How to Personalize an Invitation on the LinkedIn App
“Hi Richard, I’d like to join your LinkedIn network.” is a message I receive on a daily basis. Every time I receive it, I wonder why on earth the person didn’t spend the extra 30 seconds personalising their invite. It’s such a huge opportunity and amazes me how many stock connection requests I still get. This got me wondering why.
I think in some cases it is just pure laziness. In the same way as people think that spamming out the same cut and paste generic message in an email is a good use of their time. It’s not btw. Nothing says you don’t care about me, and that I’m just another name/number on your list, than sending me a generic message.
In these days of social media, it’s really not difficult or time consuming to find out about someone and send them something relevant and personalised. Even just using somebody’s name is a start! Take a little extra time (in most cases less than a minute) to find out about someone, personalise your invite, and let them know the reason you’d like to connect.
I do like to give people the benefit of the doubt though, and there may be another reason. Maybe people just don’t realise that you can, or how to personalise an invite. For those people I thought it was worth writing a quick “How to” guide.
On the web version of LinkedIn it’s fairly obvious really. When you’re on someone’s profile page you’ll see the blue “connect” button.
When you click that you’ll get a popup asking you if you’d like to customise the invite.
Click on the “add a note” button.
Then simply add your personalised message.
On the App then it isn’t so obvious (and actually wasn’t possible in older versions of the App) but once you know, you know! So the process is similar but not quite the same.
Again, first go to the persons profile page.
Rather than hitting the blue “connect” button. Tap the “…” menu button to the right of their profile picture.
This will now show another menu that includes the magical “personalize invite” button. Tap that.
You’ll then be able to add your personalised message and hit “send invitation”
So there you have it, how to send someone a personalised LinkedIn invite whether using the website or the App. Do let me know how you get on with this improved approach, and of course feel free to try it out on me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardjeaton/
Thanks
Richard
P.S. Apologies to my namesake used in the images above. I obviously needed to use a profile I wasn’t already connected to, and he was the first result for a search of my own name!
