If you’re new here, welcome! I’m Eva Jannotta and I help experts—thought leaders, authors, speakers and academics—grow their online platform via LinkedIn, email, and content marketing.

TL;DR: LinkedIn’s algorithm changes all the time, so I recommend caution with how much you change your strategy to suit an algorithm’s whims. On the other hand, there are tweaks you can make to your LinkedIn strategy—such as putting posts in the comments and changing how you write posts—that will likely boost your reach and engagement. And good news: you can continue to use a scheduling tool, and you can stop using hashtags entirely!

Use the menu below to find the question you most want answered, and you’ll find a list of all my sources below. Now, on to the show:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About LinkedIn but Were Afraid to Ask

• Link in the post or comments?
• Do scheduled posts get less engagement on LinkedIn?
• Hashtags: are they dead?
• Just f***ing ask
• Pending: Engagement within the first hour?
• Pending: How important is video content?
• Sources

I also share my favorite social media scheduling tool (hint: MeetEdgar) and what to consider when choosing your LinkedIn content strategy. Let’s get right into it:

Links in the post or the comments (or no links at all)?

You’ve heard the rumors: LinkedIn’s algorithm throttles links in posts. Outbound links in posts hurt reach and engagement. Links in the comments are the way to go.

Is it true? (Yes.) Below I’ll get into why this makes sense, why I hate it, alternatives that still let you share valuable content, sources and more:

• Why discouraging post links makes business sense for LinkedIn
• Alternatives to link posts on LinkedIn
  • Link the comments
  • No links at all
  • Write-post-edit
• How to choose your LinkedIn content strategy

Why, LinkedIn, why?

Kicking link posts to the curb, algorithmically speaking, makes sense from LinkedIn’s perspective as a company. It better serves their bottom line to keep people on their website, seeing the features and seeing the ads. But I called this a rumor. Is it actually true, and how do we know?

YES.

I link to my sources at the end of this post but the conclusion is: multiple tests have shown that LinkedIn does punish posts with outbound links—and I have heard confirmation from a LinkedIn employee that this is true. That means that links to LinkedIn newsletters won’t be throttled; only links to other websites.

Frankly, I hate this. I want to learn from experts and share education I find valuable. The easiest and most convenient way to do both is via—you guessed it!—posts with links: they’re easy to click and easy to publish and don’t require special maneuvering. And, education and information from reputable media sources are important for vetting and quality-control.

HOWEVER, I (grudgingly) concede that there’s an upshot to this. If you focus on providing value in your post content (rather than teasing the value of content in an article on another site), you’re “serving people where they are” (see writing for more on this). That’s good, right?

Right. But still, it’s limiting: you can’t provide much depth in a 3000 character limit post, and again: articles published by reputable media are important.

Nonetheless, LinkedIn will never consult us on their algo decisions so here we are. What are your options to provide valuable, informative, and scroll-stopping content while avoiding link posts?

Alternatives to Link Posts on LinkedIn

1. Put the link in the comments

This is the most common workaround. The problem with it is that it’s a worse user experience. It’s frustrating to have to comb through comments to access the article everyone’s talking about. LinkedIn briefly allowed you to pin comments, which at least ensured it was easy to find the linky-comment, but not anymore.

And, if you’re visually impaired or have challenges with your motor skills, combing through comments to find the elusive link is tedious at best and prohibitive at worst. Per Axbom has a helpful piece with more about this and I recommend it: Why ”link in comments” is a bad idea for LinkedIn accessibility.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the algo starts punishing links in the comments eventually, too. In fact, Sangfroid Studio and SocialPilot state that you shouldn’t be the first person to comment on your own post.

They don’t provide evidence that commenting on your own content hurts reach, but it wouldn’t surprise me—if LinkedIn wants to encourage community engagement and discourage outbound links, punishing self-commenting a link would be a straightforward way to do so. Point is, don’t get too attached, and consider this next approach:

2. Don’t share links at all

Why I like this:

On one hand, it’s a great practice to give people the information they want without asking them to leave and read something else. It’s convenient for readers (and LinkedIn loves it too for bottom-line reasons). You can still provide valuable education (albeit shorter form) by summarizing points from an article, quoting and/or tagging the experts, even including the title of the original article so avid nerds can find and read it at length.

Think of your LinkedIn post as the CliffNotes, plus some networking best-practices. This link-independent format is also The One for riffing and storytelling posts, two post types that we’re investing in more heavily for clients in 2025.

Why I don’t like this:

Pardon me for being a snob but there’s a lot of unoriginal, marshmallow content on LinkedIn. Instead of interesting ideas and stories, I see a lot of mimicry and platitudes and “best practices” disguised as new thinking. Punishing link posts opens the door for MORE of this—in absence of being able to link to a good article, I suspect many will

1. panic and say nothing, depriving us of their contributions or
2. follow suit and share blasé nonsense (lookin’ at you, broetry).

My friend, video producer Andy Robinson, said it this way: “we need more credible experts online.” There are many ways to build credibility, and citing sources, related experts, and resources are involved. So while link-free content appeals to me on many levels, it does have limitations.

3. The “write-post-edit” method

This is where you publish your post sans link, wait for about 20 minutes, then add the link in. John Espirian wrote about it here, and notes:

“I don’t believe this works as effectively as it used to in 2020 and 2021. However, as visibility penalties for editing posts seem to have diminished in recent times, there may still be some value in this method. Note that editing a post to insert a link means that the post will not display the link thumbnail.”

How to choose your LinkedIn content strategy

Let me be clear about my bias: my priority is user experience over what “the algorithm” wants, and my outlook is that LinkedIn is a tool. We use the tool as a means to an end, but as soon as we start pandering to the tool, it’s using us. I think I’m right (obviously), but: I know my bias makes me resist making tweaks to our content strategy that will both provide a good user experience and make the algorithm happy.

Given that LinkedIn can change its algorithm any ol’ time without our consent, we are future-proofing our LinkedIn content strategy by:

• Sharing a variety of post types and flavors. I recommend 50-70% original content to 30-50% curated, and a mix of educational, storytelling, riffing, offer, and feature flavors. I also recommend experimenting with different mediums: text, video, imagery, carousels, and more. Variety helps keep your content engaging with the diverse array of people in your audience, which signals to LinkedIn that your content is popular and valuable.
• Creating posts that serve people with the content alone. We think of this as “synopsis” over “teaser” content. This provides value without people needing to go/click elsewhere and makes for longer posts which signals to the algorithm that folks are spending time on your work.
• Proactively commenting on other people’s work to grow and strengthen your network. It’s my opinion that comments you write yourself are more valuable than AI-generated ones, but that’s a topic for another blog post.
• Respond to comments on your own posts. Don’t ignore the people who engage with you!
• Use DMs, both text and voice memo, to privately grow and strengthen your network. See the Just F***ing Ask section for more.
• Don’t rely solely on LinkedIn for all your lead generation, network growth, audience growth, or really anything.

If you have questions about how any of this works and you’re curious about working with me, fill out our brief inquiry and we’ll talk.

Do scheduled posts get less engagement on LinkedIn?

Another rumor! You’ve probably heard it about social media in general: that scheduling posts using a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite hurts your reach and engagement, and the only way to avoid this is by posting manually in real-time (or, presumably, using LinkedIn’s native scheduling feature) which = inconvenient.

This *might* work for you if you…

• have an employee or contractor dedicated to social media (me neither), or
• do well with all spontaneity and no advanced-planning (me neither), or
• you’ve figured out a Goldilocks social media content calendar that is somehow user-friendly and flexible and easy to maintain (me neither, and I’ve never met another expert or thought leader for whom any of the above is true).

But is the rumor even true? No. Which is great news: There is no evidence that posts using a scheduling software get less engagement or reach on LinkedIn. Cue a deep sigh of relief.

But are there any caveats?? Why wouldn’t you use a social media scheduling tool? Let’s discuss:

• Your scheduling tool is the cake (you can add icing)
• Advice to ignore
• Why people think scheduling tools hurt reach
• The scheduling tool we use at Medusa Media

Your scheduling tool is the cake (and you can add icing!)

The benefits of social media scheduling tools are many (Tactycs has a good overview, plus what to consider if your engagement is low) and this is what I always say to clients:

“Attention goes where energy flows.”

Meaning: what’s great about having your social media consistently prescheduled is you don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to rely on elusive inspiration, you don’t wake up at 2 AM thinking oh-shit-I-haven’t-posted-in-three-weeks, you don’t have to cudgel your brains about what to say and how and when. AND, if and when you ARE inspired, if and when you have something you want to talk about in the moment, YOU CAN DO THAT TOO.

And you may find that those posts outperform many of your prescheduled ones—not because you didn’t use a scheduler, but because you spoke from the heart about something timely and topical and energized. Your audience will pick up on that and respond accordingly.

It’s both/and: have a schedule that lets you reap the benefits of consistency, and add icing to that cake when the spirit moves you.

Some advice you can ignore

“Good” marketing advice can be alienating for experts and thought leaders. You read it and it sounds wise, but it’s often difficult to actually DO, and it’s not clear if doing it will make a measurable difference. Case and point, Google offered me this advice when I was researching this section (bolded emphasis mine):

“Social media schedulers have provided remarkable convenience by allowing us to pre-plan and batch-process content, ensuring a consistent posting schedule. However, there’s a significant trade-off: visibility. Many social networks, including LinkedIn, have started deprioritizing link-based content, which tends to be the bulk of what we schedule through these tools…. That’s because the social media algorithms prioritize fresh, dynamic content that engages users in real-time. Social networks are also in the business of keeping people on their platform as long as possible, which videos and photos (and, in the case of LinkedIn, sheer text posts) help them do.

Living in the feed is essential for understanding what content is currently resonating. Algorithms favor content that garners immediate engagement, and being in the feed enables you to interact with other users and contribute to trending conversations in real-time. This daily engagement provides valuable insights into content types and formats that are currently performing well.”

“Living in the feed”!? No! Just no.

You don’t have to live in the feed to grow your audience, opportunities and authority on LinkedIn (see our Client Impact Reports or capabilities deck for examples of clients success that did not require “living” in any “feeds”).

And if you’re an expert or thought leader who’s writing a book or articles, teaching, consulting, and speaking, I can GAH-RON-TEE you don’t have the time or inclination to live in your feed, no matter how on-point it sounds as marketing advice.

Besides which, this marketing advice doesn’t offer any evidence that the claims are true. I came across a LOT of unsubstantiated claims about scheduling tools throttling reach—some heard it from so-and-so at such-and-such conference, but many didn’t offer even a whiff of a citation for the claim.

Next.

Why do people think scheduling tools hurt reach?

According to a 2020 article by Tim Hill of Social Status, it may be because as social media platforms have created their own scheduling function, it gives the impression they want to replace 3rd party scheduling tools—perhaps for the same reasons I mentioned above about why LinkedIn punishes outbound links.

But there’s no evidence that this is true, and social media platforms making it harder to publish content at all would also fly in the face of their business goals.

He said, she said, and your mileage may vary, but: until I see research-based evidence that there’s a difference in performance between natively-scheduled and 3rd-party-scheduled content, I’ll keep using a scheduling tool for all the additional convenience, archiving, planning, rearranging abilities it offers.

Speaking of social media scheduling tools, I use MeetEdgar

I like MeetEdgar because of how it’s library and archive are organized, and—this is the clincher—because it has a “ReQueue” feature. This feature automatically recycles content, consistently re-sharing evergreen posts to get the most mileage out of the most enduring thought leadership.

We keep a sharp eye on all our clients’ queues to make sure all content is optimized before it goes out regardless, but this feature means we don’t have to re-schedule the same quality content again and again (which I used to do and it involved a lot of copying and pasting).

I also like that MeetEdgar automatically loads the images associated with links and lets you select the image to create an “image post” rather than a “link post.” This is handy when it comes to the link-in-the-comments thing: you can still use the picture associated with the link, which saves you from having to add an image manually, but add the link in later to make the algorithm happy.

Hashtags on LinkedIn: do they help?

Short answer: probably not.

Long answer: I see a lot of posts on LinkedIn with hashtags sprinkled throughout or piles of hashtags below post text a la Instagram. Often, these hashtag piles include words already mentioned in the post itself. Great news! Using a term twice, once by itself and once with a hashtag, is redundant and unnecessary.

I learned this from the horse’s mouth, when alumna client Charlene Li invited me to a training with a LinkedIn Community Manager for Executive Voices, who said:

“LinkedIn’s search function searches all text in every LinkedIn posts. Adding a hashtag before a key term doesn’t make it more searchable on LinkedIn.”

In other words: if you use the word “leadership” in your LinkedIn post, it doesn’t help to add #Leadership. If you want to improve reach or searchability you could add hashtags of related terms that you didn’t use in the post, like #CSuite, #CEO, #Management, and more (Btw, you should always capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag for accessibility, and this is why.)

HOWEVER. According to research by Richard van der Blom in 2024, hashtags are dead. He writes on LinkedIn, “Over the past 8 months, hashtags have had zero impact on reach, and LinkedIn has quietly disabled many hashtag related features although there is still no official statement from LinkedIn itself.”

If I were a wagering woman, I’d say you could forgo hashtags entirely and focus on tried-and-true engagement tactics instead. My company will likely begin phasing out hashtags soon—while part of me would like to wait for an official statement from LinkedIn, the other part of me is pretty convinced.

Just F***ing Ask (a favorite engagement tactic)

You’re still here! Whether you’ve read this whole honking post or skipped right to this section, I’m glad you made it to my favorite engagement tactic, which I like to call: Just Fucking ASK (JFA).

• Why asking works
• Overcoming the awkwardness of asking
• Reframing the ask from “favor” to “relationship”
• How to start your JFA practice

Why asking for engagement works

There is no shortage of “hacks” and “tips and tricks” to “beat” the algorithm that get published every year. Some of them are handy and useful, but many are, in my humble, unrealistic for the busy authors, speakers, academics, and other experts I work with.

But one engagement tactic I will always standby is the most simple and most vulnerable: asking for it.

Not in a spammy way. Not too often. Not spaghetti-at-the-wall style. But thoughtfully and genuinely, while keeping the sanctity of your relationships in mind. Tom Critchlow explains this beautifully in his oft-read (by me) post on riffs:

“…the REAL MAGIC of the riff is deliberately sending it to people… This means that you’re guaranteed to have at least one person to send the post to in their DMs. And if it’s relevant for that one person, chances are you’ve made it interesting to 3-5 others too.”

When you want engagement, what’s a more thoughtful and selective way of asking for it than reaching out to 3-5 people you know well, and saying “hey, I just wrote this and it made me think of you for X and Y reasons. I’d love to hear what you think”?

The awkwardness of “just asking”

One downside to JFA is that it feels vulnerable. When you imagine doing it, it might bring up questions like: “what if I seem desperate or needy? What if they ignore me? What if they think I’m an upstart for asking?” One client put it this way:

“I felt awkward doing this and I’m not sure I saw a bump in engagement. It felt odd not sending personal messages and I can’t ask you to do that, because you’re not me. Besides, the people I know most about in terms of [my expertise] are often my clients and I would never ask them to share my stuff.”

I get that. It’s normal for this practice to feel awkward/uncomfortable/exposing. But I think it’s worth exploring before writing off the tactic entirely. And my client was right: personalized messages tend to be most effective. They’re not scalable, but that’s okay—“scale” isn’t the only measure of value. 

Now, let’s bring in some math: the semi-personalized messages I sent for this client’s newsletter got a 60% response rate. The resulting comments accounted for 20% of the comments on that newsletter—more if you only count “quality” comments. To me, those metrics are a green light.

Reframe JFA from “I need a favor” to “I thought of you”

What helps manage the vulnerability or awkwardness is to reframe what you’re doing. You’re not begging for engagement favors because you’re a pathetic loser, you’re sharing valuable, relevant work to a few hand-picked colleagues. Your attitude and the energy with which you JFA make a difference. Consider:

• “Hey I really need engagement on this, will you Like it and leave a comment real quick?” vs.
• “Hey Jenn, I just posted about the challenge academics face in building their personal brand, because it isn’t always encouraged by universities. It reminded me of our conversation on this exact topic, and I’d love to know if you have anything to add to what I wrote.”

See what I mean?

How to start your Just F***ing Ask practice:

If you’re curious to try this out, here’s what I recommend:

1. Start by writing out the names of 3-5 people your content makes you think of. Even if you never send them anything, discover what the practice of thinking about people feels like and engenders.
2. Trust yourself. Perhaps once you think of those names, some genuine enthusiasm for their insights will grow. And perhaps not! 
3. If it does, consider sending them a personalized DM. I recommend a private DM or email instead tagging them in a comment or even the post itself. That’s because by nature of being private, DMs and emails make the recipient feel individually sought-out. You making the effort to personally ask for their input is what strengthens your relationship.

I called JFA-ing an engagement tactic above, and yes sure. But it’s as much a relationship-building practice as it boosts engagement on your LinkedIn post. And isn’t that a big reason why we bother to use LinkedIn anyway?

How important is engagement within the first hour on LinkedIn?

How important is video content on LinkedIn?

These are two more FAQs about LinkedIn strategy that I’m happy to expound upon if it would be useful. I marked them as pending because, before I start writing answers (and thereby delay how soon I publish this epic) I wanted to make sure folks are interested. Hit reply on an email from me, send me a LinkedIn DM, or write me at evaj at medusamediagroup dot com to let me know if you’d like to hear my answers to these questions.

Sources

Links in the post or the comments?

• The LinkedIn employee’s confirmation came via a client; she heard it from a colleague whose LinkedIn presence is such that they have a direct contact at LinkedIn, 2024.
• Andrew P. Wheeler downloaded his data and did not find his link posts were being punished: “I don’t see that in my data at all.” 2024, LinkedIn posting and link promotion: impression vs reality
• “The link-in-comments posts performed better and had higher numbers from both an awareness and engagement perspective.” SproutSocial 2023, Sprout Tested: The answer to why you put links in the comments on LinkedIn
• “On average, posts without links got 6x more reach than posts with links.” Hootsuite 2021, Experiment: Do LinkedIn Posts With Links Get Less Engagement and Reach?
• How to Get People to Actually See Your LinkedIn Post, Sangfroid 2024. #4 suggests “don’t comment first”
• Beating the LinkedIn Algorithm in 2024: Expert Tips & Tricks, SocialPilot. #7 suggests “Don’t Comment on Your LinkedIn Post First”

Do scheduled posts get less engagement on LinkedIn?

• I couldn’t find recent research (post 2020) about this, and I’d love to. If you know of any, please send it my way! evaj at medusamedia group dot com
• “Within our data there was no conclusive evidence to suggest scheduling posts with Hootsuite or a 3rd party tool resulted in lower performance.” – Social Status 2020, Does Hootsuite or Buffer cause lower reach and engagement?
• “We did not find a significant difference in social media reach and engagement whether we posted through 3rd-party tools or natively to each network. As you might expect, some pieces of content performed better than others no matter how they were posted.” Buffer 2018, Do 3rd-Party Social Media Tools Negatively Affect Reach and Engagement? Our 200+ Post Experiment and Results
• This article has a good overview of social media scheduling benefits, plus what to consider if you think your engagement is low: Tactycs 2024, Do Scheduled Posts Get Less Engagement?

Are hashtag dead?

• #28 Update on Algorithm Insights 2024, Richard van der Blom on LinkedIn. You can download the full, 30-page report as well.

Just F***ing Ask

• Writing, Riffs & Relationships: Conversation is the unit of content by Tom Critchlow (many thanks to Sarah Eadie for sharing this with me)

The post LinkedIn Strategy FAQs for Experts: Links-in-comments, Scheduling, Hashtags, and the F-word appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

The former want to make the best decision by researching and reading reviews, weighing the pros and cons of each option, and otherwise gathering intel to make an informed decision. 

The latter want to make decisions quickly, opting out of doing research or gathering data and instead going with their gut or the first option that’s “good enough.” 

I nearly always lean towards satisficing, which is why…

I cherish recommendations.

Hearing “I loved this—you should try it” or “I think you’d really like this” is such a gift! It makes my satisficer heart sing to get the scoop from someone I trust, saving me time deliberating and/or sheepishly putting off researching a decision I want to make.

Perhaps it’s why I love giving recommendations too—I know how great they make me feel, and I want to make people feel great as well. Which brings me to some of my absolute favorite resources over the past two years:

1. Relationships: Relating better to yourself + others
2. Networking: 5-mins per day for consistent referrals, reliable leads and meaningful connections
3. Taxes: headache-free, plus warm financial advice
4. Gifts: meaningful (and easy!) gift boxes from Black creators
5. News: the most objective news source I’ve ever met
6. Admin: customized virtual assistance

From courses to gifts to news (yes, I found a news source I truly admire), I am excited to share these six recommendations. Click to the one that strikes your fancy above, or keep scrolling for an overview of them all, including pricing. Enjoy! And I hope you find them as useful as I have.

A Satisficer and Thought Leader Advisor’s Recommendations:

1. Relating better to yourself and others: Yours Truly, $480

Become your most trustworthy self.

I enrolled in Yours Truly while expecting my first child because I wanted to hone my skills at relating to other people, but more importantly to myself in the presence of other people.

There were un-had conversations I’d been avoiding, and I would find myself getting defensive, feeling resentful, or otherwise not being my “best self” around others. I wanted to invest in my own courage and ability to stay with myself when uncomfortable topics came up. Having had the privilege of Jay Moon Fields as a client for several years (you can read about her experience working with me if you want), I knew she was the perfect person to learn from—she’s a somatic educator as well as highly-sensitive and introverted, like me.

During Yours Truly I had two of the conversations I’ve been hiding from: one with a friend of twenty years, another with my parents. They were hard, but not as hard as I’d been expecting and I felt relieved and proud of myself once I had them.

From Jay’s website: “Yours Truly is a comprehensive online program that will give you the tools and understanding necessary to not just know better, but to do better.

It’s designed to help you move from cerebral to embodied living, from conditioning to realness, from self-sufficiency to sufficient self, and from untrustworthy to yourself to trustworthy to yourself.

You’ll have everything you need to have a life where you have the conviction, courage, and competence to be true to yourself and your values in your relationships and in the world.“

For a taste of Jay’s work, you can start with her free Overthinking Archetype quiz (bonus: she uses the word “bejeebers” in the quiz, and if you scroll to the end I share my own Archetype!). I also highly recommend her email list—Jay is a terrific writer.

PSST! Use the code yt-friend and you’ll get 15% off Yours Truly!

2. Growing your network strategically and sustainably: Networking That Pays, $497

The always awkward-free, 5 minute a day path to consistent referrals, reliable leads and meaningful connections.

You could say this is an “underground” program. Founder Michelle Warner doesn’t run launches for it and created it almost as a favor to colleagues and clients who needed it. I learned of it via word-of-mouth (thanks, Carol Cox!) which is pretty much the only way to hear of it. And thank goodness I did—it’s extremely valuable and I highly recommend it.

Michelle teaches a methodical, flexible, intuitive system to intentionally and strategically grow your network. You know how relationships are everything, but it’s difficult to figure out who you need to meet at in-person networking events and you can only have so many “virtual coffees” ? Me too. Enter Networking That Pays.

I enrolled in 2024 when business was slow and I wanted a sustainable system to get things moving again. I love this program and how widely applicable the approach is. Plus, Michelle hosts monthly Q&A calls which are a great place to drop in and get focused feedback from her on any sticky networking points.

From the website: “Networking That Pays is the science-backed system that I created for myself 10 years ago, and it’s how I’ve created those relationships for myself (and why in 10 years I’ve never managed to get around to having to do all those other things everyone says you have to do).”

2. Headache free taxes and financial advice: Exceptional Tax Services, $2000+

Your Business Deserves A Strong Financial Foundation

Led by Nacondra Moran, Exceptional Tax Services provides tax and bookkeeping support to small business owners in the United States. I love working with Nacondra because her combination of warmth and deep knowledge makes me feel comfortable asking questions, but also ignoring the complex tax stuff I don’t understand because I know she understands it for me.

Beyond nuts-and-bolts support during tax season, Nacondra has advised and supported me on changing my business entity, moving states, buying a home, putting away money for my child, and more. I highly HIGHLY recommend Nacondra and her team for tax support. I remember the immediate relief and delight I felt when I started working with her. Stacey Gordon, thank you for the rec!

4. Meaningful gifts that amplify Black businesses: Bifties, ~$30+

Giving B(l)ack Made Easy

I LOVE sending gifts to clients (and, well, lots of people) and I also love buying from small, independent, historically underestimated business owners. Enter Bifties, which makes buying Black effortless, meaningful and gorgeous.

I’ve worked with owner Constance for years, reaching out when it’s time to create gift boxes for clients, and she’s helped me put together really special combinations: for example one year she helped me source gifts from women business owners in Arizona (where I lived at the time). Here’s feedback from a client for that gift box:

“I gotta say, you are knocking it out of the park in my book this week…

My brother and his wife and son are visiting us this week and we’re having a really good time. We were just saying yesterday that we should have mimosas because we had champagne, but that we were going to have to buy orange juice. And then yesterday morning I went to light my favorite orange blossom candle in the kitchen and it had finally died. We went for a hike and came back to find a package from you–with a WONDERFUL orange grove candle and fun mimosa cubes–just add champagne.

I mean, really. 

My brother and his wife were quite impressed by how spot on you were with exactly what we needed to round out our experience. And my sister in law is all about Bifties now!” 

And, a note from another client after she sent me a lovely gift: “You had such a good influence on me; I searched for a day or two to find women-led or minority-led small businesses to find this one”! Talk about the ripple effect!

I’ve also sent Bifties to loved ones, and they’re always surprised and delighted by its beautiful presentation, the information in the box, and the way Constance and her team create thematic gifts for special occasions. You’re welcome for literally never having to stress about what to give someone ever again.

5. News you can trust (because it doesn’t favor a political party): Tangle, $ free+

Every day, we tackle one big debate in American politics, then summarize the best arguments we can find from the right, left, and center on that debate.

Raise your hand if you find understanding politics and global events with a shred of clarity impossible.

Me too. Which is why I am so impressed with and ardently support Tangle (I recently became a paid subscriber). From their website: “Tangle is an independent, non-partisan, subscriber-supported newsletter, read by over 135,000 people in 55+ countries across the world. Our audience is made up of conservatives, liberals, independents, and those who don’t identify with any political tribe.”

Each email I get is a deep dive into a topic that I (usually) barely understand, going over how different politically-minded people view the topic. And then my favorite part: founder and journalist Isaac Saul gives “his take” as someone who describes himself thus here: “I generally distrust authority, government agencies, and politicians, but I do believe it’s wise to consult expert opinions and advice.”

His take is simply his take (and he frequently reminds readers of this face, by doing plenty of what he calls “throat clearing” and I call “caveating”) but I find it refreshing and helpful to read a perspective that isn’t mired in liberal or conservative worldviews.

6. Virtual administrative support: Team Delegate, $ varies

We’re the answer to your administrative overwhelm.

I met Tonya Thomas (CEO of Team Delegate) in a coaching program and I liked her right away. Her deliberate approach and experience (close to 20 years in business, I believe!?) make her easy to talk and listen to. I’ve not hired administrative support through Team Delegate myself, but I have referred her to clients and heard glowing reviews. When I’m ready for more admin help, Team Delegate is the first place I’ll go.

What do you recommend?

Whether you’re a maximizer or satisficer, recommendations feel good to give and receive, and I am so thankful for a) the many clients who have recommended Medusa over the years, and b) the many services that help Medusa (and me) run.

If you try one of these resources, or have one you’d like to share with a glowing recommendation, send me a note at evaj at medusamediagroup dot com!

Bonuses

• Do ‘maximisers’ or ‘satisficers’ make better decisions?
• More recommendations: 4 Things I Learned in the Past Year by Dolly Chugh. My own recommendations were partly inspired by this list from Dolly’s Dear Good People newsletter (sign up here—it’s once a month and it’s great), and not only because I was honored to be among Dolly’s recommendations!
• Eva’s Overthinking Archetype: I’m an Analyzer! What about you?

The post Six Recommendations for Networking, Taxes, Gifts & More (from a “satisficer”) appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

“Thanks for accepting, Eva! Do you think email lists are a good way to attract new clients?”

Not only did her response ignore my message, but I could SMELL the incoming pitch. It made me want to surround myself in a castle with a moat full of alligators. It made me think, we need better rules of engagement for managing connection requests and deepening relationships. So here we go:

Rules of Engagement for Responding to LinkedIn Connection Requests:

First, I’ll go over why it’s worth having an intentional strategy for responding to connection requests on LinkedIn. Then, I’ll offer three steps for doing it well. I’ll also share how NOT to respond to connection requests, plus some miscellany that might be helpful:

• Why how you respond to connection requests matters
• Creating connection filters
• Deepening relationships on LinkedIn
  • Alternative for “high-value” relationships
• Moving the relationship off LinkedIn
• How NOT to respond to LinkedIn connection requests
• Too long, didn’t read? Get a quick summary here

If you’re an expert or thought leader—entrepreneur, academic, speaker, author, etc—you can be certain the number of connection requests you receive will grow as your platform and authority do.

Some of these requests will come from people who are obviously important or valuable to your network. But most will not be obviously anything, which gets overwhelming very quickly.

(Then you may find yourself with 47 pending connection requests side-eyeing you every time you’re on LinkedIn. You probably feel guilty / resentful / hand-tied, so you slide your eyes over to the Notifications instead—there’s never a dearth of those—and resolve that Future You/Future You’s Assistant will deal with those requests.) 

Responding to connection requests isn’t urgent—most things in networking and marketing aren’t—but they do add up and it can feel bad. Fortunately, managing your connection requests systematically will grow and deepen your network, and make you feel capable and in control, and it’s not very hard. Everyone wins! 

Why Responding to LinkedIn Connection Requests Matters

You might be thinking, Who cares? Do connection requests really need this level of consideration?

And sure, some people are unbothered by increasing connection requests. They might say yes to anyone who asks (which I don’t recommend, for reasons I explain here), they might say no to everyone they’ve never met, no harm, no foul. 

But I suspect that you, like me and like our clients, are deliberate about your network and social media use. You want to be intentional and genuine about how you build relationships with people on LinkedIn (most of whom you’ll never know personally). So when it comes to their growing number of connection requests, our clients express concerns like, 

• Should I accept requests from people I don’t know to grow my audience?
• What’s the correct (polite, customary, effective) way to respond to a connection request? 
• I don’t want to get a ton of DMs from people I don’t know well. So should I say no to anyone I’ve never met?

These concerns make sense: you don’t want to offend anyone or hurt their feelings or commit a social media faux pas. You do want to use LinkedIn effectively and properly to grow your audience, opportunities and authority. Also, your privacy matters (as it should!) and you don’t want to overwhelm yourself.

As with most (all?) questions related to marketing, networking, audience growth etc., the answer to the questions above is “it depends.” It depends on your comfort level, your goals, how you want to use LinkedIn, your business/career model, and more. So let’s touch on that briefly, then get into the brass tacks, nuts and bolts:

Why do you use LinkedIn?

I’m not going to exhaust either one of us with a litany of reasons to you might use LinkedIn. Instead, I’m making an educated guess that you’re using LinkedIn as part of your thought leader ecosystem, to:

• Build a network of professionals for partnerships, referrals, opportunities, education, and to talk shop, and/or
• Grow an audience of highly engaged, eager-to-buy, and ready to refer people who never miss your emails, podcast episodes, webinars, and/or
• Share your articles, insights, posts, research to become a known authority in your field, and/or
• Make your book accessible during launch season

You want a healthy network and audience, authoritative presence, and to share your authorship if-and-when it’s book launch season. Great! If the main action is “Follow” on your LinkedIn profile already, anyone can easily click to follow you—perfect.

But as your platform grows more and more people will send you connection requests, and fewer and fewer of them will be people you know personally. Given the goals above, it makes sense to be strategic about accepting those requests: it’s not helpful for literally everyone to be your connection (there’s a limit!) nor does it help to reject every request from a semi-stranger—that would limit your growth.

So what do you need to simply and easily DECIDE if the juice is worth the squeeze, AKA which requests make sense to accept? A filter.

Step 1. Create a Connection Request Filter

A connection request filter is a set of clear criteria that’s simple to follow to decide whether it makes sense to accept or reject a request.

CAVEAT: it also has to be easy for someone who isn’t you to follow, so you can delegate this task. In other words, your criteria can’t rely on your intuition or mood, because you can’t delegate those (sigh).

As an example, here’s my filter. A request needs to met at least two of these criteria for a team member to know to accept their request:  

• Are they relevant to my work? (i.e. do they fit the profile of a likely future client or potential colleague in the same or a related field?
• Do we have connections in common?
• Have they sent a message explaining their request?
• (Other criteria might be: do we work at the same company? Are they affiliated with my university? Are we in the same field/role?)

A connection who meets none of the criteria is almost always a clear “NOPE” (see below for exceptions*). Same with connections who meet only one criteria—for example, they might send a message that is clearly generic, or we might have nothing but one connection in common.

As for those who DO meet two criteria, what’s next after you accept their connection request? Deepening the relationship.

Step 2. Deepen the relationship

The point of LinkedIn is to build your network, grow your audience, and share your authority—in other words, it’s about relationships, and an accepted connection request does not a relationship build.

Deepening the relationship with a new connection requires acting on it, which puts you in the driver’s seat of how that relationship might grow. I have a simple way I act on new connections (that I’m not already acquainted with), and it’s sending them this short DM:

“Hey NAME, it’s nice to be connected! [if applicable: I see we have some good people in common.] What prompted you to reach out?

I like this low-ball opening gambit because it’s easy for them to answer, and it gives me useful information:

• Did someone mention me to them?
• Did they find me by searching?
• Did they see a post of mine?

Their answer to this question helps me know how to deepen the relationship.

(I used to respond to qualified connections with a Roundtable invitation, which REALLY helped deepen the relationship. I’ve paused those for now [I write this in 2024, after a 7 month maternity leave and during a cross-country move]. I may do them again someday, but with a vetting process so I have more control over the people who join and the quality of conversations we can have.)

BONUS TIP: if you use a tool like Text Expander, deepening the relationship with a DM like mine is even easier for you or your assistant.

Optional Step 2.5 “High-value” relationships

Another powerful opening gambit comes from my friend, fractional CRO Talica Davies. It’s great to use if the connection request comes from someone who is likely of “high value” to your goals.

NOW LISTEN: this is not a judgment call on anyone’s personhood. Every individual is intrinsically “high value”. However, certain people are going to be strong candidates as prospective clients, referral partners, opportunity-sharers, etc. When that’s the case, it makes sense to put extra effort into your opening gambit: take a look at their profile and recent posts. If you see something you like, comment on it. Then send a message like this one:

“Hey NAME, I really liked [this article/post/thing on your profile], and I’m curious to learn more about you and your work. Where do you suggest I start?”

I’d be flattered to receive such a message—wouldn’t you? Who wouldn’t respond favorably to that!?

It’s straightforward and curious, and it lets you quickly get the right information to discover if you’re correct about how you might work with them.

(BTW, when Talica shared this with me, I realized I didn’t have an easy way to answer this question. Send them to my website? Too broad. To my email list? Too soon. Our Work with Medusa inquiry form? Too presumptuous. A virtual coffee link? No way rosé—I can barely stand receiving those, but that’s a rant for another time.) 

Fortunately I was already working on Medusa’s Capabilities Deck, which how I’ll answer this going forward.

Step 3. Move the relationship off LinkedIn

Remember that scene in Season 7, Episode 12 of Mad Men, when Joan picks up the photo of her son and her Rolodex, and walks out of McCann Erickson? Contact information is currency.

LinkedIn is an amazing tool for connecting and corresponding—people are right there and accessible! But we don’t have control of that access—Microsoft does. That’s why you’ll want to take the relationship off LinkedIn and into your metaphorical Rolodex as soon as possible: your contact list or email list.

There are myriad ways to do so, from inviting the connection to do something (attend an event or download a resource), to using tools like these to add their contact info to a spreadsheet.

Finally: How NOT to respond to LinkedIn connection requests:

You can do whatever you want, but if you’re in this to build your network, grow your audience, establish your authority and sell a book, I DO NOT recommend the following:

Don’t say “yes” to everyone

I had a client once who, in the early years of using LinkedIn and growing her platform, accepted every. single. connection. request. she. received. (This was before LinkedIn had the “Follow” feature.)

She learned the hard way that LinkedIn has a connection limit of 30 thousand. She’d long since hit that number (she’s a well-known figure) and had to have her assistant manually delete old connections to make room for new ones.

Another reason not to say “yes” to everyone, including those of us who don’t want anyone to feel rejected? Social media strategist Sharonda Jackson put it this way: “It’s okay to be picky about who’s in your community.”

Don’t immediately ask a leading question or send a pitch

Leading questions like the one I got (“Do you think email lists are a good way to attract new clients?”) and straight-up pitches do the opposite of build connection—they turn people off. Small talk and flirtation exist for a reason.

Don’t invite everyone to a virtual coffee

Potentially unpopular opinion alert: people I know and respect swear by the “let’s meet for a virtual coffee” or “let’s have a 5-minute phone call” technique for new connections, but I do not care for it.

Time is a precious asset, and the women I work with have to manage theirs very carefully. And while I appreciate the spirit with which it’s intended—it’s generous to offer to share your time—it’s a BIG ask, especially of someone who doesn’t know you yet and likely has many priorities competing for their attention.

TL;DR

1. If you use LinkedIn to build your audience, grow your network, establish your expertise or sell your book, then you’ll need a strategy to respond to a growing number of connection requests.
2. First, create a filter that you (or a team member) can easily use to determine if a connection request is a “yes” or a “no”. See examples here.
3. Send the connection requests you accept a DM to deepen the relationship. I like to say, “Hey NAME, it’s nice to be connected! [if applicable: I see we have some good people in common.] What prompted you to reach out?”
4. Finally, move the relationship off LinkedIn (where Microsoft owns the contact information) as soon as you can.
5. Oh, and here’s what not to do in response to connection requests!

Generate Leads with an Effective and Enticing LinkedIn Profile

Connection requests come through your LinkedIn profile, and speaking of which…

A few simple tweaks take your LinkedIn profile from eh to excellent—the kind of profile that pulls its own weight. In this short, free e-course I guide you to make simple updates to your profile so it effectively generates leads and opportunities and grows your network strategically.

Check it out here: Generate Leads with an Effective and Enticing LinkedIn Profile.

The post Respond to LinkedIn Connection Requests: a Guide for Experts and Thought Leaders appeared first on Medusa Media Group.