Accepting Friends On LinkedIn Opens The Door For Getting Cold Calls!
I joined LinkedIn as part of my new social media strategy in order to promote my brand and to help and support others with their brands. Its an awesome way to connect to similiar industry businesses and people who are interested in your niche while being able to keep your finger on the pulse of your business trends.
Within a month I am recieving multiple connection requests a day. At first I was saying to myself, oh cool, I'm getting noticed! It wasn't too long afterwards that you start noticing the pattern. Within a minute of each new friend request acceptance, you get an instant message saying Hello!
Welcome to the cold call! I am always a very polite person and I continuously indulge the sender with all the formalities. They always ask where I am from, to which I respond with, did you happen to read my profile? The answer is very obvious since my profile states where I'm from. This immediately tells me, this person didn't look at my profile, so they have no intention of being a business networking partner and their sole purpose is to sell me something.
Me being the polite person I am, tried finding the best rejection saying I could find, but in searching, couldn't really find a good one. Utlimately, we are all busy people and don't have time to toy around with 5-10 cold calls a day so I finally came up with this, that I can copy and paste into the new instant message chat...
"I joined linkedin for business networking and to discuss topics mainly involving the plumbing industry. I have already declined more than few cold call sales pitches today. So if your here to sell me something, I respectively decline. If not, cool, are you interested in buying a new water softener?"
Hopefully, nobody takes it personally but since they are cold calling me to sell something, and they opened the door, I thought it would be fair game to kindly see if they were interested in purchasing my products!
Who knows, maybe I can make a few sells here, lol.
Thanks for reading and let me know if you are having any experiences like this on your social media including facebook or twitter, and how you handle them!
Thank you!
Jeff Lewis
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I run three phones, it can be about managing the information flow, one is strickly personal, the others business. Seems to work very well.
Yeah, thats the thing about linkedin, typically its supposed to be business, but people shouldn't be selling you stuff as soon as you accept their invite, lol
Thanks for the reply!
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Nice to know about LinkedIn. I have quite a few contacts there.
Thank you!