Right. Tired that LinkedIn automatically makes me follow everyone and what they “like”. I like to be in control of what I see in my feed. Found this piece of code and now going to do a mass unfollowing. pic.twitter.com/BUpwG6RTOz

— Helen Blunden #AlwaysBeLearning ????? (@ActivateLearn) May 11, 2020

Recently I decided to clean up my LinkedIn feed because it was filled with lots of advertisements but also with articles that were liked or shared by people I didn’t know.

In a frustrated attempt to understand what was happening, I stumbled across this article How to Mass Bulk Unfollow People on LinkedIn.

It turns out that every time I connect with someone, LinkedIn automatically makes me Follow them.  This means any article they Like or Share will come to my feed.  Given that I had over 4000 connections, my feed was filled with lots of different subjects many of which were irrelevant to me.

So I decided to follow the advice of this article and run the script on my LinkedIn feed.  All up it took about 30 minutes to do because I had to repeat the process at least 5 times so that it could unfollow these 4000 accounts.

Now, these connections don’t get deleted.  You still are connected to them however, you don’t see anything they share unless YOU follow them.

I unfollowed everyone and started afresh.  I followed only people who share lots of great content that is valuable to me.  It means that many people in my network who have since stopped sharing blog posts or articles related to their work or learning, I have stopped following.  I know that I’m doing myself a disservice by not seeing what articles they click ‘Like’ or comment on but it’s come to the point of information overwhelm with me.  Sure, we have a variety of interests but we don’t need to see our extended networks interests and likes.

Give it a go yourself and see how you go.

Cleaning up our social media feeds is a constant battle to ensure that good quality information comes to you over time.  You can’t keep up with it but at least you can attempt to filter out the stuff that only makes you overwhelmed and stressed.