I Thought My Thousands of LinkedIn Connections Were Useless

For a long time I thought adding thousands of people on LinkedIn by hand, just for fun, was all show and no use.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

Then this week I found out I was wrong.

Relationships compound, but only over a long time. You only notice the books you never read when you need them, and connections work the same way.

A few days ago I suddenly needed to reach out to a lot of people with questions. Following the six degrees idea, I found that many company executives were only third degree connections of mine. Six degrees says any two strangers are linked by at most six people. The catch is that you need enough links to start with. With a few hundred first degree connections, your third degree network stays small. With a few thousand, it grows exponentially.

Being reachable is only half of it, though. The other half is whether they answer.

If someone looks at my profile and sees only a few hundred connections, I am not anyone they have heard of, and they will not even reply. A busy executive gets dozens of requests from strangers every day. To decide who is worth the time, they open your profile.

Because I have thousands of followers and have kept a public presence for a long time, they can quickly see who I am. Someone sincere, asking real questions, with views of his own. After that, the work goes smoothly.

So the gap between a few hundred and a few thousand is not just a number. Your profile, your follower count, how long you have kept it up and what you have written all answer one question for the other person. Is this guy worth my time?

If you are a PhD student or applicant still building your network, I really wish someone had told me this earlier. Do not wait until you need help to start networking, by then it is late. Start sharing your thoughts and what you are learning on LinkedIn now, even as a student, even if almost nobody reads it yet.

In the end, whether people answer you depends less on who you know and more on who knows you.