Yesterday I blogged about about a research project that I’m doing on LinkedIn. I received the following question:
“I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to ask this question, and you’re elected. How do you send an email (like the one you just sent) to all of your LinkedIn connections?”
So here’s how you do it:
There are two ways you can send a message to your LinkedIn contacts. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.
1- You can export your contacts from LinkedIn. Once exported you can do a mail merge or a blind carbon copy message and communicate with them using your own external email client.
The advantages of this method are:
- It is faster and easier to communicate with your entire network since the only restriction you have is how many outgoing messages your ISP allows you to send.
- It also allows you to personalize the message by putting the person’s first name in the message — if you know how to use the mail/merge function.
The main disadvantage of using this method is that you lose the credibility of the LinkedIn brand. When you send messages inside of LinkedIn, people automatically know where the message came from and that you are connected via LinkedIn. This is especially effective when you have very casual contacts that you want to reach.
2- You can communicate inside the LinkedIn system and send a message to 50 LinkedIn connections at one time – they have this restriction to make it harder for people to spam. So if you wanted to communicate with your entire network, you would need to repeat this process.
The main advantage of this method is that you can take advantage of the LinkedIn brand. This is practically the only advantage of using this method. However it is a HUGE advantage.
The disadvantages of this method are:
- It takes much longer to send messages to your entire network
- You can’t personalize the messages
You can click here to watch a video tutorial I created on how to use both methods.
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