How Do I Manage My LinkedIn Connections?

As your connections on LinkedIn begin to grow, it becomes more difficult to manage them. We will cover some ideas that will make your life easier in terms of keeping up with your LinkedIn network.

Using the Tags feature of LinkedIn provides one way to categorize your connections. A Tag is a category that you choose such as clients, vendors, colleagues, and press contacts. You can have up to 200 Tags, far more than most of us will ever need. LinkedIn allows you to attach multiple Tags to a contact, making it easier to find them based on different criteria.

Tags enable you to segment your list of connections which can be helpful for sending out targeted messages around specific topics as well as identifying who you know in various industries or functions. LinkedIn allows you to sort your connections by tags, last name, company, location, industry, and recent activity. Among other things, this feature can give you an overview of where your connections are concentrated, and where you may want to focus on expanding your network.

In addition,  if you send out a general message to multiple contacts, make sure to uncheck “Allow recipients to see each other’s names and email addresses” underneath the Send Message button. LinkedIn limits you to sending group messages to up to 50 tagged connections at once. If you plan on sending group messages to large numbers of contacts in certain categories then you may want to tag them in groups of 50. For example, sales executives1, sales executives2, sales executives3 and so forth with 50 contacts under each of these tags.

Advanced People Search provides an easy way to not only search for new connections, but to search within your 1st degree connections as well. This feature provides far more flexibility than Tags in that you can search by keyword, industry, location, title, educational institutions and so forth. If you find that you are repeating the same search frequently, you can save your search parameters, but keep in mind that you are limited to a total of 3 Saved Searches in the free version of LinkedIn.

Please share any tips or tricks you have found for managing your LinkedIn connections.