Even as someone who quit Facebook and will never ever ever tweet, I’ve found LinkedIn a very pleasant and productive place for a TEFL lifer like me to be. Despite its pretence that it’s about a network of people you know, I’ve found it most useful as a way of contacting people I don’t, e.g. smaller publishers and people I’d like to interview.

It seems most people feel the same way, because I have a regular trickle of people I don’t know inviting me to connect – to which if there is really no connection (and even just us both having blogs or being in Japan usually counts as a connection) I usually just click on Ignore. Most especially, people with over 500 connections or who belong to every TEFL-related group going almost always get ignored. Just belonging to the same TEFL-related group doesn’t count as a reason to connect – especially as we can already communicate through that group.

That policy, email settings that mean most updates just stay on the site and not joining many groups have meant it hasn’t become overwhelming – which I imagine is the greatest danger.

I’d love to hear about other people’s experiences as TEFLers on LinkedIn, especially:

– Personal rules about who to connect and not to connect to

– The etiquette of sending out group messages, e.g. monthly blog updates

– What on earth that “endorse” thing is supposed to be good for, and if I’m being rude by not endorsing back

– Groups you’d recommend (or recommend avoiding)

– Other ideas for making the most of the site without it all getting too much