Tips, techniques and advice on getting the most out of LinkedIn

Regardless of the business audience that I deliver LinkedIn training to, whether they be business professionals, sales teams or job seekers, I am ALWAYS asked this common question – which seems to be the number ONE annoyance on LinkedIn:

One of my connection’s excessive updates are driving me crazy. How do I get rid of them?

Answer: Let me first start of by saying that I feel your pain. Seeing too many updates by a particular person is very annoying. It usually happens when an individual integrates all of their Twitter feed into LinkedIn. I most definitely recommend against doing it! Why? I’ll cover this topic with a more in-depth response in the future, but for now, suffice it to say that when you integrate all of your Tweets into LinkedIn you do you NOT give your LinkedIn followers the chance to opt-in to follow your Tweets. You are figuratively fire hosing your followers and forcing them to read your Twitter updates which is not a social media best practice.

Plus which, keep in mind that despite all of the hype you hear about Twitter (and by the way, I love it) – the reality is that Twitter reaches 16.5% of US adult social media users. In other words, it’s only a minority of the population that is actually on Twitter. Also keep in mind that unlike LinkedIn, Twitter is a more “chatty” social media platform. Users will typically Tweet several times a day. The business protocol on LinkedIn calls for much less activity.

Along the same lines, individuals who provide too many status updates or post too many links is another cause of annoyance that I hear from my business clients. Recruiters who post every single job description and real estate agents who post every single house listing of theirs are particularly guilty of this practice. A once in a while post for a hard to fill job position or an occasional link to a spectacular house is fine. But remember that at any one time, most of your connections are not looking for a job or a house, so be mindful of your audience. What’s considered too much? I’d say don’t post more than about 3 times a week.

You have 2 options for getting rid of those updates. You an either hide the updates from a particular individual, or remove that connection.

How to hide updates from a particular individual

1. From the "Home" page, scroll down to the individual who is making the updates.
2. Scroll down to the individual's update and "mouse over" the upper right corner of the update.
3. Click on "Hide".

How to remove a connection:

1. From the top menu go to Contacts > Connections.
2. Click on "Remove Connections" in the upper right.
3. Then select the person you want to remove from your connections.

I hope this tip helps to get rid of your annoyance!