Life changes.
Subway stops and train schedules, shopping programs and pricing (I’m looking at you Prime), how social networks decide what they show you, i.e. the so-called algorithm.
Initially LinkedIn showed us posts and updates from our connections – our “1st degrees.” The people most relevant to us. We got professional updates on people we knew from all walks of life – school, work, para-professionals, vendors, etc.
A few years back we began to get more non-direct connection style updates in our feed. Put another way – interactions between our 1st and 2nd degree connections.
- “John Public likes this (with the full original update, from someone you don’t know)”.
- “Jane Public loves this…”
- “Johanna Public commented on this…”
I enjoy open networks. Finding connections between people you know that have something in common (or that they discover themselves), but somehow don’t yet know each other. I thought this was a huge issue back when Twitter changed the at-reply mechanism.
For the most part this is a great addition to LinkedIn. Reacting or commenting on industry content should show up in the timeline of others in the same industry.
This breaks down, however, when your own network gets too unfocused. Most commonly I see this among:
- Vendors (especially salespeople) changing companies or recruiters changing specialty.
- Career shifters and those that ended up in industries outside the field they studied.
Since salespeople and recruiters tend to be very busy on LinkedIn you can quickly become inundated with irrelevant updates, particularly if they change or have multiple industries. This can quickly make LinkedIn less valuable to you. Presumably these folks (and their connections) wold also see my – completely irrelevant to them – updates.
The simple fix – trim the fat.
I was way beyond any kind of minimum threshold number of connections I needed to derive value from the network, so why keep the connections that offered no value? Away went everyone who I’d never had more than one conversation with. Everyone who I couldn’t remember why we were connected and plenty of other folks (though I kept the “professionally irrelevant” school-based connections).
Point being – if a social network isn’t working for you – are you working it correctly?