Avoid having your LinkedIn Account Suspended (Learn from our mistake!)

With LinkedIn we hoped to save on our summer kindling expense!

By TJ Warren

Just admit it.  Somewhere, either out in the open on your desk, holed up in a Rolodex, or in some smelly un-used drawer there is a massive pile of business cards.  We know the feeling.

Our Linkedin problems started when we decided to try to shrink that growing heap and go digital by adding all of our contacts from that mound of business cards to our LinkedIn account. Not a good idea we would soon find out.  As you can see from the picture this quantity of business cards has taken a while to collect. One of our guys got about 20 cards in before he got sick of the “Advanced Search” function and called it a day.  As he was adding the connections in bulk, he did not put in a personalized message and left it to the LinkedIn default. The next day we were informed that our LinkedIn account was under restriction.  Our best guess is that some of the people we tried to connect with simply forgot about meeting us in the first place and declined our invitation as spam.

Linkedin will send you this notice when 3 or more people say they don’t know you in a given (but unstated) period of time. The rule makes sense to prevent people from spamming users. However, our honest mistake almost got our account shut down.  The lesson we learned is to, at the very least, put in a message of how you know the person you are trying to connect to.

Other LinkedIn users have complained about some of their other policies which can result in your account being locked.  Apparently, if you look at too many pages LinkedIn will assume you are trying to collect users’ personal information and block you.  The same is true for having too many connections. If you have over 30,000 connections LinkedIn reportedly will close your account as well.

Fortunately, our account was not closed and we learned that making an honest mistake can be very costly when using LinkedIn.