Tag: connections

Thoughts on LinkedIn

Musings on LinkedIn.

I’ve been using LinkedIn for many years and I keep changing how I use it. Below are just a few of my notes on how I’ve made use of the social network for work and networking.

– You don’t need to get to 500+ connections. There’s no game or points that you win if you do.


– You don’t have to connect to everyone you meet. Quality over quantity!


– If you’ve connected to someone and the only way you can contact them is through LinkedIn and they don’t respond to any messages over a period of 3 months, remove them as a connection. If you can’t communicate with them or introduce them to anyone then what use are they? Unless you want to follow their posts that is. Quality over quantity.


– People change jobs. Sometimes often. If you are using LinkedIn to connect to people in a certain field or industry and a connection changes to something you have no interest in, consider dropping the connection. It may sound mercenary but this is LinkedIn not Facebook.


– If you want certain people to reach out to you or be reminded of your existence without appearing to reach out first, look at their profile. LinkedIn will tell them you looked and your name will appear in their notifications list.


– You can silence spammy connections.


– You can subscribe to interesting newsletters and unsubscribe when they become boring.


– You can follow interesting people and companies and unfollow when they cease to provide whatever made you follow in the first place.


– LinkedIn is not for stalking but it is useful for OSINT.


– People post too much information. People leak sensitive data!

How do you use LinkedIn? Any tips?

Real friends vs acquaintances

I’ve been thinking a lot about friends recently. Thinking about the difference between real friends and acquaintances. A friend, to me, is someone you’ve hung out with, had beers or coffee with while discussing life for many hours over periods of time. people that you invite to parties etc. Whereas an acquaintance is someone you’ve met, maybe you worked with them, were introduced to them at a party, or just connected to them on LinkedIn after meeting them at a networking event, and have retained some form of connection.

I tend to keep in touch with both, otherwise you tend to lose contact and an acquaintance then becomes someone you knew, once, long ago.
I’ve been thinking more and more about the definition of a true friend, a real friend. It’s rare for us to have more than a handful of these, if any. My mother (and grandmother) used to say that if they didn’t make a regular effort to keep in touch with their ‘friends’ then they would lose touch altogether. But is that the definition of a friend? A true friend? If you are the one that has to do all the work to keep that connection alive, and if you stop you will never hear from them again, is that friendship, or just networking?

I realised that I had become the third generation in my family that carries out this process of ‘maintaining friends’. So I took a look at my list of ‘friends’ and wondered: if I did not reach out to any of them for a long period of time, would they even notice? How many would reach out to check if I was ok?

I’d already decided that I needed a digital detox for a while and decided to combine it with the following experiment: I would not contact anyone for 6 months and see what happens. I included literally every person I knew – family and friend – in this experiment.

My immediate family reached out in the first week of course. After a month three friends reached out to see if I was ok. Two more after about two months. Then one at about the four month mark, but only because they wanted something and not to see how I was. That was it. Five people out of about 600+ across my socials and contact list in 6 months.

I discussed the experiment with various people and I learned that a lot of them generally have an immediate circle of very close friends and family and everyone else is outside of that, and that they can be generally lazy in terms of keeping in touch with those outside, but that doesn’t mean they are any less of a friend despite no contact for a period of time, even years. It’s just that they don’t view friendships and contact in the same way that others might.

For me it was a useful exercise as it allowed me to re-focus my effort to be close friends with those that want to be in regular contact and will reach out if you drop off the grid for longer than usual. It doesn’t mean I’m now less of a friend to everyone else, they are just in a different circle. Let’s call them acquaintances.