I’m open and generous with connections on LinkedIn, but every so often I end up connected to a spammer or “business opportunity” person. Yech. How do I unfriend them?
I certainly agree that the benefit of having a really large business network outweighs the occasional hassle with someone who sees a connection as an invitation to spam you or hit you up with so-called business opportunities that offer them a lot greater benefit than it offers you (if it’s legit at all). Still, that’s the price we pay in the social media age, and given that the alternative is having a tiny circle that does you very little online, I think it’s a reasonable trade-off.
But every so often…
In fact, just this morning a gal I’d connected with a week or two ago, “Janet”, revealed why she’d asked to connect with me: so she could shill a business opportunity by inviting me to watch a “get rich through our program” video and then hopefully sign up for the program, generating a nice referral fee for her.
Not so much.
Here’s how it went down, starting with her email:
Sorry, Janet, but since I don’t even know, you, I’m not going to go to a “paysme.com” sort of site and watch a video. I could be jumping to incorrect conclusions but it sure looks like some sort of scam, doesn’t it?
I have a one-strike-you’re-out policy, so I’m going to unfriend Janet on LinkedIn. Before I do so, however, I’ll mark this message as spam by using the “More” menu:
Now I’ll click on her name in the message so that I’m looking at her profile page. The top looks like this:
Nice photograph, but sorry, I don’t need more spam, Janet. So it’s time to say sayonara…
The easy way to do that is by clicking on the tiny black triangle adjacent to “Endorse”. A menu appears:
There’s the option. “Remove connection”.
Yup, it’s come to that. 🙂
Choose “Remove connection” and LinkedIn confirms that’s what you want to do:
I do. Sorry, Janet. A single click on “Remove” and the deed is done.
Hope that helps you out!
thanks for this, dave!
Glad to help, my old friend. Remember the first time we bumped into each other, Paul? You sold me a luggable Unix system that we installed at my home in Los Altos, a looonnng time ago.
I couldn’t agree more.
Thanks for this. I had been going to the connections tab and deleting people that way. This is much easier!