Back in February I went through my LinkedIn connections and removed half of them. Five hundred-odd people, gone. Not because they’d done anything wrong — most of them hadn’t done anything at all. That was the point.
I’d been treating LinkedIn like a scoreboard. More connections equals more reach equals more opportunity, or so the theory goes. But when I actually looked at who was in my network, a huge chunk were people I’d never spoken to, would never speak to, and couldn’t pick out of a lineup. Recruiters from industries I’ve never worked in. Conference acquaintances from 2016. People who’d added me because we had twelve mutual connections and that felt like enough.
Here’s the distinction that made the decision easy: LinkedIn can be a relationship management tool or a personal branding tool. Most advice pushes you toward the second — optimise your headline, post three times a week, engage strategically, build your audience. But I’d rather have a network where I actually know the people in it. Where opening my feed shows me things from humans I care about, not content from strangers performing for the algorithm.
So I culled. And the filtering criteria were simple: Have we ever had a real conversation? Would I reply to their message within an hour? Would they reply to mine? If the answer to all three was no, they went.
The result was surprisingly liberating. My feed improved overnight. I started noticing updates from people who matter to me — job changes, project launches, genuine questions. The noise dropped and the signal emerged. Turns out a smaller network is a more useful network.
Save yourself the time you spend on all those personal branding tactics. Focus on the people who actually matter in your network. The ones you’d pick up the phone for. That’s where the real value sits — not in connection counts.
Originally published auf Deutsch at reinergaertner.de (est. 1997, older than Google). AI helped translate this. I helped introduce the errors.