What is the Optimal Number of LinkedIn Connections?

By Wynand Brand, Frog Recruitment

Whenever I receive a friend request on Facebook or Linkedin from someone with 2,000 contacts, I eye it with a certain degree of suspicion. Social anthropologists, for about the last 20 years, have adhered to the idea that average human beings are capable of only maintaining 150 meaningful social relationships at any one time, also known as ‘Dunbar’s Number’.

So I’m faced with three possibilities – that person attempting to connect with me has super-human networking ability; that social anthropologists have got their calculations wrong; or a combination of the two.

I’m going to go with the third.

Maintaining a business connection means just that. I don’t need to know my LinkedIn connections on a personal level and don’t need to have met them in person. You’re not expected to have social relationships on LinkedIn for the same reasons you’re not expected to be best friends with your co-workers. Each business connection offers a potential opportunity for an exchange of services rendered,   so a social relationship is not necessary for a healthy, functional, and mutually beneficial business exchange.

So should we disregard Dunbar’s Number for LinkedIn connections? Well, not quite.

Recently I received a LinkedIn invitation from a ‘Marketing Professional’, which I accepted. This person had couple of thousand connections, which at the time I thought of as “well, he MUST be a professional, just look at his networking success!” Soon I found my updates cluttered with messages from this person – at least three per day, none of which were targeted or relevant to me. It became very obvious, very quickly, that this person was in fact, not a Marketing Professional.

Collecting contacts and spamming them does not make you any more of a Marketing Professional than buying a brick makes you builder.

After a couple of weeks of enduring the spam, I decided to disconnect from this person. LinkedIn for this person was about them and them alone – they had completely missed the point of building meaningful business relationships. Dunbar’s Number rings true in this case, as the number of their connections contributed to my willingness to disconnect and only served to decrease that person’s credibility.

I learned that clicking the ‘Connect’ button says nothing about someone’s genuine intent to pursue a meaningful relationship – it simply means that they know how to operate a computer mouse.

So I’m going to opt for an increase in Dunbar’s Number in the case of LinkedIn, but still apply the rule that at some point the incremental increase of benefit received from every connection becomes as low as to be virtually zero.

Also, we have to consider the relative weight of the value of each connection: some connections are more valuable than others. A profile connected to 20 Marketing Directors may be more valuable than a profile connected to 2,000 Marketing Assistants, which will affect the incremental benefit of adding more connections.

You need to decide for yourself what the criteria is for connecting with people, and how many connections are optimal for the goals you want to achieve. Maybe 2,000 connections are a perfectly reasonable amount for your profession, but maybe 5 is good too.

I’d like to surmise three types of users based on my observations in the world of technology-mediated business networking:

1. The Marketing Professional:

the large number of contacts makes the user look like a hoarder – connecting for the sake of connecting with no clear goal, direction, or purpose. This person is likely to make status updates very frequently in the hopes that someone ‘bites’ so they can generate sales leads. At some point the number of connections will have an inverse relationship with the benefit received.
Eventually the number of connections has an inverse relationship with the user’s credibility

2. The Casual User:

This user is genuinely trying to network with like-minded people. This user recognizes that LinkedIn is a two-way exchange and has no qualms connecting with colleagues and acquaintances to foster genuine relationships. Every connection has definite potential value, but as the number of connections increase, the incremental value of connection decreases. This user is not strategically connecting but rather just connecting with people in the hope of extracting some mutually beneficial exchange: they can still extract some great benefit out of LinkedIn but they are not using a targeted approach. It’s more difficult to identify the high value connections if you receive regular updates from all your other connections. It is also more difficult for others to see which heavy hitters you are connected with if you maintain a large number of redundant connections.
Each new connection decreases the incremental value of next new connection

3. The Strategist:

This ambitious user sees LinkedIn as an opportunity to get themselves in front of people who can further their career aspirations. This user will concentrate on joining the right groups, responding to the right comments, and making friends with the right people. This strategy seems effective initially, but the Strategist potentially looses out on valuable connections that they fail to recognize as being important. This approach relies completely on the Strategist’s ability to identify influencer players, and is restricted by bounded rationality theory, or the inability of the human brain to process all information. This approach may work very well, but needs to be executed by someone who is willing to invest a lot of time and effort in identifying where the crucial conversations are taking place, and by whom.
Every connection is valuable, thereby increasing the credibility of the user with every new connection, however, identifying valuable connections may be difficult

This is by no means a complete profile list, but I think it’s a good starting point to evaluate your own strategy and decide which is best for you. The law of large numbers may very well work for the Marketing Professional; the Casual User may find a random connection worth pursuing; and the Strategist may get that meeting with the CEO. It’s up to chance as much as it’s up to the user.

I hope that by reading this you can give some thought to your own strategy, objectives and goals.

Wynand Brand
Frog Recruitment

Note: The three profiles are based on my personal experience as well as research conducted as part of a post-graduate Marketing qualification.

Dunbar’s Number: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number