I so appreciate the questions people ask me about LinkedIn, it’s like having a lab where I, too, can learn and then share. Questions come from both beginners and experienced folks who are working to make LinkedIn a part of their day. But sometimes, along the way, you click too fast and post a comment or share an article you did not mean to.
The other day someone called me about a mistake and need a band-aid for it. This person had received a message in his LinkedIn Inbox and wanted to respond to the sender. But somehow, rather than hit REPLY to send a private message back to the sender, he must have inadvertently clicked back to his own profile and posted his response to his status updates.
Clearly he did not want this correspondence to be posted on his home page as an update for all his connections to read.
So what to do if you post something as a status update and don’t want it there?
Well, you can post another status update immediately and it will become the top update. However, the first update–the mistake–will still be there.
The best thing to do is delete your update, here’s how.
Want to delete a comment? Here’s how.
Remember these things if you share on LinkedIn and you didn’t mean to:
- Know it’s not the end of the world. People you are connected to will NOT think you’ve lost your mind. Everyone has done the same thing: clicked SHARE and then realized that’s not what he or she wanted to share.
- Don’t not share on LinkedIn moving forward because you made one mistake. Move on, everyone else has.
- Realize that most people won’t even notice. There is so much content being continually posted that if your post doesn’t immediately speak to someone, they will just move on.
- Learn from your mistake. If you clicked and posted something in the wrong place, either write it down or make a mental note of what you did. If it worked, do the same so you build your confidence.
Not sure you have the fortitude for posting and sharing content? Don’t think it’s important? Read LinkedIn’s take on it; we will cover that more in our next post.
LinkedIn gives you multiple ways of doing things and of finding information, people, comments, companies, etc. If you make a note of how to post or comment or whatever your currently LinkedIn quest, it will help keep you out of what you might consider an embarrassing situation and will help you become more confident about participating on LinkedIn.
Just the other day when working with someone, I posted an article without commenting on it and with no context for why I posted it. It’s not something I would ordinarily do so I just popped up another, more relevant article and didn’t give it another thought.
Just keep calm and post on.
Don’t forget check out our other posts for tips and ways to engage on LinkedIn.
