How to write an inviting LinkedIn invitation

Inviting LinkedIn Invitation? What’s that? When you send a LinkedIn invite, LinkedIn does part of the work for you by crafting the invitation for you: “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”

Perhaps you didn’t even realize that this can be perceived as the wrong way to invite people on LinkedIn. Not only that, sometimes when you hit the connect button, you automatically send that invite, sometimes without knowing that this was the message you were sending.

How do you write an inviting LinkedIn invitation?

When you are trying to connect with someone, you want to personalize the LinkedIn invite. Personally, I am not outraged or offended when I get the default invite.

I know this is simply someone who is not yet educated in all the intricacies of using LinkedIn. We all started as newbies once. In my role as a career marketing expert, I gained extensive knowledge on LinkedIn and even then, LinkedIn changes the application so often that it is hard to keep up.

Did you know that you have 300 characters to write an inviting LinkedIn invite?

That isn’t words, it is characters and spaces count as characters.

A Tweet is 140 characters, your LinkedIn Headline is limited to 120 characters so the invite needs to be quite short. If you have more to say, you can always follow-up with an email or a LinkedIn message after you have connected.

Examples of an inviting LinkedIn invitation

Hi, we met at the chamber meeting and I enjoyed speaking to you. Please connect on LinkedIn so we can continue the conversation.

As I looked through LinkedIn, I saw your profile and remembered our great conversations at Green University, let’s connect.

I appreciate your thoughtful & helpful direction as my vendor for green plates, please connect with me on LinkedIn.

I miss our conversations when we worked together at Green Company, I thought connecting on LinkedIn could let us catch up.

This is just a starting point. If you use the default LinkedIn invite, come up with your own similar options. Start enjoying creating conversations with your connections.

I teach people how to leverage the power of networking and how to better understand the value of LinkedIn as I write their compelling LinkedIn profiles. Learn more.