I use LinkedIn quite heavily for sales & marketing, but due to a change in jobs, I am going to be working in a completely different sector. I’m wondering if I should just delete the majority of my current connections and just start again.? I have 2,000+ contacts, but only actually know a handful of them.!
Most people say I should keep them, but I can’t see the point…?
Ha! I’m going through this myself. After submitting an application for a position in an entirely different area I decided to re-hash my LI profile, which hadn’t been updated in 6+ years and was treacherous & hastily updated previously. I hadn’t even looked at LI in 4+ years. So I built a new, basic profile with my personal email and merged with the old one; the contacts ported over but all other data is fresh, so next it’s time to clean out unnecessary contacts and make the profile current. It’s essentially empty until I know what’s happening with the new potential position, so I’ll model it toward my goal based on whether or not the new role happens or what I aspire to do from there.
I was wondering if there are actually people using LI at all. Good to know there are at least 4 or 5!
Outside of having more of a online clean start feeling why would you want to delete old contacts (even if you don’t know them)? It’s surprising the dotted lines you can draw between folks on LI even when swapping industries. Granted I think LI started going gradually down hill once Microsoft bought it (birthday reminders on LI are way out of place IMO) but it’s still a useful networking tool…even on the gradual down slide.
Similar situation as I was coming from a sales/biz dev role where I used it heavily but am happy I’ve kept all my old connections. Just my 2 cents.
My answer to your question of “what is the point” is you never know what connections can come in valuable. Especially at 0 cost to you to preserve. I find the deeper I get into my career the smaller the world seems to get (and that’s with the industry switch a few years back).
Good luck with the sector change!
It’s a tricky one…I generally only use LI as a marketing tool, but have found it to be very effective (although no where near as good since Microsoft . I’ve had a couple of ‘culls’ before and never thought about it. My thinking is that do I really want to be sharing loads of ‘very interesting (?)’ posts about industrial Agriculture (new sector) with all my contacts from Security & Emergency response (new sector)
I suppose they could always block me if they like…! Its a real shame that there isn’t the option to segment your contacts.