Revisiting Tagging Your LinkedIn(r) Connections

Note (5/30/2014): I just now noticed that LinkedIn changed the menu from Network > Contacts to Connections  > Keep in Touch.

My revisit is for providing updated LinkedIn® tagging instructions that differs from my previous blog article from a couple of years ago. A practical use for tagging is grouping your LinkedIn connections by interests—co-workers, former co-workers, professions besides yours, professional organizations, .... Why would groups be practical? How about grouping real estate people, recruiters, special interest groups, people that you want to send a group email, etc.?

My recent revisit to tagging resulted from my wanting to group people that I wanted to send a mass email to. LI had a maximum of 50 LinkedIn connection recipients. I have over 100 recipients of a particular interest, so I needed to break the group up into three separate groups with different names.
The overall process is as follows:

1. Create an overall group theme. (I created one for my profession.)
2. Review your connections, tagging candidates with the group name.
3. Open the group list. Review for completeness.
4. Create another group name, this time tightening criteria for purpose.(For my purpose, I tagged for excluding out-of-area connections and those who were inactive in the profession the previous year. In some cases, I inferred the status from profiles.)
5. Copy the names (as text) to a word processor and sort alphabetically. (After I alphabetically sorted, I inserted column breaks to group logically—A through D, etc, keeping the groups around 45 connections, give or take a few.)
6. Tile your list next to the LinkedIn interface. Create enough tag names that will include all the prospective email recipients. Example: [some tag subgroupname]-1, [some tag subgroupname]-2, etc.
7. Tag the connections with the the appropriate group or subgroup tag name.
8. For each of the group or subgroup, open a tagged-members window by filtering for the appropriate tag name.
9. Click Select All for displaying the Message link.
10. Click the Message link for opening the compose window.
11. Compose your email. If you have a draft already, you can copy and paste the subject line and contents into the email interface.
12. Send the email.

The PDF file of the step-by-step procedure, including screen captures, is downloadable at https://app.box.com/s/ju04h698elb8j5dc0m0.