Introducing Your Network to Each Other
One of the most common questions I see about how to use LinkedIn is “How do I introduce two people in my network to each other?”
This is a fundamental practice of good networking, but unfortunately, there’s not a built-in mechanism in LinkedIn for doing that (FYI, others and I have been suggesting that feature for at least three years or so). But just because there’s not built-in functionality for this specific task doesn’t mean that LinkedIn can’t make it a lot easier to accomplish.
The best solution I’ve found is:
- Visit both their profiles and click on “Send message to…”
- Copy the e-mail address from one of the messages over to the other one (and close the first one)
- Write your introduction of both of them in the e-mail.
- In the message, include links to both of their profiles so they can learn more about each other.
I do this frequently and it really works very well – I’d like to have it in the tool, but in the meantime…
August 30th, 2007 at 8:53 am
[...] Allen presents Introducing Your Network to Each Other posted at Linked Intelligence. ‘One of the basic practices of good networking is proactively [...]
September 13th, 2007 at 8:58 am
Yes, I remember being very surprised that LinkedIn did not provide a feature like this. It seems like they have put so much energy into making it easy to build up your network, but not nearly as much thought into how people will use it once they have built that network.
December 30th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
[...] back in August, I wrote about one way to use LinkedIn to introduce your network to each other. But in November, LinkedIn introduced private messaging on the site, which allows you to send [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
[...] Introducting Your Network to Each Other - Scott Allen [...]