Organizing LinkedIn Connections via Tags

LinkedIn Connections Page

Organize your connections into different groups via tags

LinkedIn is in beta with a new connections page that makes it easier to find, organize and stay in touch with your business contacts. The update adds a panel that makes it much nicer to browse contacts quickly, enabling you to find what you need with a few clicks. You now are able to browse contacts by their companies, industries or locations. Selecting the recent activity filter, you can see who has added new connections.

When you click on one of your connections, a mini profile appears in the right panel, showing you contact information, photo, current position and number of connections.

One feature that caught my attention is the ability to tag your connections. Similar to friend lists on Facebook and lists on Twitter, you now can segment your connections so you can send specific communications depending on which list they are on. It’s no longer an all or nothing selection! This is a feature many have been waiting for with LinkedIn and is a welcome addition.

The Marketing Impact

This new LinkedIn connections interface makes it easy to browse and get information on your connections. But something that this interface also points out is whose profiles need work. Profiles without pictures, status updates or website/blog addresses are profiles of people who don’t want to get noticed. In this very crowded market, you must go the extra mile to be visible. Having a complete and compelling profile is one simple exercise to help you stand out. By the way, using your company logo as your profile picture doesn’t count – people don’t build relationships with logos or companies. Relationships are among people and the more approachable you are, the more likely someone will want to connect with you. There’s a reason why Facebook differentiates a personal profile from a business page.

Spend a few minutes each day updating something in your profile. The benefits include making your profile interesting and the fact that you updated something in your profile gets publicized to your connections, ensuring you stay visible. What’s keeping you from filling out your LinkedIn profile (or any social media profile) completely so people can connect with you and develop those so very important relationships?

  • http://www.ledet.com Sterling Ledet

    There’s a hard limit of 1000 tagged profiles, so this feature is not very useful if you have a large network.

    • http://masterful-marketing.com/ Debra Murphy

       Sterling, thanks for that information. That’s rather limiting since people’s networks are growing rapidly. I do have to admit that I haven’t tagged my connections very consistently.

      • http://www.ledet.com Sterling Ledet

        Actually, I discovered that it’s 1000 profiles per tag, not tagged profiles, so that’s not that bad. An easy workaround is to create tag2. For me, I created previousclient, previousclient2, etc. and that works around this limit.

        • http://masterful-marketing.com/ Debra Murphy

          Great – that is a whole lot better. For most 1000 profiles per tag is more than sufficient. Thanks for the update!