I currently have over29,900 linked in connections , 28,500 of whom follow me. I have recently been getting messages from Linked in reminding me

LinkedIn members can have up to 30,000 1st-degree connections. To ensure an optimal experience on LinkedIn, we recommend:

• Connect with people you know personally and trust professionally
• Follow anyone whose posts you want to keep up with, so you always stay informed
• Turn on creator mode to change your profile action to Follow so you can continue growing your network without necessarily adding new connections

While there is a limit to the number of 1st-degree connections you can have, the number of people who can follow you (and who you can follow) is unlimited. People who follow you can view, like, or comment on what you share publicly.

If you have reached 30,000 connections, Follow will become the default option on your profile. You will not be able to accept or send new connection invitations unless you remove connections to keep network size under the limit.

So sometime in the next few days I will only be able to connect with someone by disconnecting with someone else.

In the past, linked in has called me a “maven” but now feel a bit of a menace. Linked in doesn’t do discretion so from the end of the month or whenever I reach 30,000 connections, I will  be selectively firing people who connect but don’t follow.

I guess it’s quality not quantity from now on and I know that some of the people who I’m connected to are simply using me for lead generation – so (as long as I fire the bad guys)  good riddance.

How did I build a linked in network to 30,000?

Robert Gardner told me once that when someone follows, you follow back, so I connect with people who follow me – because connecting means you can send messages to people without having to pay linked in for “in mails”.

I run several groups on Linked in which between them have around 20,000 members, about 85% of those members are connected to me, because I connect with the people I admit to groups. I even tell them so , and of course they are free not to connect.

When I have a meeting with someone new, even if its a Teams or Zoom, I like to connect with that person and this means I can invite them to one of my groups and share content. I get a high proportion of the reads on my blogs from those in groups and my connections, I believe in what I write and I want to get read so this process of network building makes sense.

Finally, I have approached a lot of people who I don’t know but who I have listened to or watched in various auditoriums or on broadcast or social media. Sometimes these people say no and occasionally they report me. Six times, I have had my Linked in connection ability turned off by Linked in as if I was a virtual stalker. Each time, I have had it turned back on.

My relationship with linked in

Linked in is my habitat- some people are easier elsewhere, but I find life easy navigating this business and social database and it brings me a lot of benefits. I don’t pay to use Linked in (I did at one point) but I get a lot out of it and I’m very grateful for what it brings me.

I am sorry that I have reached this arbitrary limit as I have enjoyed see my connections grow. Now I am going for quality not quantity, I hope that my followers will grow past my connections.

This may sound narcissistic and I expect that it is. But sometimes, especially when you don’t work in a large organisation, self-validation matters and linked in is a good way to validate that you matter to a larger community.

Which is a good point to end this rather self-indulgent blog and thank all of my connections and my followers and to thank all the members of the groups I run.

And if you ask to connect with me , I will always connect.