LinkedIn Cleanup – Ending the Year Right

I’m a big fan of LinkedIn, you probably already know that. For me, it’s the most useful social platform I participate in, and in my social media pie, it’s most definitely the biggest slice. LinkedIn allows me to make useful business connections, learn from qualified experts, promote my brand, get recommendations from people who have worked with me (and share them publicly), participate in topic-focused groups (widening my connections even more!), post updates and even more extensive articles on subjects that interest me (aka “long form content”), find people who specialize in areas that are valuable to me, and so much more!

I have to admit though, that my LinkedIn behavior over the several years of my participation has been, well, kind of slutty. I have a bad tendency to accept nearly every request for connection that has come my way, and have joined the maximum number of groups, and the results are disturbing. I get way to many messages from way too many people I don’t know, and don’t know that I will ever need or want to know. Updates come fast and furious, and the list is filling up with announcements and news that aren’t always very useful.  And group membership…

I don’t think that 2,518 contacts of which many are random are going to really be as meaningful to me as, say 2,248 that are really relevant. So, the first thing I am going to do in my LinkedIn cleanup strategy is cut my connection list. If you don’t already know how to remove people from LinkedIn, it is really simple. Just click the menu item on your main page that is labeled “Connections” and for anyone on the list you wish to purge (there are no nice words for this, I considered “kill”, “deep six” and “eliminate” also, they all seem to indicate some form of illegal and deadly activity), look for “Remove Connection” (that’s nicer) under the “More” label. So simple. I removed three people just while typing this paragraph!

So, how am I going to decide who to keep and who to kill? One good start is to sort my contacts by the recency of conversation. If we haven’t connected in more than a year, chances are we don’t really have that much to say to one another, so if you are on the bottom end of my list, you are definitely at risk. The other filters I am going to use are also pretty basic. If the last four, or ten or all of your postings have been selling messages, you are gone. I don’t mind hearing a sales pitch now and then, we are in this for the business contacts after all, but try to follow the “1 out of 10 rule” with your sales pitches – give me some useful content in between. If I read your name and can’t figure out why I know you, look out! If your profession or job title doesn’t make sense to me, bye bye. And if I open your profile and find out that you only have 11 connections – one of which is obviously me, I’ll let you go as well. This latter criteria will help eliminate fake profiles that are just scammers – they do exist, as I documented recently, as well as people who aren’t really using LinkedIn in a meaningful way. Even if you are one of my best friends, why stay connected on this platform, since it will just result in a dead end for me? Friend, I can see YOU on Facebook.

I’m feeling better already, and now on to the next step. My groups. LinkedIn groups, as the platform instructions tell us “provide a place for professionals in the same industry or with similar interests to share content, find answers, post and view jobs, make business contacts, and establish themselves as industry experts”. And the good groups do just exactly that. But not all groups are created, or function, equally. As I mentioned I belong to the maximum number of groups, which is 50. I’ve joined these groups over time for one reason or another. Perhaps it was a request from a contact, or a suggestion by LinkedIn, or a group I found by searching for a specific subject. In any event, I notice a lot of traffic in some of the groups, with members suggesting topics regularly, much give and take on the discussion boards, in short they are active. Other groups seem to have sprung into existence only to lapse almost immediately into dormancy. For example, the most helpful groups have membership in the hundreds or even thousands, and there are often several topics under discussion at any time – sometimes as many as a couple dozen. Other groups have only a handful of members, which isn’t in and of itself a problem, but when you couple that with a deadly lack of activity, you do start to wonder, what is the point of hanging in there? So I am going to stick with Group A, which has 16,700 members and currently has 13 active discussion topics going, most of which were started in the past 3 days, and send Group B (32 members, Last posted topic was in September, average number of comments per discussion <1) to the woodshed. Just a cursory review suggests that my number of group memberships is going to be cut nearly in half! Oh, and that group that you started just so you could constantly bombard the members with sales information about your product – you’re out as well.

I can tell this clean-up is going to take some time. I don’t want to be overzealous and throw out the baby. But I am convinced that when I’m all done the time and attention I devote to LinkedIn will be even more valuable, and a lot less frustrating. Now I just have to keep repeating to myself my new mantra “Just because they asked you to connect, doesn’t mean you have to say yes!”