I was sitting on the couch the other night and was scrolling mindlessly down my LinkedIn feed and asked myself “who are half of these people in my feed”? What are they trying to sell, do impact in my world. Anecdotally, it felt like I was in a waterfall of content from the people I am least connected with in my business and theirs. So 30 minutes later, I had ruthlessly deleted over 400 people from my connections list. And I feel great about it.
First let me tell you another thing that really bothered my about what I was seeing in the feed. I pride myself on having a personal connection with every connection in my LinkedIn. They are either someone I have helped get a mortgage, so they are a client of mine. Or they are people I have worked with on transactions. Realtors mostly, but also Financial Planners, attorneys, title reps, etc. People who help me get the borrowers/clients closed. Finally, there are people I know in the mortgage business. Having done this for over 20 years, I know a lot of people in the business as well. I have bragged about well connected I am with these people.
I go so far as to send people that I don’t recall knowing a link when they hit me up to “connect”. If you are interested, that link is located here It’s a great screener for crappy recruiting which is still common in the mortgage industry and I thought, before the other night, helped me keep to my word of “I know everyone”. But the clogged feed the other day made me realize, I’m not doing a good job of that at all. So who got past the gate? What the heck is going on here?
Well the first group is people that I was more deeply connected with at some point in time. However, for some reason for that connection has faded, and so in a related matter has their value in my feed. Frankly I assume my value in their world has faded as well, it’s just business after all. Few of us are working with the same people we were 20 years ago. So they are out. Though reaching out to the folks I am less connected with is a topic for another day.
But the other, far bigger group, is the list of people that I connected with in the “land grab” of connecting with everyone when social media became a thing a decade or so ago. They are just hanging out, dripping stuff I am not reading into my feed and putting me in a situation where I am blocking out a fair chunk of the value of LinkedIn because they are not relevant to my life or my business. Maybe they never were. Or they could also are competing for the same relationships and customers that I am. Frankly, I don’t care what they are doing. We have some pretty fantastic social media content here at Benchmark Mortgage so I don’t necessarily want to show my stuff to them. Finally we have a group of people that I thought I might recruit to something, my company, my networking group, or they thought they were recruiting me, to a company, a multi level opportunity, etc. None of that is happening either way for lots of reasons, but that is another post. So their gone as well.
We all have heard that in business, you have to be more to less people. I think that applies here. So my LinkedIn connection list is down by 1/3rd. Now I have to figure out how to add some value and get what I want from the platform going forward. I’m not 100% sure where this is going, but I’m betting to a good place, and I’ll post about the results down the road.
