Recently one of my connections mass mailed invitations to his newly uploaded list of contacts. This activity is actually encouraged by their system. When you get your account the first thing you are invited to do is upload your contacts from your database and related social and business networking sites. The system also encourages you to invite former classmates from your past educational institutions.
Unfortunately, doing mass invitations is a very dangerous thing to do. As my connection found out, many of the people in his list didn’t recognize him and he got numerous complaints and IDKs. This also goes for sending your questions to your network.
I highly recommend that you never mass mail or mass invite any list. Your list will always contain “casual” contacts that don’t remember you providing the potential for complaints.
Additionally, you must realize that any message you send to your network will only be of interest to a very small portion of the list thus also putting you at risk for complaints and irritating many in your network.
Simple but quite useful tips, Flyn!
Thanks.
The only case that I might make an exception for is one that I did recently. (I generally don’t have non-work or social friends on LinkedIn. The only connections I do not know from a job are almost exclusively recruiters.)
The moment I was laid off I mass mailed my contacts with a very polite message that, sad to say, I was just laid off, and that, if they just happened to hear of a position, to feel free to contact me.
BUT THE KEY IS, DON’T USE “Allow recipients to see each other’s names and email addresses”. Since I was polite the message looked reasonably personal, and since they were BCD’d, it did not look spamish.
The responses I received indicated that it was not taken amiss. I also began to get job leads.