As more and more people are using LinkedIn to connect with their potential customers and build their reputation as an expert in their industry, the need to sometimes send a message to all of your contacts on there at once increases.
It is worth noting that constantly sending sales messages to your LinkedIn community will be seen as spammy and will not win you any friends or clients. I advise my customers that once a month is the most you want to be sending bulk messages out, but if you have an exceptional offer or a message that you really need to get to all of your contacts then here are a few pointers for you.
Firstly, LinkedIn only allows you to send to 50 connections at once. This is because, as I mentioned, LinkedIn doesn’t really approve of sending bulk messages to everyone. So they make it harder for you to do so. But its not impossible, it just takes a little time.
Do not be tempted to export all of your contacts and add them to your mailing list. This is really bad form and will not be tolerated. Equally, don’t export your contacts and just email them through your email client. Keep your communication through LinkedIn, unless you begin a conversation with someone and then I think its OK to email, phone or even arrange to meet up with them.
Click on connections
And then look for this section here that says sort by.
Choose Last Name and you’ll see that it brings up a box that shows you all the letters of the alphabet.
This is the process I use for my own Linkedin and when I manage projects for clients. Take a piece of paper and write the letters A - Z. Choose to sort all of your contacts by the letter A to start with. You’ll see a list of the contacts like this.
As you scroll down a field will pop up at the top telling you how many connections you have with that last name. If it is over 50 then write it next to your letter on your list.
Click on the select all button that you see and scroll down to the bottom of the list of your contacts. Then at the top choose the Message button.
You may receive a message here that says some of your contacts will not be included, this is fine - just click Okay.
Now you’ll see your message start to take shape.
You can remove people if you do not want your email to be sent to them by clicking on the cross next to their name.
Enter your subject and your message and the most important step here is to then UNCHECK the Allow recipients to see each others names and email addresses button at the bottom.
Once your email has been sent, go back to your alphabet list and tick off the letter that you have sent to.
If you have more than 50 people with a last name beginning with that letter then I suggest coming back to them at the end when you have completed the alphabet.
Your list should look something like this :
When you have ticked each one off go back to the first one on your list that was over 50, in my example above that would be the letter C.
Sort your contacts by C and then scroll all the very way to the bottom. You will have messaged the first 50 of these connections already and you now need to select the rest of them from the bottom of the list working your way up. So for me here I need to select the bottom 24 (74-50 = 24) and then send the message to them.
So there you go, how to send a message to all of your Linkedin contacts. Its not difficult but it is time consuming and you need to be careful not to duplicate emails to anyone!