 Hi, this is George Cao. For seven years, I've taught something about LinkedIn that is a popular teaching among many LinkedIn marketing professionals, which is that the more connections you have on LinkedIn, the better, supposedly, because the more connections you have on LinkedIn, the more likely you'll be found in the LinkedIn search engine, the more followers you'll have for your content on LinkedIn, and supposedly the more discoverable you will be and the more business benefit you'll have. Well, in this video, I am making a big shift of perspective. I no longer believe that more connections is better on LinkedIn. And actually several months ago, I made the shift on Facebook as well. And I made a video there saying, I don't believe having more Facebook friends is better. So now I only have a couple of like 200, I think 300 Facebook, 200 to 300 Facebook friends. Whereas I used to have 3000 Facebook friends. So I pruned down. So say I'm going to be doing the same thing on LinkedIn. And I'm going to recommend that you really consider this as well. Recently, I heard of a statistic that LinkedIn itself shared, I heard this from a LinkedIn expert, that among the most effective salespeople who use LinkedIn regularly, the average number of first degree LinkedIn connections that they have. Again, it's actually very difficult to find the exact number of first degree connections that you have if you have over 500. If you have over 500, the easiest way to find how many first degree connections you have approximately is to go to your profile and then to scroll down and go to your LinkedIn blog posts and click see more. And the number of followers you have for your blog posts on LinkedIn is approximately the number of first degree connections you have. So I have at least over 6000 first degree connections. So the average number of first degree connections for a successful salesperson who uses LinkedIn is somewhere between 150 and 250. So not 6000. Now you and I are not salespeople. I don't know about you, but you're probably not a salesperson. You're watching this probably because you're a business owner. And even as a business owner, you have probably even less time to use LinkedIn. And so I'm going to encourage us to think about the principle that small is beautiful. That principle actually comes from the environmental sustainability world, sustainable development world. Small is beautiful. And I'm going to say for our social network, even online, I'm going to say that that is the case as well. On LinkedIn, when you have thousands of connections that you barely know, just like I do, whenever you go to, whenever you log in to LinkedIn and looked at your homepage, you're probably going to barely know who these people are who are posting updates. Ironically, nine ways to double the size of your LinkedIn network. I'm going to be teaching the opposite from now on to keep a closely knit, a tightly knit network of maybe a couple hundred people that you really want to keep in touch with that are really, you can really create win-win business relationships with each other. They may be your perfect clients, your ideal clients. They may be your perfect ideal referral sources, business partners. Those are the kinds of people to really have as the first degree connection on LinkedIn. Same thing when you go to your contacts, when you click my network and click on connections, you're going to be brought to a page where you're going to be seeing once it loads. Yes. You're going to be seeing, you know, do you want to wish someone congratulations on their new job or their birthday or their work anniversary? And I barely, I don't know, most of these people and there are others I barely know and all of them are, they don't, they probably are not ideal clients or, you know, ideal referral sources for me. So it's, LinkedIn is really made. Now I'm finally willing to admit to the fact that LinkedIn is really made for having a very limited number of first degree connections that you really know, that you really would endorse their work. They would endorse your work. And it's having such a large network, first degree, really makes it, to be honest, kind of a hassle to use LinkedIn because you're going to always be pruning and scrolling through the posts of people you barely know, barely really want to keep in touch with, right? Whether it's in the notifications area, whether it's in the private messages area, whether it's in your contacts area or whether it's in your LinkedIn homepage. So, and also I should say that for seven years I've had thousands of first degree connections on LinkedIn and I will tell you my experience has been that it has not been worth it. It has not given me the kind of business results that I had expected. So I'm going to pare it out now. For the next several weeks I'm going to be removing most of my LinkedIn connections. I'll end up with maybe a couple hundred and I will really then keep in touch with these couple hundred. If I really build a true feeling of connection with them, if I really know what's going on with them, they know what's going on with me, we're going to be much more able to refer business to each other, right? And so then that's what LinkedIn is really made for. We're going to be able to really benefit each other in building our true livelihood. So, small is beautiful and I'm going to recommend that we do that for our LinkedIn and other social media networks. If we each built a truly connected network, a heart-based truly connected network where you know the several hundred people that you're keeping in touch with, you really are wishing for their success, you're following their content, they're following yours and we all can thrive. We all will have enough clients. We all will have enough business as a result. So that's all for this short little video and I wish you, until the next video, a truly connected and tight-knit authentic network. Be well.