With Steven Burda, senior financial & business professional. # 1 connected on LinkedIn.
When I was developing my LinkedIn master class, I was checking on 10 top people most connected on that network. And I found that Steven Burda was number 1 connected on LinkedIn. I sent him an invitation to add him to my network but I got a rejection from LinkedIn telling me that Steven had already too many connections.
I was really surprised because I thought that LinkedIn, as opposed to Facebook, would not give you a limit of contacts. In order to get in touch with Steven I started looking if we had any connections in common. I started to look at his posts and I did some other research. Eventually I was amazed to find out that one of our common connections was actually Steven’s father.
“I sent Steven’s father a message asking for an introduction. Within 24 hours Steven added me to his network”.
Steven’s father and I met many years ago when we were at the same event in the US. So I sent him a message asking for an introduction. Within 24 hours Steven wrote me a nice friendly message thanking me for the connection and added me to his network. Of course he had to delete some people from his contact list to allow me to connect with him.
I wanted to know how Steven managed to get over 80 000 connections on LinkedIn, and he kindly shared some of his techniques. Then, when I had my LinkedIn master classes in Moscow, I invited Steven as a guest speaker by Skype. And the audience loved his online performance. Steven is originally from Ukraine but he has lived in the US most of his life. Since he still remembers some of his Russian, it was very pleasant for everyone to hear him.
In November of 2015 we invited Steven to Russia for our Global Networking Marathon and he was a big success. Since then I’ve managed to inspire Steven to do greater things in his life and now he’s running for the government office in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. He still has the largest number of connections, the most feedback about him and more recommendations than anyone else on LinkedIn.
Watch Steven Burda’s great piece of advice to all entrepreneurs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmYJrZvkH9c