June 8, 2010

In which I delete 4,000 LinkedIN Contacts

I’m expecting a flaming for this one but here goes. Last Thursday, the 3rd of June I deleted over 4,000 of my 1st level LinkedIn contacts bringing me down to a healthy 68 (see the profile here.)

Removing that many contacts is sure to frustrate some people though I feel I vetted out my contracts correctly. More importantly, why did I do this?

  • LinkedIn is a platform that works best when you have fewer, close contacts. When I joined LinkedIn many moons ago things were a little different, this was years before there were even profile pictures (there was so much hype behind that change by the way.) There were no Twitter’s, Facebook Fan Pages were not yet attracting enough professionals, LinkedIn was the place to be to make connections. Now I have tools such as Twitter, my blog and Facebook Pages to mass interact with my audience.
  • Most of this audience did not truly want to be connected anyway (flame away.) I’m not saying all Open Networkers are bad but a majority are address book collecters. Anybody who needs to promote that they have 8,000+ connections is 1) too ego-driven to work with me and 2) has way too many people in their core group to do any meaningful networking.
    • Because of this you can’t do business with most Open Networkers. They simply are not interested, play it as a collectors game, wonder you reach out to them or don’t see your message among everybody elses.
  • The spam was horrible. LinkedIN has few mass administration tools and people I barely knew were able to hit me with self-promotion questions and messages. Honestly, I wasn’t interested, if you want to promote be open about it. By the time I cleared my spam it was time to move on and I barely got time to interact.

Since deleting everybody my LinkedIn experience has been better and far more successful. I no longer accept invitations from everybody I know. We need to have a solid business relationship or have had profound talks at a conference to be connected there. Otherwise you will just have to deail with my Twitter, blog, phone and e-mail. Like my Facebook LinkedIn is now exclusive.

April 23, 2010

Free eBook: Social Media Workout

I have a confession to make. Supposedly I have been co-writing an ebook on all things web with @NatalieSisson. Due to time commitments I was unable to further my work with Natalie (this time). The good news is she has just released a fantastic (and free!!) eBook giving brief, bite sized workouts to improve your effiency and results in the major social media channels.

Want a taste? The Contents are below:

Workout 1: Back to Basics
Workout 2: Get Facebook Fit
Workout 3: Tone up with Twitter
Workout 4: Exercise Control Of Email
Workout 5: Lunging into LinkedIn
Workout 6:  Make Movie Muscle
Workout 7: Website Weightlifting
Workout 8: Build a Better Blog

It’s totally free so what do you have to lose? Click here to be redirected to Natalie’s WomanzWorld and get your copy.

November 11, 2009

Find LinkedIN Contacts on Twitter

Just an administrative thing but the article is not located on this page. Click here for my guide on finding LinkedIN contacts on Twitter.

March 9, 2009

Why I love Social Media (Traffic spike!)

3-4 weeks ago now I wrote a Squidoo lens titled ‘How to add your LinkedIN contacts to Twitter’ and forgot about it. Last week I decided to check in on how it was going – around 20 uniques visitors per day. Then I searched Google for keywords, including ‘how to add LinkedIN contacts to Twitter’ and ‘how do I add my LinkedIN contacts to Twitter’ and noticed the lens was ranked #1. I had written an update version so thought, why not post it on my blog to help promote it?.

I did just that. I put a link at the top of the old lens informing people of the changes and linking them to the new resource, Tweeted the update to my followers (around then 1,800ish) and left.

12 hours later the article generated around 180 uniques! Looking at the traffic stats in Google Analytics I can see that Twitter referred over half the traffic, the Squidoo lens sent its fair share and I had a single hit from Delicious – somebody bookmarked me. 24 hours later Delicious hits have grown to near 25% of the traffic and continue on an upwards tend. I’ve also noticed a few smaller bookmarking sites referring me traffic. The traffic was clearly qualified too – with my Bounce rate going from 71% down to 42% and the LinkedIN / Twitter guide being the most viewed page here!

That is just a little story I wanted to share. It was just an innocent attempt on my part to drive a little more traffic here and begin to consolidate my articles. I did not really promote the change at all. For a simple blog article I think the traffic generated was phenomenal and it just goes to show what all of these websites can really do for your traffic – even if you did not mean for it to happen!