How Your LinkedIn Connections Have Become Your Enemies - And How to Undo That!

Here is a guide on how to refine who you connect with and who connects with you and improve your content reach on LinkedIn 20 times!

You probably have over 1000 followers/connections on LinkedIn (applaud!). But here is why no one cares:

Most of your followers’ accounts are dead! This means they just got up one morning and created a LinkedIn account. That’s it! They never engage in posts or create them.

Secondly, many of your followers cannot add value to your content. Like, if you are in the real estate business, why the hell would a pet doctor like your post? (only apart from when they want to buy or sell real estate).

You get the point?

How Your LinkedIn is Negatively Being Affected By This

Imagine you have 1000 LinkedIn followers and connections. This means you have the potential to reach 1000 people through your content. Now if 100 of those people barely open LinkedIn and another 100 are completely unrelated to your niche and do not resonate with your content, what will happen?

You aren’t appealing to 1000 followers anymore. That number has gone down to 800.

This obviously affects the people you reach and the traction you get through your content.

LinkedIn doesn’t like this since what they see is 1000 followers on your profile. And in reality only a fraction of those interacting with your content. Now you have a lower follower-to-impression ratio and this does affect your account.

The Do’s (Unfollow The Herd)

There are 2 ways to solve this issue. Either you unfollow those people (which also means they unfollow you), or you disconnect with those people (which keeps them following you). The 3rd option is doing both.

Why I choose the 3rd option for most.

If there’s a dead account following you, it is obvious that they aren’t going to interact with your amazing posts. That means them unfollowing you is a neutral decision (no gain no loss).

I recommend disconnecting and unfollowing them because they are just a number on your follower list with no value whatsoever. You don’t want to connect with a person who doesn’t post not show up on yours. Get them going.

Now for followers who are active but aren’t related to your niche, you can disconnect with them. This means they keep seeing your content and can engage with it in the future.

The Don’ts (Don’t Unfollow Blindly)

Just be careful while unfollowing the lot. There might be some friends of yours. Well, if you do not care about your school friends and you just follow them as a formality, now is the time to say goodbye. They will not get notified if you unfollow or disconnect with them.

Step By Step Process (Removing The Right Lads)

1. Go to your LinkedIn profile and click on “connections”

   

2. Sort by “recently added” and scroll to the end of the list. It is going to be a lot of scrolling tbh.

This is recommended because it will automatically bring you to your oldest followers. Now it is very likely that at the start of your LinkedIn journey, you just added and accepted random followers. That’s okay! I did the same.

So sorting by most recent and going to the end of the list brings you to those people whom you can safely unfollow now. Most of them have dead accounts (that’s the truth).

3. Select each profile starting from the last one by one.

4. Check for their past activity.

   

   This is a direct red flag. Don’t follow nor be followed by people who have never posted content. They are completely dead accounts. For people who have posted stuff, look at the last time they posted last. If that is months and years ago, it is time to say goodbye.

   You can also filter people through comments. Select the comments box and see how often they comment on other’s posts. Like this:

5. Unfollow and disconnect with inactive members.

Here you go. You have disconnected an inactive member.

What Next?

Half the job is done here. The other half is connecting with like-minded people and ICPs who actually show up on LinkedIn. The next post will be about it.

Cheers :)

Compiled By:

Shabbir Jasden