How to make LinkedIn less annoying!

LinkedIn is a powerful tool for your business. As with most social media, LinkedIn can also cause frustration because it makes you visible, which opens you up to unwanted communications from many people, which can in turn take up time during your day. Listening to feedback from clients, here are the most frustrating parts of LinkedIn and my strategies for minimising those frustrations.

Make your newsfeed less annoying

There’s often that one person among your connections who seems to post every five minutes. If your feed is clogged with content from the same person all the time or with content that doesn’t interest you at all, you can eliminate the annoying, unwanted content by unfollowing the people who post it. To unfollow them, just go to their profile, click “more” (next to message) and then choose unfollow. When you unfollow a connection, you remain connected, but you no longer see their posts. And don’t worry, LinkedIn won’t send them a message to alert them that you’re no longer following them!

Getting requests from people you don’t know

If you’re someone who has a following because you share your expertise on social media, you likely have some folks who feel like they know you. And it’s important to keep these people in your circle.

I get approx 50 connection requests per day, most of which I have no idea who they are. On one hand, you should welcome these people into your brand community. On the other hand, you may worry that they’ll become more mouths to feed. The solution is to give them the option of becoming a follower. Under Privacy, settings, privacy, toward the bottom, you’ll find a category called Blocking and Hiding. When you select “yes” for “Make Follow Primary” when someone is looking at your profile, they’ll see “follow” instead of “connect” as the first option. Followers don’t have the same opportunity to message you, but they’re able to see your posts.

Unwanted LinkedIn messages from members who are not connections

LinkedIn allows premium members to reach out to you even if you are not connected to them (InMail messages). That is if your settings are not configured to prevent it. To stop the flow of unwanted sales pitches from these members, do this:

• Go to Privacy and settings
• Then under Communications, there is a category called “who can reach you.”
• Under the option called “Messages: Allow others to send you InMail?” toggle it to “no.”
• Do the same for “Allow LinkedIn partners to show you Sponsored InMail?”

Unwanted email From LinkedIn members

Change your settings so that only your first-level connections can see your email address (and if you’re getting too many emails from first-level connections, choose the option “only visible to me”). You do that in Privacy, under the settings “who can see your email address.”

Getting connection requests from people who want to sell to you

Although LinkedIn recommends you only accept connection requests from people you know well, there’s power in opening up your network to a broad array of professionals. But sometimes, in our attempt to meet new people and diversify our network, we open ourselves up to the, what I call the ambulance chasers of LinkedIn. If you pay attention, you can avoid getting these over zealous salespeople into your community. Here are two ways to limit this egregious behavior:

1.   Read their headline. Many of them have billboard-style headlines that scream, “Don’t engage with me unless you want to be sold to.” If you see headlines like these and you don’t want to be sold to, ignore their connection requests:

• I can deliver a 200% increase in leads for your business
• I get job seekers more interviews and more job offers
• We build apps and websites for solopreneurs like you
• I get you access to High Ticket clients
• I want to share my proprietary, super-effective process for generating more leads
• I help motivational speakers generate more leads through social media

2.   Make your acceptance of their connection clear. When you accept your connection request, share something like this:

“Thanks for reaching out. I’m delighted to have you in my community. I use LinkedIn as a way to share knowledge with interesting people. I don’t use it to sell to others or to be sold to. So you’ll never receive a message from me asking for anything and I hope for the same. Thanks. Looking forward to staying connected.”

Unwanted LinkedIn messages from connections

Sometimes you let people into your community because they seem like they’d be a good addition, but they turn out to be annoying opportunists, using your connection acceptance as an open door to stick their foot in. Sometimes there are triggers in your profile that get you on their sales list.

To these people, I send a standard message that reads:

“My favorite thing about LinkedIn is connecting with interesting people to share ideas and get inspired. My least favorite thing about LinkedIn is receiving unsolicited sales pitches, so please don’t be offended when I ask that you please remove me from your sales messages. If your only reason for connecting was to sell to me, feel free to remove me as a connection. Otherwise, I look forward to staying connected.”

LinkedIn is one of the most valuable personal branding assets you have. And when you follow the advice I shared here, you can maximize the value of the tool and minimize the frustration over wasted time and annoying messages.

And why the accompanying image on this post? I just liked it!!!!