You can compare this functionality to Facebook's "add to friends". Only on LinkedIn you can have as many as 30,000 friends, and strangers are more likely to accept an invitation if your profile seems professionally interesting to them.

Unlike Facebook, where the owner of the business you want to win over to your portfolio of customers is unlikely to accept your invitation and the message you write to him will end up in spam, on LinkedIn you have a huge opportunity to reach out to him and make direct contact just like that.

When the invite button is clicked, 2 options appear:
1) "add a note"
2) "send without note".
And this is where things get a little more complicated. According to LinkedIn and many experts, educated on the portal's tutorials, recipients of invitations with a note are more likely to accept them. In contrast, the prevailing opinion among Sales4Team users, who send hundreds of invitations per week, is that a note does not increase acceptance rates.

A similar result came from a test we conducted in the second half of 2023 on a group of around 5,000 decision-makers: invitations with a note have similar acceptance levels as invitations without a note.

By contrast, in December 2023, LinkedIn introduced a change that, for users without a premium package, limits the number of personalised invitations (with a note) to just 10 per month. Of course, invitations without a note alone can still be sent around 100 per week.

Let's also consider how the note is displayed to the recipient:

√ in an email notification, it is clipped content - easy to miss,

√ in the mobile app, you don't see the note before accepting the invitation, and after accepting it appears as a new message with no additional notification on the screen, which also makes it easy to miss,

√ in the desktop format, the note is also not exposed before the invitation is accepted, instead, it suddenly pops up as a new message upon acceptance.

In our opinion, a note as a message attached to an invitation has a high chance of going unnoticed and eliciting a negative reception from occasional users who are not well acquainted with the portal, which is most likely the majority of your target audience.

In summary: we do not recommend the use of notes attached to invitations, and the invitation itself with a carefully crafted headline ensures a high level of acceptance.

As you already know, 30-40% of your invitations are likely to be accepted, and if you use the clever Sales4Team system even up to 90%. So what happens to the invitations that are still waiting for acceptance?

Invitations without acceptance are waiting in the corresponding list available here: https://www.linkedin.com/mynetwork/invitation-manager/sent

In the past, LinkedIn has experimented with a limit on so-called pending invites and we currently observe that the number of such invites can be very high, even several thousand. However, in our experience, it is advisable not to exceed 1,000 pending invitations, but also to keep this number below 60% of the current number of 1st degree contacts (your friends).

So it's worth checking this number every week and withdrawing the oldest invitations, whose chance of acceptance is diminishing, to make room for new ones. Unfortunately, LinkedIn doesn't allow you to withdraw invitations in bulk, so you'll have to work manually and withdraw one at a time.

Automatic withdrawal of unaccepted invitations is available in Sales4Team

You've probably noticed that next to every contact on LinkedIn there is a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd designation. This is known as the degree of connection in the portal.

1st) contacts in your network - you are connected because one of you sent an invitation to the other, which was accepted. You can write to each other freely and invite each other to events. In addition, you have access to the full details of your 1st contacts along with their contact details like email and phone, as long as they have been marked as public.

2nd) contacts from your network of contacts. In other words, friends of friends. You cannot freely write to each other subject to 'open to contact' status and the paid and restrictively limited InMail available in premium packages. You can only see part of the profile data of the 2nd degree.

3rd) The others, i.e. contacts with whom you have no mutual friends. The communication works similarly to 2nd, but sometimes (we encounter this rarely) the portal restricts the possibility to send invitations to 3rd type contacts.

Is it better to invite 2nd than 3rd? Information about common friends appears in the invitation and, intuitively judging, should influence the level of acceptance. In practice, however, we do not observe clear differences. Remember that each new 1st, means hundreds or even thousands of 3rds who become 2nds.

Some LinkedIn users have a very restrictive policy towards the invitations they receive, which is somewhat at odds with the idea of social media. If you are one of them, you can choose carefully whose invitation to accept.

However, if you accept all invitations in order to leave the evaluation to yourself, you can easily enable automatic acceptance of all invitations in Sales4Team.