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TIL that 80% of my LinkedIn connections were just noise after a local Atlanta meetup last month
I spent years collecting 500+ connections thinking I was building a solid network here in Atlanta. Then I went to a small coffee shop meetup in Decatur and realized only maybe 30 of those people would actually return a text. Most of my so-called connections were just people I traded likes with on posts about SEO or AWS. The real relationships came from actually talking to folks face to face about their projects. Has anyone else found that online contacts just don't translate to real opportunities?
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ben_fisher18d ago
that thing you said about "collecting connections like baseball cards" really got me. my buddy mark used to be the same way, he had like 700 connections on LinkedIn from all these local dev meetups he went to in midtown. one day he needed to hire a freelance designer for a side project, so he messaged maybe 50 people from his list. only 4 even opened his message and 2 of those said they were too busy. turns out most of those connections were just people he said "nice to meet you" to for 30 seconds at a happy hour. he ended up finding the designer through a friend of a friend at a saturmorning coffee shop in east atlanta, someone he never would have added on LinkedIn. now he just keeps a small list of people he's actually sat down and had a real conversation with, says it saves him a ton of time.
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Man that hit hard because the same thing happened to me! I cleared out my whole list last year after a real conversation with the_faith at a local Node.js meetup. I started focusing on maybe 40 people who actually showed up to things or asked real questions about work. Now I just message people I've actually met for coffee or a beer and it's way less stressful. The connections that matter are the ones where you've seen their face and know their actual story, not just their job title.
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the_faith18d ago
30 of them would actually text back, that's brutal but so true. I had a similar wake-up call after a meetup in Little Five Points where I realized I'd been collecting connections like baseball cards. Like I'd get a notification that someone I never messaged "liked" my post about Python libraries and thought we were building a real relationship. The real talk though, you can't replace that face-to-face vibe where you can actually see someone's face light up when they talk about their side project. It's crazy how much gets lost in translation through a screen, even a well-written DM just doesn't hit the same way as a handshake and a real conversation.
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