LinkedIn Connections: Time to grow/weed your garden?

Is it time to grow your LI Connections garden? Or weed it?

Back when I was first learning about LinkedIn, mostly by attending courses on how best to use it to ‘grow my network’, it was indeed more like a social network. For business purposes, mind, but more personal, if you can say that about a digital platform.

Since then, LI’s grown to having a whopping 600+ million members worldwide, a number that impresses and boggles the mind at the same time.

The network has grown – and changed

Seems like the upside of this growth is that I can rest assured that many, many people are on LinkedIn, which makes me want to keep my own profile fresh and interesting.

Seems like the downside of this growth is that I’m seeing a lot more ads for all kinds of things that have no relevance for me or my business.

(But that’s what I get for nothing, so to speak – I don’t pay for a Premium account, and so you get what you pay for.)

Are we really connecting anymore?

Thought about numbers and relevance the other day. Had a look at my own list of contacts, or Connections, as they’re called in LI lingo.

As of today, I have 1,126 of them.

Time to do some weeding! Nothing personal against any of these fine people, but to be honest, I made many of these contacts ages ago. In what seems like a former business life.

As happens sometimes with relationships, we used to have a thing going but don’t anymore. Time to realize this for what it is and hit the Remove key beside some profiles.

And move on and up to where my working life is now.

Quality or quantity?

So I might end up whittling my list down to 10 people, who knows? But it’ll be 10 that I feel I can help out and who can perhaps help me out someday.

And after I’m done weeding, I’ll reach out to new contacts and ‘start a conversation’ with them to grow my garden once more.

Where are you at in your LI Connections garden? Does it have quality or quantity?

Does your list reflect who you are and where you’re at now in your working life?

Is it time to grow it, or time to weed it?