6 Bad LinkedIn Habits That Must Be Broken

by Daniel Newman

As LinkedIn surpasses 300 million users, it clearly remains a powerful networking site where the benefits of social meet the needs of the professional.

Still, there seems to be some confusion on how to use LinkedIn; there are still several basic tenets of using LinkedIn that seem to go ignored. Specifically, we seem to be using Linked as we use Facebook or Twitter.

#Fail.

If you want the other pros on LinkedIn to take you seriously, you need to avoid certain behaviors; some of which are perfectly acceptable on other social networks. For best results, here are 6 social networking practices you should not to do on LinkedIn…

Frequent Status Updates

People don’t check LinkedIn nearly as often as Facebook or most other Social Networks for that matter. So I recommend that statuses are updated no more than once or twice a day. This is more for your benefit than for your network. Oversimplify here and focus on sharing much less frequently, while trying to find highly interesting content that will benefit your connections.

Connection Spamming

I know you may want to be a first level connection with Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Cook, however random connection requests here are generally not looked upon fondly.


Collecting connections is kind of like collecting twitter followers. If they aren’t interested in you, your product, or your service then the connection may not hold much value. If you really want to give it a go and connect to those you have no relationship with, at the very least include a little note saying why you want to connect and how a relationship with you may become mutually beneficial.

Habits 3-6 and the complete article