Don’t be fooled, it’s just not working – Why personalising your invitation on LinkedIn is becoming redundant
When inviting someone to connect with you on LinkedIn, the standard advice is to personalise the message and let the person know why you are getting in touch. It lets the person know instantly that you are someone who has thought about the invitation and helps them to know how to start a conversation with you.
However, things on LinkedIn are changing.
Previously, this message would appear in your Inbox along with your other messages, but now it is only connected to the actual invitation. Once you’ve accepted the invite, it disappears for good. There is no way to get it back. (So just a note, if you have personalised the message and don’t get a response, make sure you get back in touch anyway as they may not have seen the message).
This change really is a big deal. The loss of the personalisation creates extra work and most people don’t realise their carefully crafted message has not been seen.
But it gets worse.
In some browsers, seeing this message is getting difficult if not near impossible.
As you’ll know, an invitation to connect looks like this. What you might not know is that the little grey speech bubbles in the top left hide the personalised message.
When you hover over the grey speech bubbles, a pop up appears showing you the message they sent (which incidentally if you want to reply without accepting their invitation – just click the top right arrow in the message box – if you can get your cursor to actually hover over it properly).
However, in some browsers the speech bubbles are starting to not work. I have found I have had to refresh the page up to 4 times in order to get the message to appear. It’s happened in Google Chrome and Safari.
So if you know about this trick or think ‘I’ll make sure I do that but can’t get it to work, don’t be disheartened. The page just needs refreshing – a lot.
It’s not really cool that our personalised messages disappear after we’ve connected, but that’s how it is for now. It is just going to need a little patience.
If you have a question about LinkedIn and how to use it to grow your business, then please be in touch.
Expert LinkedIn Profile Writer | Business Strategist
Naomi Johnson is a leading LinkedIn trainer and Business Strategist based in the UK. She has a passion for helping individuals build businesses around their expertise using LinkedIn. You can read Naomi’s own story here.
Thanks for the heads up on this Naomi – I always aim to connect with a personal message and so it’s disheartening to hear that people won’t necessarily see it. Are LinkedIn purposefully trying to irritate their users?
Hi Naomi! Yes, it’s another flawed LinkedIn ‘improvement’ – they only do it to annoy, to misquote from ‘Alice in Wonderland’!
I’m copying the personalised message (really difficult to do – more nifty cursor work required:0) and pasting it at the bottom of my reply, so at least it’s there in the message thread.
Tedious!