This one is aimed at people who have quite a busy Notifications tab on LinkedIn. You can improve your LinkedIn experience by cutting down the number of unnecessary notifications you receive.
There are various options for notifications control in the Settings & Privacy panel, but one approach that no one ever seems to talk about is getting rid of notifications from specific people who only ever “react” to your content.
I have lots of people like this in my network, and although I appreciate their support, I don’t need to be told if they’ve clicked the Like button on my posts.
Here’s an example of what I mean. In this case, the notification really gives me nothing to work with. Someone has liked my post, but so what? There’s no conversation for me to continue here.
I tend to delete such notifications and move on with my day, but some people do nothing other than like my stuff, and I really don’t need to be notified about that. Perhaps you’re in the same boat.
There are a couple of ways to get rid of notifications like this.
The easiest is direct within the Notifications tab. Click the 3-dot … menu to the right of the notification to reveal this popup:
Select Change notification preferences, and then you’ll see options that look like this:
The top slider here is for notifications from that specific person. Set this to Off.
Once you exit the screen, you get a popup notification to confirm the change in the bottom-left corner on desktop:
From now on, you won’t receive notifications from that person. (This doesn’t affect your connection status with them in any way.)
The alternative method is to visit a person’s profile and then look for the bell symbol towards the right of the top card. You’ll see the bell symbol only if you’re already following the person.
Once you click the bell, a popup appears. By default, this will show that you are opted in to see only the most relevant posts from that person.
Set this to Off and click Save. You’ll then see a confirmation in the bottom-left corner on desktop.
You’ll also see that the bell symbol has a strikethrough:
Each of the two approaches above lead to the same outcome: you will no longer receive notifications when that person interacts with your content.
This means it’s important that you should do this only for people you are sure are not going to be commenting on or reposting your posts.
This method is best only to your serial likers – the people who don’t interact in any other way.
Why not just unfollow?
The above methods are a more nuanced way to reduce notifications than the old approach, which was simply to unfollow the person.
The big issue with unfollowing an existing 1st connection is that doing so would stop you receiving any notifications from them in the event that they @mention you in posts or comments.
This would have the potential to be quite awkward if someone mentions you and you never receive a notification about it, so I don’t recommend that approach anymore.
Also, you might receive such Like notifications from people you weren’t following anyway, in which case there is no option for you to unfollow. However, the methods at the top of this piece apply for everyone regardless of whether or not you’re following them.
That’s it: a pretty simple way to start reducing your notifications burden.
I share more advanced tips like this in my training sessions and inside the Espresso+ community.
