We all have times on LinkedIn where we seem to get a flood of irrelevant connection requests. You check your network notifications, see the invite and think “Why has this person reached out to connect?”
You see no relevance in their background or experience and with that awful generic invitation message you have no idea if they really are trying to connect with you for a specific reason or they just hit the ‘Connect’ button.
Now, to be fair, LinkedIn is in part to blame for this. Whenever you click a connect button anywhere else except on the persons actual profile it send that connection request automatically, along with that generic message.
Hopefully, you would expect someone to on your profile when they ask to be in your network, but life and LinkedIn do not work that way!
Well there may be a solution. But is is a hidden once, or at least not well publicized.
You can actually change your profile button from ‘Connect’ to ‘Follow’, thereby forcing someone to go through a couple more steps to actually try and connect with you.
This will really help you if you have a more limiting networking policy and want to keep your network small and manageable. Or if you have a big network and are approaching the 30,000 connection limit!
It can also be beneficial if you want to build a bigger following of your posts and articles and reach a wider audience.
Be warned, as is their way, LinkedIn has made this a little bit harder than it needs to be. And as is their way too, this feature is only available currently on mobile not desktop (it’s okay the two departments never seem to speak to each other!).
So this is what you have to do.
1. Open up the LinkedIn mobile app.
2. Click on your small headshot circle at the top left.
3. On the drop down menu click on ‘View Profile’ at the top.
4. Click on the cogwheel at the top right.
5. Select ‘Privacy’ tab.
6. Scroll down and find the ‘Who can follow you’ option and click on it.
7. Scroll down a little and click on the ‘Make follow’ the primary choice.
Now your profile is set to show the follow button to visitors instead of Connect.
That’s it. Let me know if you found this useful or if you have any other LinkedIn questions I might be able to address in a future tip.