LinkedIn Invitations : How do you know this person?

The Trouble With LinkedIn Invitations

You meet at a conference and it was apparent to both of you that you could collaborate and do business together. The following day you open your laptop and look this person up on LinkedIn.

Having found their profile you click on the blue ‘Connect’ button at the top of their profile to send them a LinkedIn invitation and you are confronted with something like this….

LinkedIn invitations

They are not a colleague or classmate, you clearly haven’t done business together (yet!) and they are not really a friend. If you select ‘other’ it asks you to supply their email address but you don’t have it so what do you do?

You really want to customize the LinkedIn invitation message to remind them of your meeting but these reasons are getting the way!

Is this a dilemma you have faced?

If so you really don’t need to worry because it actually doesn’t matter, the recipient of the message whether they see it by email, desktop inbox or mobile don’t even see what you have selected! You can pick whatever you like, it really doesn’t matter!

That should be the end of the matter but in my experience many people still struggle with the idea of selecting a reason which they know to be blatantly untrue so here are two other solutions you might find helpful;

The desktop solution

This only works for 2nd tier connections because it involves saving their profile to contacts. Click on the video below to see a short, step by step explanation of how this is done;

The mobile app’ solution

Mobile used to be the worst way to invite someone to connect until they updated both the Android and iOS apps allowing you to customize the message. Unfortunately it’s not the most intuitive of features so here is a short video showing exactly how this is done;