The objective of this article is as mentioned in the subject to provide professionals using LinkedIn with an untraditional yet valuable way of sending free messages to other LinkedIn users.

So I will be listing the traditional ways of sending messages on LinkedIn and after that I will get to the untraditional approach. But first I would like to highlight the different reasons LinkedIn users would need to send other users messages. This way readers of this article would relate to the subject and it will help them achieve their objective of being on LinkedIn and support them in connecting with their targeted LinkedIn users. As such, below are the top reasons professionals on LinkedIn will try to connect with other users and send them messages:

• Sales Managers and Executives trying to identify sales leads by connecting to prospect clients.
• Job Seekers trying to pursue new career opportunities by connecting to recruiters, hiring managers, and head hunters.
• Recruiters trying to identify potential candidates for vacant positions.
• People who are looking for consultation from SMEs on LinkedIn who have relevant expertise in the subject.
• Business Development executives trying to identify opportunities for new joint ventures, partnerships and other relevant business opportunities through connecting with other business professionals and owners.

Below are the traditional ways through which you can send messages to other LinkedIn users:

• Adding users as connections: certainly this looks like the easiest and direct way for sending messages to other LinkedIn users by sending them a Connect request and once they accept the invitation you will have the option to send them free messages. What happens if the person rejects the Connect request? Or sometimes users do not allow anyone to send them a Connect request.

• LinkedIn InMail: this is also another direct way for sending messages to other users but you will need to upgrade your account to one of the Premium packages available and you would have to pay for the upgrade. You will be able to send an InMail message to any LinkedIn user. Unfortunately, not everyone can afford to upgrade his account and as such would look for alternative free approaches to connect with other users.

• Open Messages: some LinkedIn users with a Premium account will enable an Open Message feature which will allow any user to send them a message for free. It is very rare that you will find these type of users in the list of your targets unless you are very lucky.

The basic idea of the untraditional approach of sending a message to any other user is to have a common LinkedIn Group with the other user. Below are the steps to follow to end up being able to send a free message to another LinkedIn user:

• Open the profile of the targeted user and go down to the Groups section to see the list of groups the user is member of.

• If you find in the list a group that you are already member of, then just open the group. Otherwise, select one of the groups and send a request to join that group.
• Once you have a common group with the user, open the group, and then click on the number of members as shown in the below image.

• In the Search field, write the name of the targeted user and click Search.

• You will see in the list of results the name of the targeted user and you will also see a “Send message” link below it.

• Click on the “Send message” link and now you are able to send the user a free message.

I hope that you find this article useful and wish you good luck in connecting with your targeted users.