How To Improve The Quality Of Your LinkedIn Network

After I hit 10,000 LinkedIn connections, I felt I should do some major work “pruning” this very valuable tree of relationships. Most of us have been guilty of accepting connection requests from people that you don’t know and who may not be the best fit for what you have to offer. I’ve surely done this, and I’ve also sent out connection requests to other people who I thought might benefit from my services.

Long story short, if you do this, you also need to do some spring cleaning once in a while.

Here’s what I asked my Invisible Bot, Michiel, to do to fix this:

• Find all the connections that did not seem to fall into my target business audience. Use various segmentation criteria to filter the ones that probably should not be part of my “confirmed.” These criteria are different for everyone, and in my case, included industry, title, location (to make sure I keep connections in the Netherlands, but maybe not in Italy). It also included a company name, to introduce a positive bias for connections from my former employers.
• Create a google sheet with connections and their details, that my bot suggests disconnecting, so I can review.
• After I have confirmed the list, disconnect the market connections, including sending a nice email to mention that I’m happy to connect again if this person thinks we have valuable work to do together.

I’m now going to do this on a regular, say quarterly, basis to keep my network high quality. This is not just good for me, but also for the people who have connected with me, and through me.