The Research Playbook

Archive for September, 2011

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No one appreciates the value of LinkedIn (LI) more than I do. Which is the reason I want to alert you to a limitation you will eventually discover, assuming you use LI to its full potential? That limitation is the number of invitations LI allocates to each user.

The limitation seems high enough when you begin using LinkedIn, but overtime you might discover, as I did, that you can and will reach it. So, what is the limit on invitations? The number is 3,000.

I know what you’re thinking, “Oh man, what are you worried about?” “It will take me years to use up 3,000 invitations.”

Well you might be correct, but it’s useful to know the limit exists and not find out once it’s too late. Of course, truth be told, LinkedIn will warn you when you have used 2,000 and have only 1,000 invitations remaining.

However, it could help to know that the limit is there and to monitor how many invitations you’ve used (the number is available on the invitation page of your inbox messages).

There are ways to invite people that will preserve your invitation allocation, but that’s a topic for another day – stay tuned!

Please share your experiences using LinkedIn.  How have you been able to build relationships?

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This Twitter case study is another in a series of case studies demonstrating how businesses can grow a strong Twitter account and use it to gain advantage in the marketplace.

A small marketing and website design company in Virginia asked for help with their Twitter account. They simply wanted to build a well-targeted audience and use it to push people to their blog and help to create relationships with a broader audience. These are very typical objectives and very doable ones too!

The company had had a Twitter account for over a year and they had accumulated 449 followers and they were following 818 people.  We took over and quickly built the account to 1600 followers. However, at that point things slowed down and it wasn’t clear why. We investigated the follow-back situation and found that of the original 818 people being followed 427 were not following our client back and this had slowed finding new followers to a crawl.

Unfortunately, they had never inspected these non-followers and once we did a “purge”, our quest to build relevant followers was back on track. Within the 8-week contract period, we expanded the number of followers to 3,277. Since this client is familiar with social media, they decide to do the work internally going forward.

However, the company has suffered from its own success and, unfortunate, the account has not progressed , in fact, the number of followers has shrunk to just over 3,000. The reason is focus, if you don’t focus on the tasks of building your twitter followers you simply won’t see progress. Whether you go with the do-it-yourself or hire a social media manager the effort and resources applied will largely dictate the results you derive.

Please share your experiences using Twitter. How have you been able to build relationships?

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