Back again...
18 months ago I left LinkedIn and deleted my network, profile. I'm now rebuilding my account. I want to talk about why I'm back and what I learned while I was away.
It's been about 18 months since I loudly left LinkedIn. And I'm reluctantly coming back. I’ve been thinking about recreating my profile for the last 6 months mainly due to the burden that not having a LinkedIn profile creates for others and a desire to start rebuilding my network AC (after-kids). It took me a while to figure it out. I was emotionally invested in my decision to leave.
“…that sounds like an emotional decision instead of a calculated one…" a friend told me when I discussed this whole thing with her. I replied, "I'm still calculating my emotional decision (to return)."
Too much network friction
What decided it for me was the comments of two people whom I'd know and had great conversations with in the past. We'd lost contact during the first-three-years-of-new-child when my 3rd child was born in 2020 and my attention span narrowed dramatically. These two people spent a long time to find my contacts and went through too much trouble for something that should have been trivial - I have a website and a Substack Blog. I’m searchable. Or so I thought and assumed.
LinkedIn has become a default way to reach people, so me not being on LinkedIn presents a challenge to everyone used to that default. This was part of the appeal to getting off LinkedIn when I was overwhelmed with three kids, work and no time. Now that the kids are older, work is more stable and I’d like to spend more time with my professional network and friends.
I just had too many connections previously. This meant that any attempt to cleanup my LinkedIn network presented an insurmountable task. I once calculated that I could do it if I went through 30 contacts a day for more than a year. I tried that for a while but it was horrible work - repetitive, emotionally difficult to decide on each person and not very rewarding. In the end, deleting my profile and taking a break was the best thing I could have done (and I did it!). I’m comfortable with this post hoc justification.
Observations and reflections
The time away helped me realize a few things about LinkedIn and social media in general. I hope these insights will help me better manage my new attempt:
Maximizing is frustrating - looking back, I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn trying to maximize everything: post more! connect more! join groups! enhance my profile! tweak settings! I clearly did this to increase my social credibility or profile on the platform but I never really had a clear objective for it in mind.
I used LinkedIn for business development and recruiting, but all the time spent on maximizing and posting would have been better spent with those people and prospects. Know why you are using the platform, decide metrics around that and focus. LinkedIn offers too many features that attempting to maximize everything will just frustrate.Connect with people you want to build a professional network with - my old profile was a graveyard of thousands of largely random connections. People who I mass connected with while recruiting or canvasing for sales. A very small percentage were people I actually wanted to network or get to know mid/long-term. I gained from the massive reach of my network but lost even more because I couldn’t focus on those people whom I wanted to spend time with.
The “best” way changes, changed me - I may have used LinkedIn in the best way I could before. For the objectives I had at the time, the functionality of the tool and who I was. That likely influenced me and how I looked at things. I can recall a time when meeting more, different people was exciting and fun. Now with family and other obligations, it seems exhausting. As we change and as the tools change, the market changes, we need to reconsider how we use the tools, what we spend and gain.
Choose the game you want to play - social media is a form of entertainment and a game. You can play by trolling people, or being a defender. You can craft a personality and persona via what and how you post and share. You can consume and engage or withdraw and watch. I don’t think anyone should try and play every role. Decide early on what kind of role do you want to play and focus, measure and hold yourself to that. You are going to spend some of your time on this, make sure it is a game you enjoy.
As I rebuild my network and recreate my profile, I’m thinking about these things. My profile is still private, but if you have my personal or office email address, you should be able to send me an invite. I’ll update this post when the public link is live again.
We can’t always choose the tools, but we can choose how we use them
I like the disconnect that being off LinkedIn allowed. I don't like the difficulties it creates for people I care about.
So I'm coming back. And I’ll make it work as best I can. If I'm completely honest, I'm doing this with some dread. I wish it wasn't needed to add back one more tool, one more source of noise to my life. As I choose how to play the LinkedIn game, I hope I can prove that feeling wrong, find a meaningful niche, and build a network. Because I failed to do it in the past, I should keep trying until I find a way to make it work for me. Life is one big experiment after all.
The journey starts again…