I removed about 1,000 LinkedIn connections yesterday, which was nearly 40% of my LinkedIn 1st-degree connections.
No, I haven’t become anti-social. It’s just that whenever I look at my LinkedIn newsfeed, I might see a post from a 1st-degree connection and I will ask, “Wait, who’s that again?”
I’ve been on LinkedIn since 2010 (14 years!) and many people have connected with me.
Among them were many HR recruiters who added me and never ever contacted me. This is almost as sad as being blue-ticked on a chat!
There were also strangers who liked my content and I added them, thinking “why not, we have a limit of 30,000 LinkedIn connections”. I heard from others that there was no harm in adding more connections as it might increase my visibility in search results.
The Problem: I realised that having strangers as 1st-degree connections would imply to others that I knew them. So if you browse a LinkedIn profile and you see that I am a connection, you will think that I somehow know this person, even though I don’t.
The Solution: It was only a few years ago I discovered the LinkedIn creator option where people could follow me instead of connecting with me. And I also observed that most business opportunities have come from people who weren’t connected to me in any way, but simply people who searched for the topics I post about.
I’ve been pondering about this situation for some time now and yesterday, I decided to clean up my contact list once and for all by removing people I haven’t interacted with. It took a few hours and I was surprised by how many names I removed!
To end with the obligatory question at the end of every LinkedIn post – Do you plan to clean up your own LinkedIn connection list?
(Image generated with Midjourney)