Now that you have all the connections, what are you going to do with them? Kathleen Smith, ClearedJobs.Net

What to do with all your LinkedIn Connections? Congratulations you have made it to the magical number of 500+ connections on LinkedIn! Now what…… You have connected with these individuals for a specific reason – recruiting, job hunting, business development. More than likely you have a combination of connections in your network from school chums to prospective employers. But how do you keep them organized especially if you want to communicate with them?

How Can you Organize Your LinkedIn Connections? There are some ways that LinkedIn organizes your Connections or Contacts for you and there are some things you can do to organize your Connections. First, there are set Locations that are inherent in the system. You can filter your connections based on location, this is called “Narrow Your Connections” by Location.

Filtering by Industry Settings

Remember when you selected which Industry would be listed on your Profile? Well you can “Narrow Your Connections “ by Industry as well. You have to remember your connections may be in other Industries than you think they would be.

Filtering Your Connections to the right audience Now that you have” Narrowed by Location” and “Narrowed by Industry”, you can select the contacts that you want to send a message to.

Another way to filter connections, and to take it a step farther…

When you view your Connections, on the left hand side you will see groupings called “Tags”. The default settings are for Groups, Partners, Colleagues and then Untagged. You can further create selections based on Tags by creating new Tags. Go to “Manage”

Create the Tags that would be most helpful for you to Organize your Connections.

Using Tags Once you have created a Tag, you can open a Connection, and click on “Edit Tags” This allows you to add a Tag to the Connection for filing.

You can select your Tag and then Send Message to the group

Remember to protect your connections

Remember to protect who sees your Connections LinkedIn, like all social media, is based on sharing information. Your basic settings will be to share as much information as possible. This means your connections are seen by everyone until you change this. Go to your Settings which is in the upper right hand of your tool bar. Under Profile, you will want to select “Select who can see your connections”

Make sure that “Only You” see your Connections By clicking “Only You”, your connections are then not Public. However, if someone shares a Contact with you, they will be able to see it as well.

Remember this is about having conversations with your connections! Not spamming them!

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