LinkedIn: The Myth of Having "Too Many Connections"
From my post on MyLinkedInPowerForum.
To me, having too many connections is like having too much MONEY.
Bring me the connections, and bring me the money! People seem to
think that a person who has "too many connections" doesn't have a
life. Though that may be true :-), it's not because he/she has too
many connections.
This issue seems to be one of "control". People are busy. They think
that by "managing" their number of connections, that they are managing
their time, and or their reputation. The fear is that by having more
connections, that there must be a correlating requirement of time to
manage LinkedIn requests.
I can tell you emphatically that this is NOT TRUE!
I've figured out anecdotally that LinkedIn is handling about
50,000-55,000 requests per month, and that has been fairly consistent
and growing slowly since January. With over 2 million users, the
average number of requests per member would be .025 or 2.5 out of
every 100, meaning that only 2.5% of members get even a single request
in a month. The median number of connections for all 2 million
LinkedIn members is still "1", meaning that more than half only have
one connection.
Though connections on LinkedIn follow a scale-free power law (get my
free report - MLPF message #2400 for an explanation), requests do not.
The reason for this is that there is quite a bit of homogeneity
between two super-connectors, in other words a lot of the same people
are connected to each other, and their clustering coeffecient (see the
paper) becomes closer to one. So two people who have 1000 connections
each, may have a coefficient of .5 meaning that they share 50% of the
same connections.
Because of this, 95% of the connections are owned by less than 5% of
the members. The top 500 users in LinkedIn with the most connections
have a total of about 350,000 connections, an average of about 700
each. But most of them share hundreds of connections between them, I
know I do.
I'm in the top 150 with about 850 connections and I only process about
15 requests a month. It's interesting that that number has not
changed much in 18 months when I only had 50 connections. I've found
that as my number of connections increases, that the number of my
"monkey in the middle" requests have actually decreased. So the
requests I am actually forwarding are typically to and from people I
actually *know*, which is exactly what I want to spend time on. I
spend about one minute processing a request, checking out the profile
of both the sender and receiver if I don't know them, and writing a
short note, then sending it on its way.
If I can process one request every minute, I could process over 10,000
LinkedIn requests every month by myself. Five of me could process
EVERY SINGLE LinkedIn request from the entire LinkedIn network
population. Would I want to do that? YES! Why wouldn't I? Wouldn't
I LOVE to have 50,000 people every month depending on me for
developing and furthering their relationships with other business
people. Remember, when you help enough people get what they want,
you'll always get what you want!
But since I handle all of my requests in 15-30 minutes a month, and
I'm in the top 150 LinkedIn users, why is *anyone* concerned that
their volume might be more time-consuming than that?
I'd be interested in hearing how many *real* requests Christian Mayaud
forwards per month. He has 8 times as many connections as I have, so
he should get 120 requests to forward every month. That should take a
few hours a month, certainly not a huge investment of time considering
the current value of his potential reach. But if my theory is true,
he doesn't receive 120 requests to forward each month. Since he has
*only* 6823 (at least this minute) direct connections, he is only
directly connected to less than .3% of LinkedIn members. If he were
to get .3% of the requests, he would get 165 requests per month,
certainly a manageable amount.
So, what are you worried about? Just BUILD YOUR NETWORK and *relate*
to people!
Joe Bartling
https://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=62910
2 Comments:
Awesome article Joe!
i am just starting this whole business networking thing and slowly being surpised as to what is eventuating
8:45 AM
Joe makes so many good points here that I am completely jealous I didn't write his post ....
but, I guess I am uniquely qualified to address his following query --
I'd be interested in hearing how many *real* requests Christian Mayaud forwards per month. He has 8 times as many connections as I have, so he should get 120 requests to forward every month. That should take a few hours a month, certainly not a huge investment of time considering the current value of his potential reach. But if my theory is true, he doesn't receive 120 requests to forward each month. Since he has *only* 6823 (at least this minute) direct connections, he is only directly connected to less than .3% of LinkedIn members. If he were to get .3% of the requests, he would get 165 requests per month, certainly a manageable amount.
I was kinda interested as well ... so I went to the outlook folders where my various LinkedIn correspondence gets sorted to to check
Here's the raw data based on type of request
=======================================================================
The week ending ... | Request to Forward | LinkedIn Request | Connect on LinkedIn | TOTAL
=======================================================================
5/20 | 70 | 37 | 17 | 124
5/13 | 97 | 24 | 23 | 144
5/6 | 80 | 17 | 23 | 120
4/29 | 61 | 26 | 16 | 103
=======================================================================
TOTAL | 308 | 104 | 79 | 491
=======================================================================
ave/day | 11 | 3.7 | 2.8 | 17.5
At first, it looks like Joe is wrong BUT ...
point 1 -- these numbers are inflated because of redundancy ( ie one request to forward may generate an additional "reminder to forward" when I'm travelling or over a long weekend, and often forwarding generates an additional "done" response or "thanks" response ie 1 request becomes 2 and sometimes 3 emails) (and I don't feel like sampling my emails to that level of detail ... Joe. you are welcome to come over and count'm yourself)
point 2 -- as Joe also noted in his "Connections Envy Post", the composition of my network is a bit different than most other "superconnectors" (or "SPPs") ...
.... my 682 connections have 116,200 connections between them, an average of over 170 each! That's insane! It should be much less than that. I checked a page worth (57 to be exact) of Christian Mayaud's first level connections and found that they have an average of 15 connections each, vs. my 170. To me that means that his network has much greater diversity and uniqueness than mine, even on a "per connection" basis, and certainly in the aggregate. He certainly deserves credit for evangelizing LinkedIn. I was surprised to see how many people he is connected to who have him alone as their single connection. That means he is walking the walk, not just talking the talk!
The point is that I connect to alot more "low connectors" partly because I accept alot of "newbies" and also "direct connects" (and, of course, after you connect to a superconnector like myself, why would you EVER need any more connections??? :-) )
Anway, I notice that "newbies" and "direct connects" are usually "on a mission" (looking for a job, find a candidate, looking for capital, find a certain type of contact within certain companies) and NOT just "fishing for connections" ... this means I often end up processing 3 or 4 "requests to forward" from them "right away" and then it stops ... so if you take away the 200 or so new connects every month (ie I stop accepting new connections), I think Joe is right -- my baseline or steady-state request rate would be about 100 to 200 per month (which hasn't grown faster than the overall growth rate of linkedin)
Also, only the "Requests to Forward" rate of 308 per mth takes anytime to process (to write or "cut and paste" the forwarding message) ... the other 200 are really just notices and, at most, require just a simple yes or no click. (you all know which one I click ... as "THE" LinkedIn SPP :-) )
My routine is to process requests 3-4x per week (every other day) for about 30 min or 1hr 1/2 per wk or about 6 hr per month so that 50 per hour or a little over 1 min per request
So that's the "cost" side to me (I spend almost 1 hour per day processing my regular email sans LinkedIn so my productivity gains made by using the email processing system I posted earlier more than make up for this incremental time per month) ie 30 hours per month for email responses of which 6 are Linkedin related ie 20% of the email I respond to is LinkedIn related.
The plus side is that most of the "direct connects" (ie I allow people to "request to connect" to me directly) "come with a deal"!!!! ... This intially surprised me ... I actually get more relevant referrals each week from my "new direct connects" than I do "from my network" ... I have noted for a long time that the deal flow from my large number of connections
hasn't increased much since about 1000 connections BUT what surprised me was that allowing people to "request to connect directly" not only didn't cause any problems but actually brings me more deal flow for me ... so as long as I keep accepting "direct connections" at the rate I do, I effectively double the amount of value I get from LinkedIn ...
although this surprized me intitially, it kinda makes sense -- why would anyone search and find me, read all the way to the bottom, push the button to connect ... to me, only then discover that they can either refer through others or to me directly --- which would you chose? (I know the "LinkedIn Party Line" is to chose the referral path so that your "trusted connections" will "recommend you" to increase the likelihood that I'll respond ... but "HEY, he says it's OK ... so why not go direct?" ... I think most people go the way of least resistance ...but I could be wrong ...)
so, what I can't say is what would happen if I didn't allow "direct requests to connect" ... at first you would think useful referrals to me would go down by half but we also know that some percentage would still try to reach me through the referral path -- so perhaps the effective refer-through rate would actually go up to compensate a bit ...
just don't know ... but I also suspect that by allowing "direct
connections", LinkedIn allows your profile to be seen by those who have no referral path to you ... which, as Joe noted, is quite significant (at least 20% of linkedin aren't reach by "superconnectors", if I'm not mistaken)
So there you have it, my STATs for last month ... and I think it support's Joe's Thesis quite well ...
11:03 AM
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