Why Are People Ignoring Your WhatsApp & LinkedIn DMs?

Today on the podcast, we're going to look at the proper way to send connection requests or friend requests, whether you're on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever social media of your choice. But of course, I'm going to be leaning partial towards LinkedIn because that's the only social media that I have for now. If this your first time listening to the podcast, my name is Tavishima Ayede. I'm the host of the show and I am your favorite lawyer turned business consultant.

But on this podcast, we don't talk about anything legal. We only talk about things related to sales and marketing, especially problems that can be solved through personal selling. Now, personal selling is the art, it's the discipline, it's the science, it's the whatever you call it where you're face to face with someone over a table or making a phone call or across the keyboard and you're trying to advance your agenda, advance your sale, advance your whatever it is that you're trying to do.

So those are the sorts of things that we talk about over here on the podcast. Now, if you like these sorts of things, then subscribe on Spotify, Apple or YouTube or any player of your choice. And if you'd love to connect with me, you can call, send me a text message or send me a WhatsApp message on 0806466 2140. So today, how to send a connection request. Now, the reason why we're looking at this today is because, well, the profile of the podcast is gradually increasing and it has over the course of 2025 S.

For those of you who've been listening to the podcast and who gradually discovered, I'd like to say thank you to you guys for making the show grow. I really appreciate your support. So we're currently at close to 70,000 downloads and 3700 and something subscribers on Spotify. But of course, I can't verify how many subscribers we have on the other channels. Now because of that, people reach out to me on on LinkedIn. They also send messages on WhatsApp.

In fact, maybe I should start from WhatsApp now. For some reason, it seems to be accepted culture in Niger. Oh, by the way, I'm making today's recording out and about. I'm in the parking lot so I expect to hear some noise in the background. I had to come to Utaku in Abuja to pick up a couple of packages because my wife has been doing some, you know, Christmas shopping now you know how it is. So came to pick up some packages.

Then before I left, I was responding to my LinkedIn messages and I just thought, you know what? I don't think I've directly addressed this thing before, so let me just come up and address it. So for WhatsApp, people just send a message saying hi and then they don't say anything else. Or they say good morning or good afternoon and they don't say anything else. All they say is this, so, so, so and so, and they don't say anything else.

When you're trying to connect with someone on WhatsApp or any social media or whatever, most people are wondering, this person who is reaching out to me, this person who is making contact with me, attempting to make contact with me, attempting to establish contact with me. Who is this person? Where do I know them from? What do they want? Is this an important conversation to have or is this person the time waster? So please, whether on WhatsApp or on LinkedIn or on Instagram,

that is the frame of mind that the average Nigerian is in. When you're reaching out, just in case you've been sending connection requests and you notice that your connection requests don't get accepted or people don't respond to your messages. These are some of the reasons why you're reaching out in a manner that does not say who you are, what you're about, what you do while you're reaching out, and whether this outreach, this conversation, this message,

this, whatever might be valuable for the person that you're trying to reach out to. So if it is going to be on WhatsApp, try and address those questions. Don't just say hi and leave it blank. You can say hi. My name is Tavishma Ayede. Is this Kelechi Yeh Nacho question mark. Now if that's the only message you send, well, at least you have answered one thing. You've answered the question who you are and you you're trying to reach out to.

A conversation can ensue. Some people can respond and say yes, it's Kelechi here Nacho, what do you want or how can I help you? And you see the conversation can into you. Now what I prefer to do is I'd have to throw in as many of these things as possible. In fact, I don't bother with identifying myself. So I'll reach out saying good morning, Kelechi here natural question mark and my next paragraph would be I got your number from so so so and so.

And the reason why I'm reaching out to you is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Chukodi said you're the person to talk to regarding this. Is that correct question mark? And then I send. So the person will open the message and get the sense that OK, this person who is reaching out to me was referred to me by my guy Chukwudi. And the guy wants to discuss ABC and 123. So you can see how we can reach out to people on WhatsApp or social media and the thing will begin to make sense and people will want to continue the conversation with you.

Now back to LinkedIn, which is where I was. That was the main thing that was choking me before I picked up my phone to make this recording. Now on LinkedIn, some of you are, well meeting, you're just new to the platform. You just create your profile and then you put up your name there, Godwin Uzokalu, and you just leave it like that. No profile picture, no description of who you are, no description of what you do. You're not trying to hint in your profile whether you're trying to connect with people because you want to grow a business or I mean nothing.

Absolutely, absolutely nothing. Your LinkedIn profile is just empty. Oh, sorry, 1 moment. OK, sorry about that. Like I said, I'm in a parking lot and my attention was required. So now that I'm done with that, let's continue. So some of you just set up your LinkedIn profile, your Instagram profile, your TikTok profile, your whatever profile, even your WhatsApp profile self. And you don't put anything there to try and hint at who you are,

what it is You do the sorts of things you're interested about. And then you just send a message saying hi or you just send a connection request and you expect that people will want to connect with you. Now, the reason why I'm making today's podcast episode is because someone sent me a connection request and the profile was obviously blank. But because, you know, I've been doing this for a while, I know that this is someone who listened to the podcast and they just want to connect.

So I accepted the connection request and then I sent my usual message, which is, you know, thank you very much for reaching out. You know, thank you very much for connecting. It's a it's an honor. It's a pleasure to be a part of your network. And then the guy responded and we're having a small conversation and I told the guy, I said, look, guy, you suppose optimize your LinkedIn profile because now Niger we did. We are in Nigeria and in Nigeria everybody is afraid of 419.

So most people when they see a profile like that, we just name Godwin here natural, nothing else. Most people just ignore the as I'm saying, Godwin here natural. Do I know any Godwin? OK, that Godwin for secondary school. What's his name, Sir? I'm never sure if it's that Goodwin. And then they'll just ignore because everybody's afraid of 419. Everybody's afraid of all these scams that happen on social media and that happen on WhatsApp.

Now, some of you will make it worse because you don't even put a real name. You will now put your name as a web developer. X3IJ4562026 Reloaded. You know, something like that. Come on, we're not in secondary school anymore. We're reaching out now because we're trying to grow our businesses and we're trying to grow our careers. It's time for us to grow up. The time for nicknames don't pass. Now. When you are with your guys, you can call yourself whatever it is you want to call yourself.

But on social media, set up your your profiles, set up your handles and optimize these things well. So for LinkedIn, what else? Instagram. OK, Instagram is more personal. Let me just leave down. Let's just talk about LinkedIn since most people on LinkedIn are either worried about business growth or carrier development. So for LinkedIn, your government name, full government name. So Godwini here. Natural good. Don't set up a profile.

And then when it comes to name, you just put GI. So full government name, Godwin here. Nature. The next profile picture, it doesn't have to be anything fancy. Take your phone, stand next to a blank background, reverse the camera and then that's it. Check on, take the picture, make sure it is well lit. Start with that one first. We'll worry about professional photo later on. We'll worry about branding later on so that when somebody, when you send somebody a connection request and they see it, they see a clear picture of a human being.

And then the proper name, Godwin here, Nacho. Then we have to optimize our profile. There's the bio. In the bio, you're telling a little bit about yourself. Now don't write all the wonderful things about yourself that you like. Write enough to let the person know who you are, what you're about, the sorts of things that you're interested in. So that is where you will now write, you know, software developer, Web 3 coder, crypto something, something enthusiast looking to connect for carrier growth.

Bam, that's it profile. Excuse me. So excuse me, I'm recovering from a code. So somebody will see that kind of thing now and they already have a snapshot of what you're about. You are in the tech space, you are in the Web 3 space, you are an employee or you want to be an employee and you're thinking of connecting with people for career reasons. So somebody will now know when they open the profile, they see a profile picture, they see a name, Gordini Hennicho, they see the bio, they now know accept or not accept.

If you've been doing a good job and sending out these connection requests that are targeted to people who are in the industry, more and more of them will connect you. Then continue to optimize your profile. You don't have to put details about your education. I mean not too many details. Nobody needs to know that you graduated third class. For those of you who graduated first class, well, you know, it's a good brag. So you know, go ahead, put that up there if you want to.

So schools attended, don't write every single thing. Forget about primary school, no need, but at least uni put it there. You know Nigeria now. Now we like to you understand, you know, we like to flex. If you went to Harvard, you better put your Harvard degree there. In fact, in my own opinion, I would say pull Harvard first. Let's say you went to Suka there from Suka I went to Harvard. In my own opinion, pull Harvard first.

After that pull Suka. Let people see the Harvard first like wow, Godwin in here nature, blah blah blah, crypto web 3 something something something graduated from Harvard and studied AI engineering. Let people see that one and say wow, then do not accept your connection request. Hope you guys have you need to appreciate what I mean when I say optimize your profile before you send connection requests. These are ways that you reach out to to people much more effectively on social media.

Remember the main questions that I've that I've been talking about so far, people are not accepting or before somebody accepts, they want to know who are you? What do you do? What are you about? What are the possible reasons why you might be trying to connect? So we should make sure that whenever we're reaching out to people on social media or WhatsApp or whatever, that we have set up our profiles to properly answer those questions,

or that the message itself that we send should attempt to address these questions. Now on LinkedIn, there's something called, what's it called? Gosh, I can't remember personalized request or personalized something where you send a connection message, but you have a chance to actually send a personalized message before you send the request. So in that case, with this feature, now it will help if you can do that when sending connection requests.

So let's say you would like to connect with me. You find me on LinkedIn. If you just send a normal request, it's fine. I'll accept because I accept everybody when I now discovered that the person accepted as an idiot, I will now block the person. I will spam the person, but I accept everyone who reaches out. But it would help for other people if you send a personalized message. So let's say you listen to two podcasts.

Let's say you listen to the I said what I said podcast and you listen to my own podcast and you really, really love those podcasts. And so you reach out to the ladies on I said What I said that was Jola and I can't remember her name, FKFK. And Jola, when you are reaching out to them, excuse me, on LinkedIn, send a personalized message. So you open FK's profile and then instead of just clicking on connect, you click on the three dots.

On the three dots, you now click on personalized. I think it's personalized request or personalized message or something. I can't remember, but just go check. Then you now say, hi Jolla, just listen to your podcast, the episode where you discuss blah, blah, blah. I found it mind blowing and really, really inspirational. Because of that, I thought it would be a good idea for us to connect. Looking forward to engaging with you on LinkedIn.

Send that kind of thing. So I will open it and say, oh, it's one of my podcasting love lies. Somebody who has listened to my podcast, then she might accept or not. But if you just send connection request on LinkedIn, you didn't use your real name or you just put GI, or you just put GI, the Almighty Web Three Web 3 Superstar 2026 loading, then you didn't put anything on your profile. How do you want her to know that this is a reasonable somebody that she can accept the person's connection request?

So the reason why talking about this on the podcast this day is because obviously since we talk about personal selling as a way to improve our businesses and improve our careers, you can see that making connections with people, whether online or in the real world are going to be material to growing our businesses and improving our careers. So you are not helping yourself if you're not adopting best practices when reaching out to people on WhatsApp, reaching out to people on LinkedIn.

So that's it. That's all I wanted to say for today. Summary. Help yourself when reaching out to people. Improve the odds that somebody will accept your connection request. The goal is that in the future, you guys might entertain one or two conversations because you never know where these kind of things might lead. So help yourself. So that's it, and that's all for today. Thank you very much for listening. Remember, if you'd love to connect with me, my name is Tavishima Ayede.

Now you can call send me a text message or WhatsApp message on 08064662140. Thank you very much for your time and attention. I'll catch you all some other time.