The Art Of Blocking!

Have you ever blocked someone on LinkedIn? This week I chat with John Espirian about useful ways to use this feature.

This article has also been recorded as a podcast;

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts?/?Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts

But before all that…

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

The LinkedIn Creators page continues to be an interesting follow, this week they published a Creators Content Calendar (January- March 2022) which could be a useful tool for those who are looking for topical subjects to post about. I have to say that I find all these ‘special days’ a bit contrived, I mean who knew there was a ‘Get To Know Your Customers Day’ on 20th Jan (the day I recorded this episode)? Not many it would seem as the hashtag only has 169 followers and although I did find a few posts using that hashtag today, the vast majority were company page posts and I didn’t see any that attracted any meaningful engagement. It seems marketing peeps love this sort of stuff but the rest of us ignore it!

A more interesting read was this article from Tomer Cohen in his ‘Building LinkedIn’ newsletter series. Incidentally, I subscribe to this newsletter but didn’t get notified about it which is very frustrating, I’m just glad someone else brought it to my attention.

Tomer is introducing some new features, some of which we have already covered but this one below was a pleasant surprise to me

The ‘Adding newsletter flow’ on the left is a bit confusing but as I understand it, this new feature allows you to add a newsletter to your featured section rather than just an article (which is part of a newsletter) and the difference is that the newsletter series is shown with the option to subscribe. Great feature, I can’t wait to get it!

Tomer also published this post this week. The comments thread is really quite fascinating and well worth a read, especially those replies from LinkedIn product managers as it provides some insight into their focus. It’s also interesting that even non-product-orientated LinkedIn employees are using this opportunity to request features!

Warning: The comments thread can be a bit of a time suck so I have highlighted a few below that I found especially interesting.

These are brilliant suggestions from Jeremy and I think you could add content suggestions or who they might consider following - based on Creators hashtags and the popularity of their content. My gut feeling is that it feels a bit too sophisticated for LinkedIn but as you can see, they are clearly looking at.

Another great suggestion, LinkedIn previously had a basic mentoring feature but in my experience, it was rarely used. Opting in alone clearly isn’t enough, there needs to be a search filter or ideally a separate directory of mentors that people can use to find someone who can help them.

I found this one very interesting. He is spot on about analytics, what we currently get is a waste of space - this could be a premium feature but it would be much wiser for LinkedIn to allow all those on creator mode more analytics. I’m convinced allowing people access to better data would encourage them to post more and to improve the quality of their content. Give us the data and we will improve and when content gets better, LinkedIn will sell more ads!

As for scheduling, and a lot of people are asking for it, I’m not a fan. I believe that easier access to scheduling will decrease the quality of content and that is counter-productive. In my experience, creators who are thoughtful and creative with their content, rarely feel the need to schedule it. People who just want to ‘put stuff out there’ in great quantities love to schedule! I know this is far from universally true but I feel there are too many people that will take advantage of scheduling at the detriment of the quality of our feeds.

Video captions are essential and I suspect they will come with the new short video feature.

I’m impressed that LinkedIn are asking for our input, let’s hope that they’re not just paying lip service to it…the replies and tagging from LinkedIn employees would suggest not. Let’s see what happens.

The Art of Blocking!

I received a question from a listener this week about the best way to use blocking, the question referred to company page posts but it got me thinking about a wider conversation about blocking and that inspired me to phone a friend! Here’s the transcript of our call (Note: you might find this easier to listen to on the podcast...transcripts are OK but inevitably quite lengthy);

John: “Hello John Espirian”

Mark : Hi John, it’s Mark. I wanted to ask you a question. Well, actually, I wanted to repeat a question that had been asked to me. I want to talk about blocking. Every time I think about blocking, I think about you!

John: Charming!

Mark: Just to explain that. What I mean is that you do a lot of blocking and I don't. But you use it quite strategically, so it always makes me think, oh, anyone wants to know about blocking, you're a good person to ask because you know more about it than I do. But this isn't specifically about the way you block. It's just I thought it was an interesting question to kind of bounce off you… Let me read it to you.

John: Okay.

Mark: It's from a listener to the podcast. I won't say their name, but it says “We've disgruntled someone who is now making snide comments on posts. I know personal profiles can block people, but how about company pages?

John : Yeah, good luck with that!

Mark: Yeah, you can't block people from company pages, but you can delete the comment. They could keep on commenting for sure and if they did, you could report them to LinkedIn I guess that's really all you can do, isn't it?

John: Yeah, that's pretty much it. I mean, I guess there's a school of thought that says if someone's being nasty in public you kind of give them as much rope to hang themselves as you want and they make a fool of themselves and the silent watchers will see that and go, well, that's an idiot as opposed to maybe trying to whitewash something or being accused of you're trying to cover up the truth. But I guess practically if it's obviously a nasty thing then yeah, I would delete it and try and move on as best you can but you definitely can't block them from your company page.

Mark : Yeah, I always think that when it's nasty, unpleasant stuff it's kind of being associated with it so If it's on your company page that's not a good image for anybody to see, even if that person's looking at it. So yeah, I think deleting is probably the best route on that. But you can't block them and I guess that is a bit of an issue and maybe LinkedIn could do something about that. I don't know. But they should be able to really when you think about it, it should be quite possible. Really.

John: I don't see why they wouldn't and they keep banging on about trust and safety and all of that. Well, if people feel threatened why shouldn't they have the right to block an individual from what they see as bad practice? I think they should implement that.

Mark: Yeah, I agree. Also second part of the question. What does blocking them actually do? Does it stop me from seeing their comments but others still can. That's fairly straightforward - I have blocked people and I don't see anything at all from them. I have occasionally seen someone refer to (tag) someone in a comment on a post, not my posts, and their name is kind of in black. I go, oh, so why is that not a link? And then I realise it must be someone that I block. That must happen to you a lot, because you block a lot of people.

John : Well, yeah, that's right. So when you do block someone, that basically makes them invisible to you on LinkedIn, if you go and try and look up their profile, it'll just say that the profile is not available, you won't be able to see any posts from them, they won't appear in search results, you won't be able to see any comments from them. But yes, if someone else who isn't blocked happens to mention them and you get that kind of bold black highlight on their name, that implies that either you blocked them or they blocked you.

Mark Yeah, could be they blocked you actually, yes.

John: And also the act of blocking someone in the comments, let's say that doesn't remove their comments. So someone else would still be able to see it, which I've always found a bit odd, because I would think that if you're going to take the step of blocking someone, you've seen an offensive comment, you're going to go, right block and maybe you might even report, but it doesn't actually remove that comment. So if I were ever to do that, then I would be removing the comment first and then going to their profile and then probably reporting them and then blocking them.

Mark : Delete the comment on someone else's post. You can't do that. Yeah.

John: Obviously you don't get that ability on someone else's post, but if it were on my own, then that's probably what I would do. I would remove and then report and then block.

Mark

Would you always block or would you sometimes just delete the comment?

John

Well, yeah, I'd probably just sometimes delete the comment. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily jump to blocking all of the time.

Mark: You do block a lot of people for good reason, by the way, it's not just that you're really intolerant. We'll get onto how you do that in a second. But there's a limit, isn't there, to how many people you can block?

John: There is a limit. It used to be much lower. The last limit I saw, I think was 1000. But honestly, I don't know what the current limit is right now.

Mark Because I guess where I was going with that, I was just thinking, if you are blocking a lot of people strategically easy for me, then someone like that, you might think, well, I'll just delete the comment first. If they continue to do it, then I'll block them. But I don't necessarily want to be using valuable blocks.

John You'd have to be a really heavy power user blocker to get near that limit I think you say that I block a lot of people. I probably do but I shouldn't imagine I blocked more than 100 or 200 maximum people.

Mark Oh, really?

John I'm still way short of whatever the limit is. I think the limit yeah, I've never tested it. It's a pretty hard one to test, actually.

Mark No, absolutely. I imagine it is. I've unfollowed lots of people like hundreds but not blocked that many people maybe 15 or so or something like that. I think you just need to detach the emotion from the action so my view on this is to use blocking sensibly but it's not a punishment. It's not like revenge. ‘That person upset me. I'm going to block them’ because that might not actually be sensible because someone could upset you today and they may change their mind or maybe become someone that you get to know.. I know you can unblock people but the thing is you're not going to see anything from them they are going to disappear from LinkedIn so don't be too hasty with it and it's not an emotional decision, I don't think anyway, I think it's more of a strategic one. If it doesn't make sense to see that person's content. I don't want them to see my content therefore I will block them but don't do it as a revenge thing.

John Yeah. And sometimes even if they have really ticked you off it might be strategically wise not to block them because that kind of as I said it makes them invisible so if you want to keep track of what are they actually posting or maybe they've said something indirectly about me or someone else. I know you never get a chance to see that if you're going to block them, unless you kind of log out of LinkedIn or go in Anonymously and try and look at their activity, which isn't straightforward. So, yes, I think removing the emotion from it is a good idea. In my head, I would have thought that you'd only block someone if you really found them offensive. But actually, there are more use cases than that. For example, a lot of my blocks are nothing personal at all. It's just because that's the only way I found to reliably remove noise from my LinkedIn feed. But I think there's like a value judgement associated with a block. So if someone found out that you'd block them, they're naturally going to take it personally because they're human beings, aren't they? They're not going to be there waiting for your kind of rational justification that ‘I really like you and good luck with your business, I just don't want to see your stuff in my feed and it's so popular. You've been a victim of your own success and every third post is something that you've done and brilliant’.

I just don't want to see it.

Mark Yeah, I understand it from when we've discussed this in the past. A lot of the people that you've blocked are particularly popular and that's a key reason why you've blocked.

John Yeah, that's right. So what happens is you're seeing stuff. Let's say you see stuff from your connections and you're not interested in it. You can just unfollow them and everyone's happy. If it's a non-connection, you can't unfollow someone that you're not already following. So LinkedIn have introduced this mute feature that seems to work for some people but it's never worked for me. I can just hit mute on the same person five times and I know that I'm going to get their content again the next day. So I either just put up with the fact that I'm going to see stuff that I find irrelevant, or I hit the block button because I know I'm probably never going to need to interact with them. They're probably making ten times the salary I'm making. Good luck to them. Go and run your business, but I don't need to see that. So I'll hit the block button.

Mark When you first told me about that, I had played with it a little bit. What I also found myself doing, though, was sort of intermediary step where I went. ‘The reason that post was in my feed, and I don't want to see this post from this popular person that everyone seems to be liking and commenting on their stuff, is that somebody that I'm following has engaged with that content and I look at that person and I go, ‘Do I really need to be following them?’ So I just don't disconnect with them, but unfollow them and. No, sorry. Actually, that's a very good point. I would have unfollowed them, but actually, I'm not sure that solves it.

John Well, it should solve it because if you unfollow someone, that should stop anything that they refer to your feed from appearing. The thing is, that doesn't solve the problem at source, because if you remember back in the days before LinkedIn made their algorithm adjustments and you had like Oleg and Bridget appearing in your feed every other post, you can't very well go and haunt down all the people who are going to go and like and comment on that, because you might as well go to the source, which is I don't want to see this source material.

Mark Yeah, I get that. Absolutely. It's funny, actually. I think Oleg probably was one of the people that I blocked on that basis, having got that from you. And then occasionally I see someone referring to Oleg and I think, oh, I thought they'd gone. Then I realise it's me, I blocked them. But just going back to the original point now, this is an interesting one, actually, because I think what I would have done was unfollow on the basis of what you just said thinking that means I won't see anything that they engage with again. But actually, if you look at the wording of the difference between a connection and a follower or someone you follow, following means that you see their content, not their activity. Connection means you see their activity. So unfollowing someone won’t work. We won't know the answer to this because it won't be defined anywhere, will it? The only way we could do it is testing it. But unfollowing someone that is a connection might result in you still seeing their engagement because you haven't disconnected.

John Well, possibly, but I haven't seen that happen. When I've unfollowed someone, that bit has worked reliably for me. I am not seeing that activity anymore. It's just a mute feature that isn't working that I was so excited about when it came along. But the frustrating thing there is that it does seem to be working for some other people. Mute is the ideal feature. If it works, it means that essentially you're unfollowing the people that you weren't already following, so you don't need to see their stuff, but you have the benefit of being able to go and look at their activity or go and look at their profile anytime you want, rather than taking the sledgehammer to the nut and saying I don't want to see absolutely anything from this person.

Mark Yes. And they're not going to get offended if they ever find out.

John Exactly.

Mark That is a good feature if and when it works. I have to say I have muted some people, but not enough to have noticed whether it worked or not. I've never really been able to work out whether it does or not. For me, that's an interesting point in itself. And that when people say to you, oh, it does work for me. I do sometimes scratch my head and wonder, are they quite as analytical as you are? Because I know what you're like, you will test it and go, Right, I'm going to see if I see something from this person and then you're particularly sensitive to it. If you see it in your feed and you'll pick up on it and go, ‘It's not working’. I wonder, we saw the people. If someone said to me, does mute work, I'd probably go, yes, I think so, because I don't remember seeing anything from someone I've muted. But can I remember who I've muted? Am I looking at it all the time? Probably not.

John That's right. And LinkedIn doesn't maintain a mute list, so you can't go and see the people you've muted. And weirdly. It's unfollow list for me isn't accurate either. It used to be, but it's not anymore. I've unfollowed probably, I would say about 8000 people, and my unfollowed list on LinkedIn is only a couple of hundred now, whereas it used to be in the thousands. So I don't think LinkedIn is showing that accurately.

Mark Interesting, I've not looked recently.

John But that could just be my account. I don't know.

Mark Or it could be that they're just showing you the first few hundred or something like that.

John But why wouldn't it show me the whole list as it used to? I'm being a little bit more judicious on unfollowing people now, because if you unfollow someone, you don't get notifications when they tag you. And that's an issue because you might end up just it might be a faux par. Someone tags you into a job alert or something and you've unfollowed them and you don't reply and it looks like the height of bad manners.

Mark Well, they could tag you into something that would be really good for you to comment on. And you don't.

John Absolutely. And then you don't see it and you have to make some sideways excuse about being busy or must have missed that notification. And if you know how the system works, you know that you were never going to get that notification because you unfollowed that person.

Mark I do also think, though, that tagging notifications don't work quite as well as they should. The amount of times I've had people say to me, I tagged you in a post and I go and I checked back in that situation and it was like there's no notification at all when I haven't followed them. Again, that's just my account. I don't know, but I just don't rely on them. And I always say to people, if you're going to tag someone, you're not just tagging them, kind of because you think they might be interested, but it's like really important that they see it. Send them a DM with that post at the same time. So you tag them. Yes, but also tagging is important because then people have a reference So they can click on the name and see their profile, but don't rely on the notification. Always send them DM as well. I know you're not going to do that every time, it can be a useful way of bypassing that.

John Because I've got such a weird surname, I've got a saved search on references to my name, including misspellings of my name. So I can just run that and say how many references to my name have there been in the last 24 hours or seven days? And therefore, even if someone if I've unfollowed them, if they've mentioned me, I will see that in my search results. But that's not going to work for Mark Williams.

Mark No, but Mark Williams probably wouldn't think of doing it anyway! That is such a John Esperian thing to do!!

John Yeah, I wish that worked in comments, but of course, comments aren't searchable, So those Tags will just be silent then for me.

Mark Yeah. @ mentions in comments don't work in that sense. That's interesting, isn't it? I'm never a fan of @ mentions in comments anyway, Because if you @ mention someone in the comments, the chances are they'll likely to reply and replies have no visibility.

John Yeah, but then the original comment might rise up the ranking of the algorithmic sorting of the comments on that post. So that might possibly help the original Commenter. If there are loads of sub replies, Then that original comment might be ranked as the top comment, if you like. And that serves the purpose of the original Commenter. Maybe.

Mark Yeah. Now I can see that counterargument to that. But I suppose I've always felt that people will do a post and @ mention (tag) people in the comments and then they reply rather than comment.

John So what I do there is if someone's tagging me into something and I know, all right, I'm going to drop three paragraphs of value here. I might reply to the comment and say, thanks for bringing me in. I'll reply the main thread for the benefit of anyone else watching. And then I'll put that as a response, as a new comment, and that serves both purposes.

Mark Yes, I've done that several times in the past. But it's good advice to people to say if you're going to tag someone, tag them in the main body of the post. If you tag them in the comments, there's a danger that they are just going to reply. Yes, if it happened to me, I would do what you've said. You can't rely that other people are going to do that and that might damage the visibility through the network, if you like. But I can see counterarguments there as well. Interesting stuff. Thank you for that.

John It's okay, as always. That was an epic!

Mark It's always good to get your opinion on things, so thanks. Much appreciated.

Did you know that John is soon going to be launching a membership community? This will be your chance to get regular help and inspiration from John on subjects such as

– Content creation

– Personal branding

– Online visibility

–?LinkedIn best practice

Find out more at https://espirian.co.uk/espresso-is-coming/

Post Of The Week.

Before I get onto this weeks winner I just wanted to give a shout-out for one of my favourite creators on LinkedIn, Dave Harland - funny, creative and a bit crazy but he’s well worth a follow.

I had 3 strong nominations this week - I chose this one because it’s topical and easy for many people to relate to. The image gets your attention and directs you to the text for an explanation. It really brings it home to you just how much this pandemic has changed our working practices.

Don’t forget to let me know if you see any really great content in your feed, click on the 3 dots at the top of the post and send it to me via DM.

That’s all for this week, take care and have a fantastic week.

This article has also been recorded as a podcast;

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts?/?Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts