Should you accept all LinkedIn Connection requests?

The logic, of course is that you probably shouldn't, as you could open yourself up to spammers and people who might look to scrape your profile for contact info, which they could then, potentially, collect up and on-sell to the highest bidder.

Then again, when you connect with more people, you expand your LinkedIn network which translates into having a better chance of getting your posts read and amplified in the app.

Do you accept all those connection requests thrown your way?

Recently, we asked the SMT community what they thought. More than 5k people participated in our LinkedIn poll. 
The vast majority of people do not accept every request to connect. Yet many do, and in the comments, some noted that they felt this was a good way to expand their network and reach.

'Why wouldn't I?' one user questioned.

LinkedIn's own advice is that you should only accept connection requests from people that "you know personally and who you trust on a professional level". That might be fairly restrictive, and there is value in taking your connection pool a little further than this. But again, you risk opening up your profile to strangers. That exposes not only your personal history but your contact information, company phone number, contacts, connections, etc.

Last April, it was discovered that a hacking group was putting an archive of personal data, scraped from 500 million LinkedIn users, up for sale - all of the above and much, much more - that had been pieced together by combining the details listed on LinkedIn with other online databases. The hacking group gathered the information and then built a more complete personal info profile on a huge number of people.

According to LinkedIn, this group had not hacked into its systems but instead managed to pull the information from public and non-public listings that included, in the latter, random connections in the app.

So there is some cause for concern, and caution in connecting – but on the other hand, LinkedIn L.I.O.Ns as they call themselves (LinkedIn Open Networker) have built huge presences in the app by connecting with anyone that they can, and some have done so to good effect.

Obviously, this does come with some level of risk. Some people have commented about the poll that accepting all connections can have a boomerang effect if those you are connected to never do anything with your posts. And if you only connect to randoms and then upload content no one cares about or would go out of their way to comment on or share, your post reach will decrease over time, since LinkedIn's algorithms will begin to understand that nobody wants to see what you share.

Or worse, they might mute you, which sends not-so-good vibes about your posts.
It looks like a minor worry since all your posts will reach some of your first-degree connections in the app and some of them, you would assume, will respond. But unless you are accumulating sound response levels, it might not be the best strategy to maximize your reach.

Of course, people will disagree on this one, and-as will be discussed above-some L.I.O.Ns will promise allegiance only to their 'networking at scale' strategy. Still, all of these factors have to be balanced.

You should, at the very least, take time to read through all connection requests before deciding whether to accept them or not.