LinkedIn 1st, 2nd and 3rd Degree Connections- What Is The Difference? and LIONs
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Six degrees of separation. This is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other.
As a result, a chain of "friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps.
It is also known as the six handshakes rule.
The concept was originally set out in a 1929 short story by Frigyes Karinthy, where a group of people play a game trying to connect any person in the world to themselves by a chain of five others.
I’m sure you have experienced this phenomenon - I know I have many times.
Social media platforms are a great way to see how real it is, and LinkedIn is the best one of them all in this sense.
Linkedin uses the connection degree level to open up more connections for you.
Basically, the more you are connected with people who have many connections, the more people will be visible to you in your search results and the more connections you’ll be allowed to make.
Now, Linkedin assumes that you are using its platform to connect only with people that you personally know, for example, people you worked with, or people you went to school, to the army, or met personally at an event.
LinkedIn also assumes that you would connect with people who are connections of your connections.
For this reason, it categorises your connections as either first, second, or third or more degrees of connection.
First degree connections are people you’re connected to because one of you sent the other a connection request.
You can contact 1st degree connections by messaging them on LinkedIn and seeing all their LinkedIn details.
Second degree connections are connections of your first degree connections. You can connect with them by sending them a ‘connect’ request. If they accept, they will become 1st degree connections.
Third degree connections are the connections of your 2nd degree connections.
If you see their full name and surname, you’ll be able to send them a connection request.
If only the first letter of their last name is displayed, ‘Connect’ won’t be an option but you can contact them through an introduction or through InMail.
But when you are searching for clients, partners, or employees worldwide you are very often more than 2 or 3 degrees away from them as you might not have any connections on a different continent.
You could also have just started out on LinkedIn and simply don’t have a lot of connections yet.
The problem is that if you start searching and people are too far away from you or your and their connections, Linkedin will not show their names, pictures, or even give you the possibility to connect with them.
In these cases, LinkedIn could ask you if you know a user’s personal email that they have in their account to prove that you know them personally.
This is just how LinkedIn works. For example, the Search results will often show the 2nd-degree connections before the 3rd-degree connections or those who are even more degrees away from you.
So, my recommendation to overcome this limitation is to connect to those who already have many connections.
Now that you understand the power of ‘friends of friends’ in the eyes of the LinkedIn algorithm, it should be clear that connecting with LinkedIn users that have many connections opens up a lot of connections beyond that.
You may have seen LinkedIn users that have the word LION in their title.
LION in this sense stands for LinkedIn Open Networker, and finding them and connecting with them is a great way to broaden your network on LinkedIn.
LION users accept every connection request as they want to be connected to everyone. LIONs normally share their e-mail address with everyone so that they can receive invitations from +2nd degree connections directly, dismissing LinkedIn´s ask of only contacting people you know.
To help you broaden your network and meet you goals on LinkedIn, I have prepared a list of these LIONs that I’m gonna share with you. Download it and make use of it!
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