<p>I don’t use Facebook, but I do have a profile on LinkedIn. I have some contacts, but I feel like I don’t really know how to use it. </p>
<p>Here are my questions for other LinkedIn Users: do you contact people who are listed as contacts of people you know? Is that assumed to be part of the deal when you accept a new contact? I am in the mortgage business, and I could (theoretically) email all of my contacts and/or my contacts’ contacts with an offer of reduced closing costs on a mortgage, but I’ve held off because I think that’s overstepping the bounds of what people expect on LinkedIn. </p>
<p>Another question: two people I barely know (but who live in my town) have asked to be a contact of mine on LinkedIn. I have never interacted with them professionally and one of them, I have never met. What’s your guideline for accepting contacts from people you don’t know? I have chosen not to accept because I want my contacts to be people I have either met and/or had some business interaction with.</p>
<p>Appreciate any constructive thoughts/ideas/comments.</p>
<p>I only use it to connect with people I’ve worked with or would like to work with. I don’t connect with people just for the sake of having connections, I only connect if doing so would be constructive or if they were someone I worked closely with. I wouldn’t advise using it to solicit anything, I don’t think that’s what the site is for. When you make the account, as you might remember, it asks you to specify what types of communications from others you are open to and it lists that on your public profile so people know what not to bother you with.</p>
<p>I’m just starting my career but what I’ve mainly used my account for is to look other people up. When I have a job interview coming up it’s fun to learn a bit about the interviewer before I go.</p>
<p>I like LinkedIn partly because it’s not like Facebook. People’s contacts are generally meaningful, people they actually know or have worked with. It appears that it’s mainly consultants and salespeople who accumulate huge lists of contacts whom they know only peripherally.</p>
<p>In my opinion, it’s in poor taste to make contact with someone on LinkedIn whom you don’t really know and haven’t had more than passing professional contact with. But that’s just me.</p>
<p>^^totally agree with both of you – my instincts are the same – not to use it to solicit business but to maintain it as a way to connect with people I have worked with in the past. That’s why I’m so leary of connecting with people I haven’t met. I think I’ll continue to ignore requests from those types of contacts and respect the contacts I have.</p>
<p>I use it to solicit business with people I have worked with in the past. I am a contract project manager. I have only asked someone to introduce me to someone in their network once, and it honestly didn’t work out. Both of the contacts told my connection they would be happy to talk to me about their company (where I was hoping to find out about contract opportunities), then didn’t respond when I followed up to contact them.</p>
<p>I never accept invitations from people I don’t know (but would if a current link who I knew fairly well asked me to – but that has never happened).</p>
<p>I think of LinkedIn as:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>A great way to keep in touch with your professional contacts as they move around. You can always find them (and get some info about what they are up to), no matter where they have moved to.</p></li>
<li><p>A good network of people I know personally that I can tell when I am searching for a new contract/client. But I try not to overuse it and bug them (I would guess I end up working with my network once every 2-3 years).</p></li>
</ul>
<p>I have encouraged my D to get on, and add everyone she meeting through her internships and jobs while in college as a start on a longer term network. She was hesitant at first (I think her generation thinks it is like FaceBook, and has trouble distinguishing that these are professional connections, so it is okay to link to someone you would not want to have a beer with).</p>
<p>Emaheevul07, note that people with paid accounts can essentially see who is “stalking them” on LinkedIn. If you have any identifying characteristics in your profile (like where you work now, etc.), they can see some of that info. Not everyone has a paid account, but just so you know that this is a difference from FaceBook. :)</p>
<p>I knew that, but assumed nobody would care unless I checked their profile a hundred times. Looking up someone you’re going to be having a meeting with seems like a reasonable thing to do to me.</p>