Many of us are overloaded on LinkedIn. Nearly every day, I hear two recurring pain points from the people I'm connected to:
"I get too many irrelevant invites from people I don’t know / who are trying to sell me"
"I get too many “connect-and-sell” DMs"
Simple Hacks for Reducing Unwanted Pitch Slaps on LinkedIn
The Gated team is working as fast as possible to bring our expertise to LinkedIn, to reduce the noise in your LinkedIn inbox as we do in email. In the meantime, I wanted to share a few of hacks, tips and tricks that people who use Gated have found effective:
Restrict invites to people who know your email: This small change in your settings will immediately reduce the number of connection invitations you receive. Since emails are easy to guess, it might only create a small hurdle, but people report that it's a step which forces unknown connections to spend a bit more effort before they send you an invite.
Turn off InMail: Most of the messages you get here are solicitations anyway.
Don’t accept invites from people who are likely to sell you: While new connections can spark amazing relationships, remember that by accepting an invite, you are giving permanent access to your DMs. One easy way to determine who will sell you is: Only accept invites from people who include a message (even a short one) that reveals why they want to connect. It's pretty obvious, in most cases. And give yourself permission to NOT accept all connections. Those people can still follow and engage with your content.
Turn on your away message: If you are overwhelmed with DMs, you can use this feature to set expectations for your network. In particular, a lot of people who use Gated actually put their email in this message so that unknown senders will reach out via email and be asked to prove their value through a Gated donation.
Best Practices for Setting an Away Message on LinkedIn
I am still playing with how to make my LinkedIn DMs more relevant and less chaotic, but here are a few best practices I would recommend:
Communicate value: Unfortunately, LinkedIn sends your away message even to people you just messaged. So your message should help them understand why it has been sent and how this helps them, in the end.
Set norms: Help people understand how you will respond. You're telling people how it would work best to reach you and even what you're most focused on.
Pick a single channel: If you struggle to stay on top of DMs, using your away message here can route people who need you to a single channel, where you can be more in control of the messages you get and how you respond.
Be brief: The automated nature of an away message (it shows up RIGHT away!) is a little jarring - so keep things short, easy to read, and friendly.
What's a Goode Example of a LinkedIn Away message?
Here are three of my favorites. I'd love to see any example that you enjoy. You can reach me to share, at any time, at andy@gated.com.
