. Unfortunately many people misunderstand the relationship between following and connecting and think that just because they read some great thoughts published by someone they don’t know and might not even be within their industry that they should connect. They might even do so with a sloppy generic invitation. I have previously written about the message you send when you send a generic invitation to connect in “Don’t Send Me Generic Invites On LinkedIn”. This is definitely not the way forward and if you really really want to connect with let’s say Sir Richard Branson then you better sharpen the pencil and find a very good story to sell him. There should be some ground rules as to who to connect with and who to follow. 

The ground rules 

While there can certainly be a discussion on what those rules should be I will try and at least form the basis for discussion. So people you should/could connect with would be the following. 

• Colleagues
• Friends (if they are relevant to your professional life)
• People from your own profession (if they are from your area or you can find a clear mutual benefit in connecting)
• People from your industry
• Recruiters within your industry and/or profession (yes let’s not forget about what LinkedIn is really about)

This is not black and white naturally and you can always discuss if you are an analyst if you should connect with a CFO or if you work in the mailroom and you feel it’s very appropriate you connect with the CEO of your company. Likewise if you are just starting your career probably you don’t have much use for connecting with a C-Suite recruiter and so on. 

Instead of connecting with as many as you can consider that despite you finding many people interesting on LinkedIn you can also follow them and still get the great benefit of their thought leadership. So who should follow exclusively then? 

• Influencers
• People you admire
• Non-influencers who publish posts within your area of interest
• People that work in companies you would like to work in

Again it’s all up for discussion and perhaps you can make a case to people you admire that you want to connect with them because you are looking for a mentor or have the greatest desire to work in their company or industry. You can certainly also connect with influencers if you feel you have something to offer them, but remember you have to bring something to the table. Otherwise you might as well “just” follow them. 

Have you done your network spring cleaning yet? 

So now is a good time to look through your network and see if you are connected with people that doesn’t really fit the bill or even those you thought would be logical additions to your network who just didn’t prove that there was value in the connection. Don’t always go with quantity over quality, but make sure that your network is valuable to you and that you would be willing to help each and single one of your connections. 

This is the second post in my miniseries on the life on LinkedIn which started last week with the post “7 Reasons Why Your LinkedIn Posts Will Fail” and I am curious to know what you think? What’s your strategy for connecting vs. following? I would very much also appreciate a “like” or a “share”. Even if you disagree or have more to add to the discussion you can leave a comment and I will be sure to respond in one way or the other. 

You should also take the time to read through some of my previous articles on LinkedIn and networking. 

How To Crowdsource Your Personal Development

Did I Start Publishing Too Soon?

How To Avoid Ending Up Single In Networking

Why I Just Removed 10% Of My Network

5 Insights From A Year Of Blogging

Don’t Send Me Generic Invites On LinkedIn

Social Media Quarterly Statement 

Personal Branding Is Like Building A Business 

Anders Liu-Lindberg is the Regional Finance Business Partner for Maersk Line North Europe and is working with the transformation of Finance and business on a daily basis. Anders has participated in several transformation processes amongst others helping Maersk Drilling to go Beyond Budgeting and transformed a finance team from Bean-counters to Business Partners. He would love the chance to collaborate with you on your own transformation processes to help you stay out of disruption. If you are looking for more advice on how to get the most of LinkedIn Anders also has a few tips to share as well as if you want help in your job search. Don’t be shy! Let’s get in touch and start helping each other.