Why dont they get it about linkedin ?

I don’t have any quantitative data to prove or disprove my hypothesis that  a vast user base of linkedin don’t get it. They don’t understand the purpose of linkedin and how to use it effectively. Let me try and list out the major annoyance that affect me.

• Confusing linkedin and social networking sites like facebook

Maybe in some industries the distinction between social networking and professional networking is blurred but it is certainly not in my industry and I would assume most of my network.  Posts on politics, sports etc. really have no place on linkedin. I would go one step further and say that is  downright annoying. The problem is that if one your connections “likes” the post, it comes up in the news feed.  It is not a very big job to unfollow the perpetrator but then what is the purpose of being connected?

• Cryptic “I would like to add you to my professional network”.

This actually belongs as cardinal sin one. Now if I don’t know you why would I want to add you to my network unless I know something about how this connection would be beneficial to me. If you are trying to tap my network, you are not going to succeed since this is hidden. I initially used to not add anyone I didn’t know personally but had to abandon this after realizing that I forget names of people who resurface after years and decades. Now there is no algorithm to decide which invitations to accept and which ones to reject and it is quite random.

Glancing through this post a bit, I thought this is a good excuse to start cleaning up the connection list and removing people I personally don’t  know but had  to abandon this  planned action seeing the amount of work involved.

So how does one use linkedin in  way to get benefit. ?

I don’t fully don’t know the answer to this one. I find the noise to signal ratio just to high.

My rough cut estimate is that 10-20% of my connection list post something of interest to me. So what works now is that as I am glancing through my connection list, I just unfollow the remaining 80% as when I see some posts.  Another technique is to use tags constructively.  I add a tag as soon as I add a connection. I have not yet found out what to do which this tagged information but assume it will help me at a later date.

If anyone reads this post and can comment on how they use linkedin effectively and get some benefit out of it –  it would be appreciated.